when people say they fear the police.. also, when confronted with criminal element they will have no one to call upon to protect them. ..feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness

After the Eric Garner Decision by Amy Davidson 2014/12/15  | The New Yorker:



When Mayor Bill de Blasio ran for office, he talked about radically cutting back one such measure, the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk policies, which had become not only a civil-rights violation inflicted on a generation of mostly young black and Latino New Yorkers but counterproductive. There were almost seven hundred thousand stops in 2011. There have been fewer than fifty thousand this year, and crime is still falling. De Blasio’s recent proposal to have the police deal with the possession of small amounts of marijuana by issuing summonses, rather than by making arrests, is designed to help reduce the disparities in arrest rates and prevent arrest records from derailing young people’s job prospects and their futures. His announcement, on Thursday, that every N.Y.P.D. officer will take a retraining course whose goals will include not letting “adrenaline” and ego get the best of them is intended to help prevent deaths like Eric Garner’s.


 .. Loretta Lynch in 2000: “We live in a time where people fear the police,” she said. “But we must also understand that when people say they fear the police, as bad as that is, they are also expressing an underlying fear, that when they are confronted with the criminal element in our society they will have no one to call upon to protect them. And that feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness is the worst feeling that we can inflict upon fellow-members of our society.” 



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