Talking with a friend about the recent Black Lives Matter protests, he suggested my background gives me a unique take on these events and that I should write down some thoughts.

So here goes. But before getting into it I should probably clarify that I’m a dark-haired caucasian man. Although born in the USA, I’ve travelled around the world multiple times – when I was a child due to my dad being a US Army officer with multiple overseas posting, and as an adult out of choice. I was also brought up multilingual because my Swedish mom spoke Swedish with me and my sister in the house, and I’d also pick up a bit of whatever the local language was where I happened to be. My background was in other words more international than that of most American kids.

From that perspective, one thing I can say without reservation is that America was strikingly racist pretty much all through childhood. I didn’t see it so much when I was overseas, being surrounded mostly by other military kids and families. Up until it was time to go to High School I was either in Asia or Europe, with one short interlude in Ft. Leavenworth while my dad went to OCS. But coming home, whether in Kansas when I was ten, or later on again in my teens I noticed there were some strong unwritten rules and attitudes regarding race to which raised-only-in-America Americans hewed closely. Just a few of the lesser ones: Blacks don’t swim. Whites can’t dance. Business executives are white, but most sports stars are black. Simple biases which, to be honest, blew my mind. Most troublesome were the ways in which kids seemed to internalize the casual, yet definite, separation into us and them.

A quick digression. I lived in (West) Germany for three years at the apogee of the Cold War, in the beginning of the 1980s. M60s and Leopard 1 tanks would regularly tear up the fields near our town as they practiced getting ready to repel the red hordes that might come at any moment through the Fulda Gap. Bo105s and Kiowa helicopters would clatter over my school sometimes, and there’d be stand-tos fairly regularly on weekends, since everyone knew the Russians would come on the beginning of a long weekend when most NATO forces were home with their families. Being precocious, I’d read Foreign Policy and The Economist when I could get my hands on a current issue, and I knew that once the Red Army got going our puny three US divisions wouldn’t stop them and we’d be forced to use tactical nukes. Which meant they’d use nukes, and considering I lived right near one of the major staging areas for US Forces in Europe, this meant I’d get nuked.

My point isn’t that this was a terrible thing for a young kid to live with, because I had a comfortable life. My point is that my early searches for life’s meaning included the very real notion that it could be taken away very, very quickly, and that if American lives (Including my own) had to be sacrificed to stop the Russians, so be it.

Secondary to that overarching threat of nuclear annihilation was the idea that when the Russians did come we’d all be in this together. I’m sure that there were racial issues in the barracks and mess halls, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t anywhere near the level of what civilian Americans internalized and lived with. As for us kids, my friends at school included a fair number of black Americans, Hispanics and Asians, as well as whites. I honestly cannot recall ever – EVER – having that be something we talked about or really noticed as kids. Much more objectionable was that we’d have run-ins occasionally with the local German kids who went to different schools. If there was ever an us versus them, that was it. Americans stood together, and skin color really wasn’t in the picture. The point I’m making is that being an American meant something in a way that I think most Americans who have never lived overseas could ever understand. Being capital-A American has absolutely nothing to do with something as frivolous as skin color. Only people with an unexamined sense of smug security could possibly waste their time on something so patently ridiculous. If there’s one thing that the ghost of Harry Truman can be proud of, it’s the integration of the US Armed Forces he forced through.

So that was my background when I come back to the states to go to High School. A few things surprised me right off the bat. American kids knew nothing about the world outside. I’ve gotten used to it over the years, but when I was a kid I could not understand how anyone could be in High School or later without knowing where, for example, Japan or Brazil was on a map. Conversely I noticed I wasn’t considered really American because I didn’t know what Bubblelicious gum was (Not a joke. After saying no to an offering of gum because I didn’t understand what the kid offering it said it was, I was referred to literally as ‘the foreigner’). Lastly, and most important to my point, I didn’t understand why I needed to think of myself as ‘White’. This last point came up inevitably in some form of casual conversation about sports or music or any other cultural entity. Blacks were natural athletes, but whites worked harder at sports. Black music was fun to dance to, but white rock and roll was more “serious”. Etc, etc. None of this made sense to my kid brain, and it stills doesn’t. I’m not even getting into real racial issues, because even to me it was obvious that there were problems. I was in New England, and Boston had gotten a pretty bad rep during the 1970s because of busing. But that was just ignorant Southie Irish being racist, I was told. Never mind that the suburbs where I lived were staunchly white, not integrated like the international schools I was used to. And even those nice, majority white, middle-class kids at my school had some of those same “Southie” views under the surface. For a kid who grew up watching Armed Forces Network, where Gilligan’s Island segued seamlessly into Soul Train, these kinds of artificial distinctions seemed utterly bizarre. The kind of American I thought I was didn’t actually seem to exist in America itself. Nobody in the Continental US seemed to ever think about the Russians or nuclear war – they were more worried about whether a black family moved into their neighborhood.

But why? Nukes really don’t care what your skin color is. Isn’t that something worth pondering just for a moment?

What does any of this ancient history have to do with what’s going on now?

Well, the pendulum of American history seems to be swinging back a bit from the conservative tide that Reagan started. Is this a cultural revolution moment? Are the hippies coming back? Flower power and free love? Well, no. But if history doesn’t repeat, it does rhyme. Take the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. As I write this, multiple articles are being written about how this neighborhood, with it’s abandoned police station and ensuing “occupation” by self-styled radicals is something completely new. Except it’s not new, not at all. It’s just new in America. Any visitor to Copenhagen, Denmark, has had the chance to see this same experiment for the past forty years. A section of that town called Christiania was taken over by hippies at the tail end of the 1960s and run according to communal laws, with no police, or other forms of city officialdom. Two main things resulted. The good thing was that this part of Copenhagen became an artistic hub with incidentally, some of the best vegetarian restaurants in Europe. The bad part is that the hippie-friendly pot culture that was part and parcel of Christiania’s initial vibe eventually got corrupted by organized criminals, mainly bikers, who came in and took advantage of the lack of hard power. Turns out career criminals aren’t really amenable to persuasion on the merits of just, like… chilling out, man. So Christiania was a decades-long experiment that proved that you might have the best intentions in the world, but if you don’t have a plan of what to do when bad people show up, none of that matters a bit. Bombings, shootings and grenades harshed the mellow for a while there, and now Christiania has a police presence – although for what it’s worth it’s still a bit more laid-back than the rest of Copenhagen when it comes to cannabis.

I don’t know if the Capitol Hill Zone will become a peacenik haven of yoga and vegan food trucks, or a drug ridden dystopia. But there’s a reason most people instinctively know that a society needs somebody to take on those people that take advantage of liberty to do evil.

Which brings us to the police.

Another story from the past. I’m no longer a kid. I’m out of college, in my twenties and visiting my Mom’s relatives in Stockholm. It’s a warm Swedish Summer evening and I’m with my Uncle who lives in an apartment in the heart of the city. People from other apartments have gathered in the square formed by the enclosing building, a pleasant spot shut off from the traffic of the street outside. We’re sharing some beers my uncle’s brought down, and he introduces me to a couple who live a couple floor below him. They’re in their late twenties, early thirties, dressed casually but hip like so many Stockholmers. Blonde and with that healthy glow that seems to come naturally from walking and biking everywhere. I ask them what they do, and they say they’re both police. I’m a bit surprised because for some reason they didn’t seem like police to me, although why I don’t know. I’ll circle back to that.

My uncle mentions I’m from the states and they say they’ve just come back from there too. Vacation? No, a sort of exchange program. They’d been to some big city, New York if I remember right, for a few weeks and some American cops from that same department had come to Sweden, observing and taking notes how their opposite number police do things. We talk a little bit about America, the woman has more to say than the guy. She liked the stores, the fact that places are open all hours. I ask them what they thought of American cops, or how American police worked. Awkward silence. They both just looked down a bit and shook their heads.

But American shopping! That’s great!

I wasn’t interested in penology or had any desire to become a police officer. But I was surprised at their reaction, even a little offended. America’s the best! How can they think anything bad about it at all? But that’s simple patriotism, not thoughtfulness. Upon reflection it’s obvious that even the biggest of big city American PDs have not always had the best reputation from outside observers. For some reason I found that shocking. I probably shouldn’t have been, as my perception of American police has shifted from being primarily based on what I happened to see on TV to actually living all over the US and having friends of both sexes who happen to be black.

I don’t think Swedish police are necessarily much smarter or harder-working than American cops. But I do know that if they mess up, they can’t resign before being disciplined and just start over somewhere else, like American cops can. I do know that while they all carry guns, their training emphasizes over and over that pulling their sidearm is an absolute last resort. I also know that training to become a cop in Sweden takes five semesters (About 60 weeks) of college-level study plus six months probation. In America, the equivalent is 20-odd weeks of study, and about the same or longer probation. Does it help to be in Police Academy for about three times as long before going out in the field? Probably. If nothing else, it’s a lot longer to be inculcated with the right way to do things (Just as an aside, the Swedes aren’t even the real study nerds. German police have to go to school for three years before hitting the streets).

Why does this matter? Well, from experiencing some exciting moments at various times in my life I can say with some certainty that the first time something real and unexpected happens, it’s hard to act with absolutely correct wisdom and judgement. Fight-or-flight response is a real thing. And especially after my experience flying commercial aircraft I believe the value of going over abnormal and emergency situations over and over in a controlled environment cannot be overstated. This is especially true in building conditioned behaviors which go against the natural grain of most human instinct. A random human faced with an airplane’s engine catching fire is not instinctively going to pull out a book. A commercial pilot (After completing a few very obvious steps, like pushing a big blinking red light), does precisely that. Likewise, a random human facing an aggressive and hostile individual on the street is probably not going to first ask why they feel the way they do. A policeman trained in de-escalation techniques might very well do precisely that. In both cases the raw human has been turned into a professional, and their fight-or-flight instincts tempered into constructive behavior and actions. More time in the flight simulator or the police academy means more time to mold that raw human material into a professional, rather than hoping they figure it out “on the line”, or “on the streets”. Training over and over until the correct behavior is the natural behavior requires precisely that: training over and over. And it requires recurrent training once or twice a year, too, not just once upon hiring.

You want professionals? Train them that way from the start, and keep training them that way no matter how many years they have on the force. It’s that simple.

Setting aside training for a moment, there’s also the question of optics. A big part of the current issue citizens are discovering with American police is that there’s the “Protect and Serve” outward image that most (White) Americans see, and the “How we really do it here” mentality, particularly towards minority communities, that’s becoming clearer and clearer with the advent of cameras. Will training bring the optics of policing across all communities into alignment? I would argue that training more, and in a more consistent and realistic manner, would absolutely do that, to the benefit of no-one more than the police themselves. After all, the best type of police work is that which is done in conjunction with members of the community most affected by crime. If police are seen as illegitimate, they simply don’t get the tips and intelligence they need, they are ineffective, and crime flourishes. Good policing isn’t “tough” in the sense of cracking skulls, but by building solid cases against those criminals who are truly ringleaders and instigators.

More young black men die from other young black men than from the police, some say. Well, so what? More citizens are killed, overall, by other citizens than by the police. That’s why murder is a crime, and we hire police to prevent it. For about four years I lived in a drug-dealing neighborhood in LA. I wanted to make it in Hollywood, and thought I’d struck gold when I found a place that only cost a semi-outrageous amount. Of course, my upbringing hadn’t really prepared me to see the signs that I guess most Americans, let alone Angelenos, pick up without thinking. Bars on the windows? Dudes standing on the corner motionless? Weird graffitti that didn’t have any artistic merit but was just strange sort-of letters and numbers? Nothing like that in Germany or Thailand.

Besides, if you’re going to hustle in Hollywood and make a movie you have to put up with a little weirdness, right?

In the time I was there I found only a small measure of success in Hollywood, but I got a great close-up outsider’s view of Crime In America.

One day the police raided the Section 8 building kitty corner to mine. While they were trying to find their arrestee their cruiser got a couple tires slashed and some windows smashed. The next day twenty police cars blocked off the street in every direction, and police were coming and going for about six hours pulling people (All minority) from the building and driving them away.

I found out after moving away that my own house had been used as a drug stash, bags put under the foundation.

A neighbor who reported some troublemakers on his corner got his house fire-bombed.

More than once I had a couple people sitting in the closed-off yard outside my door when I came home that I had to shoo away – politely of course, but still.

That’s just a few off the top incidents I can remember. I don’t want to make it seem like I was some tough guy in the hood, I didn’t get shot or anything, but it definitely wasn’t a Mayberry vibe.

Now, the police would roll by in their cruisers fairly regularly in the day, but I don’t recall ever once seeing an officer patrolling on foot. Instead, at night there would be a slow, constant stream of nice, shiny cars rolling slowly through the neighborhood. The car would stop at a corner where a guy would separate himself from a light pole, and saunter up to the window and say a word or two. The car would then roll on to the next corner where a second guy would walk up to the window, after which the car would sidle on back to the hills or the beach whence it came. Because that’s where most of the drug buyers came from. They definitely weren’t local guys. The cars that started showing up after the sun went down were invariably driven by whites. Which brings an interesting point to the whole notion of Crime In America. There is not only a disparity between unarmed black people getting killed for the smallest, or indeed no, reason. There’s almost no attempt to choke off demand for drug crime from its source: in my personal experience, mostly white people with money.

Because so much crime in America is inextricably tied into the use and consumption of drugs, it might behoove people to think a bit about who does what. I’m not excusing the black guys slinging rock on the corner. But isn’t it a bit strange that you never read about some white Wall Street type getting busted in the local crime beat section of the paper, or its website? Because if that’s happening, I sure don’t see it anywhere in the media. The ghetto kids are cannon fodder for this war, but the ones actually driving it with their dollars and separated septums are nowhere to be seen in the statistics or the perp walk.

How do I know there’s a double standard? Because it’s blindingly obvious.

Another story.

I was still living in LA but visiting Boston. As a private pilot, on a lark I rented a small airplane and flew from Bedford, Massachusetts to Provincetown out on Cape Cod. Provincetown, for people who have grown up in Boston, is apparently well known as a gay community. I, of course, had not grown up in Boston, or at least not long enough. I just thought it’d be interesting to fly across the bay. I took the plane, flew over the North Shore, and after a little under an hour landed at P-town, as it’s called. I wandered the terminal a bit before heading back, but was shocked, well and truly shocked, to see a small display on a counter for arriving passengers.

This display had a medium size basket, and next to it a sign that said (I’m paraphrasing because this was a long time ago), “Please leave your uppers, reds, blues and other pills or drugs in this basket. It’s illegal to use meth or cocaine in Provincetown. Thanks for your cooperation, Provincetown Police”

I have never come across something like this before or since, perhaps because I don’t desire to hang out with a bunch of gays. I just picked Provincetown as a destination because it was an interesting over-water flight. In fact I couldn’t figure out why this random coastal town could possibly have something like this until a native long-life Bostonian said something to the effect that, yeah, it’s a gay town and they do what they like there. No matter how troublesome this seemed to me, maybe I should just have shrugged or something. But this thing really hit me. I was living in a place where American citizens who happened to be black were being shoveled into the criminal justice system like so much cattle and here were gays being given a wink and a nod that they could do or take whatever drugs they wanted.

Hypocrisy much? There is a really blatant double standard in the policy of drug law enforcement in the US, and this was such a crystal clear example. Privileged gays can do whatever they want with regards to drug dealing and drug use with a smile and a wink from law enforcement in “their” town, but minorities in hardscrabble neighborhoods get their lives ruined from their first felony stop and away they go to the gladiator schools and gangs.

Which does not mean I’m excusing criminality. It’s the double standard that gets me.

While I lived in that part of LA the most useful comment I ever heard regarding crime and individual criminals came from a detective who happened to knock on my door to ask if I’d seen anything on a particular night when someone had gotten shot. I wasn’t able to help him, but during the conversation he said in an off-hand manner that one of the two real bad apples from the block had gotten out of jail just a few days ago and so they’d been expecting something like a shooting.

This throwaway comment that I’m sure the detective didn’t think anything of struck me deeply. Mandatory sentencing laws meant that foot soldiers in the gangs, caught for having some baggies of crack on them, could be expected to go to prison for longer than their bosses went to jail for ordering a murder, if those bosses even got caught in the first place. I’m not saying all gang members are angels who deserve everyone’s sympathy, but considering the relative misery that the truly-, for-real-, damn-that’s-awful- bad guys cause when they’re out versus the small fry guys, shouldn’t police really concentrate on cutting off the head of the snake versus trying to catch the tail?

Police training and greater emphasis on intelligence. And less hypocrisy. What else? Well of course, there’s also the fact that Americans are crazy about guns in a way that’s just out of alignment with every other advanced country on the planet.

Time for another digression.

The Austrian gun manufacturer Glock has become the default choice for many police departments in the US, and indeed other places as well. This is bad for a simple reason, and that reason is that they’re just about the easiest pistol to shoot that exists. Most handguns have one or more external safeties. The purpose of the safety is to prevent the operator from firing the gun accidentally, assuming there’s a round already chambered. On a typical non-Glock handgun the safety might be a small lever alongside the receiver. To operate the gun, the user has to flick the lever to the correct position and then pull the trigger. Two separate actions. The user cannot just grab the gun and pull the trigger and have the gun fire.

So on most guns, you have to really be aware of what you’re doing before firing. Glocks don’t have that type of safety. The Glock safety is incorporated in the trigger. You begin to pull the trigger and the “safety” part of the trigger follows along as the trigger’s depressed. In other words, if you grab the gun and simply pull the trigger the gun will fire. The “safety” isn’t really a safety at all. I would argue that at least a few of the incidents we’ve seen where police shot unarmed victims might simply be the result of poor training (Pulling the gun in a non-life threatening situation), andrenaline, and a horrifically bad human interface on the actual weapon. For use as a military sidearm pulling the gun and shooting immediately might make sense. If a soldier is resorting to a sidearm rather than his rifle then a split second really might be literally the difference between life and death. However, this has not been the case in any of the recent shootings where police shot unarmed citizens.

Incidentally, a word on why it’s so important to use proper descriptors, especially when talking about military versus civilian use of fire power.

The people we’ve all recently seen shot or otherwise assaulted without cause are citizens. NOT “civilians”. Police officers are civilians themselves. The false divide that seems to have crept into some discussions of police on one side and “civilians” on the other is false. Police are not soldiers, and thank goodness for that. True military firepower has no place on our streets. So if it takes a half second for a CIVILIAN police officer to actually consciously set the weapon to fire before pulling the trigger, I would argue that that is precisely a good thing. Rather than jumping out of his cruiser and shooting at a twelve-year old kid with a bb-gun within a few seconds, a police officer might have the weapon in his hand but have to think about the situation first. And a little American kid would be alive.

This is a strange time in our nation’s history. We’re tearing at each other in a way that I don’t believe I’ve really seen before in my lifetime. Nevertheless, we are, and will remain, Americans. All of us. Black and white. Police and regular citizen. Soldiers overseas or stay-at-homes who never even leave their native state. We’re still all Americans, and it’s up to us to figure out what we want from ourselves and our fellow citizens, and for this country.

When my little town in Southern Virginia had a Black Lives Matter parade I went, carrying an American flag.

Because what else is a American who still has hope for the future gonna do?