IT’S PAST TIME FOR MONTGOMERY COUNTY COUNCIL AND EXECUTIVE TO FACE REALITY
5/27/20 The Washington Informer: “The fatal shooting of Finan H. Berhe by a Montgomery County Police Officer has ignited efforts of the Silver Spring Justice Coalition (SSJC) and Berhe’s family to ensure consequences for his death and eradicate what they say is the latest in a long string of Black murders at the hands of racist police.”
- Reality: The threat caused by Finan Berhe running directly at the officer with a large kitchen knife, as well as Berhe’s nonresponsive actions to the officer’s demands to put the knife down, justified the use of deadly force.
- Reality: The Washington Post police shooting database reflects that since 2017, there have been 10 fatal police shootings in Montgomery County. In every case but one, the individual was armed. The one who wasn’t armed attacked the officer; had he been successful, he would certainly have been armed. Seven of the 10 were black.
- Reality: Police officers sometimes must use force to carry out their job. It’s avoided by most officers at all costs, but sometimes it is necessary. The vast majority of arrests and encounters involve no violence.
SSJC and certain councilmembers refuse to accept this reality. They would prefer those 10 criminals were still alive, regardless of how many others are dead because of them. Their lack of concern or even acknowledgement that People of Color are disproportionately impacted by violent crime proves that they are not pro-justice. Their agenda is 100% anti-police at the expense of public safety; they’re willing to sacrifice innocent lives if it furthers their agenda. And this is the group of biased activists to whom the council has practically given an honorary seat, and whose members stack the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, the Policing Advisory Commission, the Police Accountability Board, and the Administrative Charging Commission. Interestingly, Councilmember Jawando fought to ensure that members of the latter two boards receive generous compensation, while members of almost all of the county’s other civilian boards receive no compensation.
- Reality: Regarding disparity, population data is a fundamentally flawed benchmark that councilmembers and activists use ad nauseum. It takes no account of police concentration (high crime areas) or focus (gun crime) that skews locations and activity. When you adjust to more realistic benchmarks, racial disparities look very different. Disparity does not equate to bias. The 10 police shootings in Montgomery were all male; does that mean police are biased against men?
- Reality: SSJC’s mission is to reduce the presence of police in our communities. They don’t want police in Germantown, downtown Silver Spring, or Montgomery Village, regardless of what the citizens of those jurisdictions want. If you ask them, I think you’ll find that members of SSJC attend houses of worship that enjoy police protection. Elected officials also enjoy police protection. The phrase “Rules for thee but not for me” never rang so true.
SSJC is a small vocal group of entitled activists who purport to represent communities of which they are not a part and to whom they do not speak. SSJC spews inflammatory rhetoric with no basis in fact. They have no experience or expertise in policing, yet they sit on bodies created to advise and judge police. The council has pandered to them to the exclusion of all other stakeholders; they disregard what officers with boots on the ground tell them about what is actually happening on the streets, because that doesn’t fit their agenda.
Until county and state legislators divorce themselves from these activists and reverse the harm that has been done from their biased advocacy that has disproportionately impacted the people they pretend to care about, the public safety of Montgomery County residents will continue to decline. Will even one of them do what they know is right?
