WaPo | I’m afraid that incidents such as those of the past several days will
reinforce a view that violence is not only justified but appropriate.
That such incidents will drive police and the communities they serve
further apart, dampening any interest in reconciliation.
But I’m
also optimistic. Even relationships that have been undermined by a long
history of distrust and anger can be repaired. We have seen some
remarkable progress in truly challenging situations, including police
departments in Richmond, Calif., and Camden, N.J., just to name a few.
We
can learn from those successes, and from successes outside the United
States. In Northern Ireland, for example, police and the Irish
Republican Army were in a state approaching open warfare for years
before establishing a tentative, then more lasting, relationship in the
late 1990s. More recently, U.S. military personnel put community
policing principles into practice with great effect in counterinsurgency
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If positive relationships
can be established or repaired in those environments, surely we can do
the same in the context of domestic policing. Surely we must.
