E pluribus unum: is that even possible anymore?

Like most of you, I am saddened as well as disturbed by events in Dallas, Texas, where five policemen were killed in the line of duty - Ironically, while on the streets protecting the rights of a roup of people who were protesting police violence.

Then Sunday morning we learned that in Baton Rouge, La., a shooter gunned down six police officers, killing three.

This is a difficult subject, and if anyone tells you they have the answers, pray that they do and that someone listens.

But I doubt there are any answers that won’t take time, compromise, and humility by people on all sides.

I don’t want to get into race relations here. I don’t have any better answers than anyone else.

Instead, I want to talk about police.

I have the utmost respect for policemen. I grew up on movies where the Wild West town was tamed by a lone sheriff, willing to take a stand (think “High Noon”). I love stories where a guy comes back to his small town that is being controlled by bad guys and decides he’s going to do something to change it. And while I realize most police are not one man against the gang of bad guys, I also recognize that on any given situation, on any given day or night, one lone policeman might be all there is between a bunch of bad guys and the safety of my family, my house, my neighborhood.

I also know from talking to a number of chiefs of police that it’s incredibly hard to get qualified candidates for police academies (reiterated by the Dallas police chief in his challenge to people when he said, “We’re hiring!”). I was attending a meeting recently of several police chiefs, and A.C. Roper, Chief of Police in Birmingham, said that in a given year his department may lose 25 officers. They put out the word for applications to the academy, and may start with over 200 applicants. But by the time the next class starts, they are lucky to have 20 people who either meet the qualifications or stayed with the process through to the end. Police chiefs in Jackson, MS, and Tuscaloosa said much the same thing. When you lose more people than you can replace in a given year, you’re either going to be short-handed or have to start taking people that you might not ordinarily take, which can lead to problems.

The economy has also taken a toll on local police. Small communities used to be patrolled by their own local police forces. Now (and this was, as I understand it, part of the case in Ferguson, Missouri), there isn’t enough budget to fund an independent police, which force small towns to contract out services to county sheriffs or other larger police departments to patrol their streets. Imagine Andy and Barney no longer policing Mayberry, but bringing in cops from Mount Pilot who don’t know the community, who don’t know the town drunk is harmless, who don’t know the parents of the small boys who get into mischief. The ‘personal’ goes out of the police force and it becomes strictly professional, and community is lost.

Now, I realize very few of us live in towns like Mayberry. But most of us do live in towns where the police force is under local control, be it mayors or city council or county commission. And that's as it should be. One of the reasons I fear a “nationalized police force’’ (as some are calling for) is that very reason: I want my local government to have day-to-day control over the local police force, because they know how they want their community cared for better than a bureaucrat in Washington DC who writes one-size-fits-all manuals and procedures for cops.

I can’t imagine how scary it can be to be a policeman, walking up to cars with tinted windows, or knocking on doors where there’s an obvious argument going on inside or something barely seen is suspiciously hiding in a dark alley. Once when I was in high school, four of us were coming back from a day at Callaway Gardens (a resort in Georgia an hour or so south of East Point, where I grew up). We were pulled over by some local police, and while we sat there in the car waiting, two of the guys reached down to put on their shoes. The next thing we knew, two policemen were at the trunk of our car, guns drawn, telling us to get out of the car and keep our hands visible. Apparently, they were looking for four white male suspects related to some crime and when they saw two of us reach down to the floorboard, they didn’t know we were putting on shoes and feared we might be getting weapons. It scared us pretty bad, but I also realize it probably got the police’ hearts racing a bit, too.

For all the stories and media and protests, violent crime is down in this country. According to FBI records, violent crime has decreased since 1992 by about 50 percent, and 2015 was one of the safest years ever recorded. I saw a stat that said the number of police officers killed in 1930 (the height of Prohibition) was nearly triple the number of police killed in 2014. Of course, that doesn’t make you feel any better if you are one of the victims or know one of the victims, and even one death is one death too many. But we’re not living in the Wild Wild West or even the gangster era of the 1920s-30s.

The Washington Post published a study of police shootings in 2015. The Post found that 990 people - almost all of them men - were shot and killed by law enforcement last year. In three-quarters of these incidents, police were defending either themselves or someone else who was, at that moment, under attack. That leaves around 250 cases that were not obvious self-defense or defense of a third person.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that those shootings were unjustified.

The racial breakdown of those who were shot by police in 2015 went like this: the largest number, 494, were white; 258 were black; 172 were Hispanic; and the remaining 66 were either “other” or unknown.

And yet …

As in any profession, there are bad cops. There are police who are looking for an excuse to bully someone, to even pull a gun and use it. It’s human nature; you get trained to deal with violence or to shoot a gun and there will be a few people who are anxious to try it out. There is no question violent people can be drawn into positions of violence. Power corrupts. It might be as relatively insignificant (compared to killing someone) as the cop who decides he’ll accept cash when he stops a speeder rather than write a ticket, but all abuse of power is wrong. Police carry prejudices and fears and anger, just like everyone else. Sometimes those prejudices and fears get the better of them, despite training that says they need to be in control. And then its human nature, again, when something goes wrong, for their department to rally around them and try to shield them, to take on a “brothers in arms” mentality because one bad cop reflects on all the good ones.

And there is bad police work. Police make mistakes. They arrest the wrong person and sometimes are given too much leeway to draw a “confession.” SWAT teams break into a home in the middle of the night with a legal warrant, go in with guns drawn and geared up for a shoot-out, only to later find out they had the wrong house (I read about a case where a drug dealer was tying into the unsecured wifi of his neighbor, and when local drug investigators tracked the drug dealer through the internet they traced the “source” to the unsuspecting and completely innocent neighbor, whose house was then raided in the middle of the night by over-zealous drug enforcement who considered the real drug dealer armed and dangerous).

There is a dilemma in poor communities. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, the leaders of those communities complained that the police didn’t care about them, didn’t respond in a timely manner to their calls, didn’t do anything about drug dealers and pimps and bad guys hanging out on the corners. So mayors responded by increasing the patrols in those neighborhoods, putting more cops on the street, with more frequent patrols. Mandatory sentencing was instituted to take drug dealers off the streets. And in many cases, crime came down and those neighborhoods became safer - but at the cost of more and more people going to jail. Now some of those same leaders are saying they get too much police, too many patrols, too much attention paid to their community and they aren’t treated like the "suburbs."

And mistakes happened. We’d like the justice system to be perfect, but it’s not. Innocent people have gone to jail – and it’s been disproportionally poor people and blacks.

I keep hearing that we need to have “open, honest dialogue.” But haven’t we been doing that for the past 50 years? And isn’t part of the problem with “open, honest dialogue” is that you run the risk of finding out that some people just don’t like some other people for reasons as immature as the color of their skin, their accent, their sexual preference, their likes and dislikes, they sports team they cheer for. And when everyone doesn’t say the right thing – “right” defined by whomever is leading the conversation – then we’re told we’re not being truthful, or we need to have more “open and honest dialogue.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we don’t need to have these conversations. It’s always better to talk it out.

But what really scares me is, I fear that we’re being baited into conflict. The more we talk about it, the angrier some people get. The more we start to conjure up all those insults and abuses that we’ve somehow managed to put aside all these years, the more we believe “but you just don’t know what’s like.”

I don’t want us to be baited. We should mourn those people killed by the bad guys and those unnecessarily killed by police. But let’s not allow ourselves to be manipulated.

There are no simple answers to America’s race problems and crime problems and “trust” issues. I heard a representative from the Black Lives Matter movement say on CNN this week say that the phrase “all lives matter” is inherently racist. She also said the entire police system is corrupt and would not say most policemen are good and want to do the right thing.

Positions like that don't move either side any closer to resolution. If anything, it completely closes off any kind of "dialogue'' that might bring some reconciliation.

There is no way to work together when it feels like the only acceptable solution is total capitulation.

But too often, that’s what it seems like both sides expect.

The U.S. motto is "e pluribus unum,” which means “out of many, one.” I wonder if that's even possible anymore.