It's us versus them? Ah, but there is a third way

The two minute hate on Facebook today is some pristine white upper middle class female college basket ball players dissing cops by a slogan on their uniforms. Yes, cop hating is the new "in" movement among the elite. Seems like this happened before, in the 1970's...

Sorry, but when I see the upper class elite students who never faced a disaster worse than a broken iphone or a bad hair day dissing working class cops who keep them safe I get angry. These elite students, like their parents in the 1960's, find it easy to ridicule cops, since few of them know anyone outside their set, such as people who are so gauche to join the police force (or fire department, or be a construction worker, or join the US Army out of patriotism).

And one doubts that any of them had ever worked the weekend inside inner city emergency rooms that resemble the hospitals of Baghdad due to the inner city gang wars.

So now a lot of us see the press join the bandwagon and guess who is the "enemy"? Yup. The hard working whites and immigrants who are most at risk in these artificially staged riots.

 Play by the rules Percy? You're soooo screwed, as Annabeth would say.

Or maybe I should say: Mr Patel 

A convenience store clerk, often a Patel or someone of Indian-origin, is killed in a robbery every few months somewhere in America. In fact, according to the Center for Problem-oriented Policing, convenience store employees in the US suffer from high rates of workplace homicide, second only to taxicab drivers, where too large numbers of Indian-origin people are employed

This article in the NYTimes magazine is a better background to the problems involved

over the past 20 years, violent crime in New York City has fallen by 80 percent, twice the rate of decline of the nation as a whole. According to the New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one way the department has driven crime down is by stopping and questioning (and sometimes frisking) large numbers of people in high-crime areas, thus deterring people from carrying weapons. In 2012, the New York Police Department conducted almost as many stops of black youths as there are black youths in the city, recovering 729 guns in the process.
Nearly 60 percent of white New Yorkers approve of the tactic. Less than a quarter of black New Yorkers share that opinion. Many perceive it as racial profiling, an interpretation bolstered by recent police testimony in a lawsuit filed against the city over the practice

So if racial profiling stops black murders, wouldn't a better way to stop community hostility be by calming things down and getting local folks involved in stopping those who terrorize good people?

If you read the entire article, that's what is being done in Watts, LA.

 Many police officers were skeptical, perhaps because so many gang-intervention workers were themselves ex-gang members. Some hadn’t really left the gangs. But during his time at Harbor division, Gannon saw firsthand how gang interventionists could shut gang feuds down. ...
The first meeting was a grievance session. The second meeting, the same. At the third, Gannon finally spoke up. “We’ve had eight homicides in two weeks, four on the L.A. side, four in the city of Inglewood,” he said. “I just had a double murder the day before yesterday. I need help in stopping that. I have to stop that feud. Can you help me with this particular problem?”
Discussion ensued. The gang-intervention workers said there were people with whom they might talk. “That day it stopped,” Gannon says. “Not slowed down; it stopped.”

Read the whole thing. A similar program was promoted when we lived in Boston, and lowered crime rates there too.

Maybe the President will bring it up and publicize it with his newly formed "task force" on policing problems.

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Related item: How do you stop terrorists?

Maybe by talking about Islam. says the UKTelegraph.

We are petrified of speaking obvious truths. When a lord recently dared to invite Muslim leaders to address the violence in the Koran, he was condemned.This groupthink has to stop....Here is what we can’t ignore any longer: religious reform is essential if Islam is to overcome what the great Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi calls its "predicament with modernity".Until we admit that Islam has such a predicament, admit that the Islamists exploit that predicament to radicalise, and admit that when they do they can point to canonical sources (even if it is also true that moderates can point to other sources, and more of them) then we are not going to win.

The article discusses the need to re emphasize the Islam of peace, using their own religion to stop the hateful strain spread by Saudi money that morphed into much of today's terrorist creed.

This has actually been done in trying to deprogram former terrorists, including a program in an American military run Iraqi prison where one of our relatives worked. Pushed in the right way, this could lead to the much needed Islamic reformation.

Though each story was unique, it became clear to me that "deradicalisation" was the difficult process of casting off an acquired Political Islamist conception of Islam, a politicised piety of breast-beating and resentments, and embracing in its place some version of the Islamic concept and practice of "sakinah".Sakinah means tranquillity, or peaceable (co)habitation, and is drawn from the Quran: "He who sent down tranquillity (sakinah) into the hearts of the believers, so that their faith may grow stronger" (48:4). The term is associated with stillness, contentment, and mercy, and with the notion that Muslims should be a just and moderate "middle community". In Sufism the word carries the sense of internal illumination, or "seeing the light".

Will it work? Yes, for many.

But it took Europe awhile to settle down their religious wars, and the real danger is a major Sunni/Shiite nuclear war before things settle down.

On the other hand, even the Germans/Picts/Scots/Irish/and Vikings settled down a bit after they became Christians.