Frank Kyosho Fallon

June 16, 2020Updated: June 16, 2020 11:51p.m.

The death of black people in our country at the hands of police is a source of shame. Our law enforcement agencies are composed of good people who have been trained the wrong way.

I applaud Gov. Andrew Cuomo's leadership with the police accountability bills he just signed. I thank him for taking on institutionalized racism. Our impressionable public servants need training, not shaming. It should be about how to serve us all.

The war on drugs is another example of how the good intentions of ending the harm caused by drug abuse has resulted in a war on black people.

Commercial capitalism sets up the well-known relationship: The greater the risk, the greater the reward. The greater the success of the war on drugs, the higher the price for drug dealers to overcome those obstacles. It's obvious why the war on drugs accelerates the problem. It's built into our system.

Instead of continuing this self-perpetuating battle, I ask the governor to consider how best to convene agencies and responsibly change the war on drugs to remove the criminal incentive for example, by defining drug abuse as a medical problem, and by providing legal access in controlled clinical settings for addicts who aren't ready to stop. The state would call the shots, figuratively and literally.

This is one way to pull the plug on illegal drug commerce. No commerce, no crime, no enforcement, no prosecution, no imprisonment.

Problems can be solved, and it sure looks to me like Cuomo is a governor who has figured out how to do it.

I urge him to also take up the larger issue of shrinking our gigantic, budget-busting prison system. Our people need education and medical care, not SWAT teams on our local police forces.

We can have instead sensible law enforcement community policing with interagency support from social services that allows all citizens to call on our friends in blue in their hour of need.

Frank Kyosho Fallon lives in Shokan.

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Viewpoint: Policing can evolve toward protecting everyone - Times Union