Last year the State of Texas executed 24 individuals. Those executions pale in comparison to the 27 individuals killed by Harris County law enforcement agencies during the same period. Harris County police-inflicted deaths are double the national average according to a Houston Chronicle report (Jan. 17, 2010.

            While the U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed the execution of mentally ill persons, this judicial concern has not slowed law enforcement agencies from killing them. Five of those killed or injured by police gunfire in Harris County last year were identified as being mentally ill, according to the Chronicle report.

            Arlene Kelly understands the problem of mentally ill people being killed by law enforcement officers. Her daughter, Colleen, was killed by the police in 1999 after the cops were called by the teenager’s psychiatrist. Arlene Kelly was so disturbed by the police-inflicted death of her daughter that she formed Civilians Down, a citizens group that monitors police shootings of the mentally ill.

            “I think cop culture hasn’t change, and it needs to change,” Kelly told the Chronicle. “If it doesn’t change, there’s just going to be more and more unnecessary shootings, even though law enforcement agencies say they are justified.”

            Not one law enforcement officer was charged in any of the 27 police inflicted deaths or in any of the 33 other police shootings by Harris County law enforcement agencies.

            While most of the 27 police inflicted deaths were probably “justified” from legitimate law enforcement perspectives, it is difficult to assume that they all were. The state’s “cop culture” underlies the state’s “death penalty culture.” It is an official mentality that people in authority have the unfettered power to take a human life—whether it’s an unjustified cop killing of a suspect, even one who is mentally ill, or the execution of an innocent or wrongfully convicted inmate.

            Texas ranks at the bottom or near the bottom in virtually every category where the value of human life is involved: it ranks first in executions; it ranks near the top in penal incarceration; it ranks at the top in police inflicted deaths; it ranks near the top in abuse of the disabled and elderly in state-run facilities; it ranks near the top in the sex abuse of its juveniles in state run facilities; it ranks last in providing food stamps to its poor and hungry; it ranks last in the care of its homeless children; it ranks near the bottom at providing health care for its young; and it ranks near the bottom at providing education to its middle and lower income children.

            Yet Texas ranks as one of the top states in the construction and maintenance of its highways, state parks, highway rest stops, and recreational areas that feature ATVs and Bamby killing.

            This is not to say that the people in the State of Texas are callous, mean, or uncaring. Some of the finest people in the world are Texans. But it has a political system, whose roots run deep in a rugged “kill the Comanche” frontier culture, that places individual interests (what most Texans will call individual “freedom”) over the good of the group. Caring for the group is just “too liberal” for the Texas political system. Every man for himself— fueled by a “pick yourself up by the boot straps” mentality—is the conservative political creed in far too many Texans.

            This conservative political system can produce authoritarian cultures like the “cop culture” and the “death penalty culture”—both of which do not place the value of individual life over the protection of group. Now, I don’t know if that’s per se wrong, or just plain necessary. What I do know is this: far too many people either die or suffer horrific physical abuse at the hands of those in authority the State of Texas.

SOURCE:

Lise Olsen and James Pinkerton, “The Rise of Deadly Force,” Houston Chronicle, Page One (January 17, 2010)