Mayor Regina Romero is postponing Tuesday’s Mayor and Council meeting after viewing a video on a Tucson Police Department in-custody death, saying it would be “inappropriate” considering the gravity of the situation.
“After viewing a video yesterday of a Tucson Police Department in-custody death, I do not feel that it would be appropriate to carry on with business as usual in light of this event,” Romero said. “I am anguished and deeply troubled by what I saw in the video yesterday.”
Mayor Romero said they will not be sharing the name of the victim, details of the incident, or releasing the video at this time out of respect for the victim’s family. However, the mayor will be holding a press conference to disclose information surrounding the incident, after the victim’s family members have a chance to be briefed.
“My heart goes out to the family and friends of the victim during this extraordinarily difficult time,” Romero said. “I want to assure our community that there will be a thorough and transparent investigation.”
The mayor said she hopes the council will adopt new reforms and policy changes in upcoming meetings. The city has not announced when Tuesday’s meeting will be rescheduled.
“I will be proposing that Mayor & Council act swiftly to adopt reforms and effective policy changes with input from our community,” Romero said. “We can and must do better.”
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2020.
pay some attention to the firefighters giving of their lives and energy to save our homes, mountains, animals for 3 weeks. You only care about the minority groups, not the police or our firemen or first responders. You are a mayor with compassion only for the left.
BLM is marxist Karen. Their goal is to overthrow the country.
First Posted 07/08/2017
Re: “Tucson, I Am You. You Are Me. What Are WE Going To Do?”
Those who study behavior tell us that when we feel fear there are two basic instincts wired into our brains — fight or flight, but when you run they chase you down for resisting and when you fight you are resisting.
Beginning in the 1980s, police officers were taught to show no fear as a means of gaining and maintaining control, but to do that they must suppress those basic instincts and in so doing they are suppressing some of what it means to be human and to recognize the humanity in others. Trying to turn off fear, they change it to anger and rage, then they are expected to make life and death decisions in the blink of an eye.
A long time ago, in a previous career as a military policeman, I came face-to-face with an armed black woman and had to make a decision. I was in plain clothes, but the woman recognized me for what I was. She told me that I was going to just have to do what I had to do. Two of my fellow military police in uniform arrived on the scene, weapons drawn, as was mine, and I ordered them to take cover and to only fire on my command. I recognized this woman and I knew the personal circumstances that were driving her because this was not the first time she had crossed paths with the law, but more importantly, I saw her for who she was at that particular place and time — a person filled with fear wanting me to take her life to end her pain and it was my own fear that helped me. I kept talking to her calmly, asking her to lay down the shotgun she was holding. She refused and backed away from me, unconsciously ejecting the shells from the gun. I followed her and at the last minute, when she realized I would not take her life as she had asked, she quickly turned away from me, pulled the shotgun up and managed to fire one shot before falling to the ground. I ran to her, expecting the worst, but as I turned her over I could see that the barrel of the shotgun was too long and she had only singed her hair. By this time other military police and first responders had arrived. They took the woman to the hospital for treatment and I returned to the station to begin the paperwork. Many of the other military policeman who were not there talked about how they would have “taken the shot”, but I knew that because of me there was a soldier who still had his wife and children who still had their mother. Perhaps to really SEE the other human is the first step.
Well, that’s a true “Karen” comment if I’ve ever seen one. Let’s unpack it a bit.
By use of the pronoun “our” she means “the rich white folks who build their million-dollar McMansions right on the edge of the national forest and expect taxpayers to subsidize their foolish, selfish choices with billions of dollars of fire suppression every year”.
By counter-posing “the minority groups” with police and first responders, she lets slip a classic trope of white supremacy culture, namely that the vast majority of such public servants are indeed white, and that they are assumed to be superior than and in opposition and conflict with “the minority groups”.
Then she wraps it up with a stale partisan take on the whole thing, by citing “the left”, again in opposition to the “our”, by extension of the original premise of the comment. This, too, is a painfully obvious and true trope of white supremacy culture, namely that the structural racism that has poisoned our country since its inception and still persists today is and should be of no concern to the rest of the population that is not “left”.
Thanks, KAREN, for today’s civics lesson. But no thanks–I’d much rather spend my tax dollars reining in corrupt, out-of-control police forces and attacking structural racism and the white supremacy culture that remains the unspoken, unwritten law of OUR land than protecting McMansions by endangering firefighters’ lives and spraying toxic fire retardant all over OUR public lands. And I am very grateful that we finally have a mayor who is NOT a Karen or an Old White Guy and truly understands how important her leadership is in that effort.