Pay to Play

Money makes the world move.

Don't believe me?

What if I told you that rich citizens are given access to the police simply because of their ability to make donations? I don't mean they get to do a poo-butt ride along, I mean they get to use tasers, help kick in doors or even watch a perp get questioned. They get to fulfill all of their law enforcement fantasies with a scratch of a pen on a check.

Would you believe me?

Some of you wouldn't, you'd tell me that's a clear conflict of interest. You can't pay the police for access. You'd be right. You can't give most police departments direct donations. But, you can give police foundations donations. Or organizations like the fraternal order of police. And everybody knows those non-profit organizations are really just an extension of the police department.

If don't believe me, all you have to do is verify what I'm saying by reading the New York Times.

I'm not here to blast the NYPD. Lord knows they aren't unusual in their operation or methods.

Nah, I'm perturbed by something else in this process. I'm bothered by the possibility, wait scratch that... I'm bothered by the fact that rich folks with unprecedented and unequal access to the police always make things worse for people like me.

I know it's not anything new. Money has made its own laws forever. I'd have to be a fool to believe that rich folks and poor folks operate on an even playing field when it comes to the justice system or law enforcement agencies. I've been accused of being a lot of things, but rarely a fool.

But, what the Times exposed was fairly brazen. This wasn't a lost report, or a ride home instead of to the lockup for a rich person's son. This was an entire program where donors were given a taste of what it is like to be a boy in blue, and then hit up for cash afterwards. And instead of being done by a public agency whose records are open to the public, it was done by a shadowy foundation, that keeps its business private.

That should concern folks, for real.

More and more, people with money are creating a separate world with separate rules. And that world is being staffed by folks with guns and sadistic tendencies. It's not hard to imagine the next stop on this train. Private militias running around enforcing the "laws" of private enclaves populated by rich folks seeking to escape the masses.

Gentrification would seem to the forerunner of a new society where rich folks have usurped easily defensible urban areas, while the huddling masses are pushed away from these hubs and crammed into shanty towns. Food and other amenities are brought in from outlying farms to those folks living in the urban areas.

Some of y'all are shaking your heads, and I don't blame you. I typically try to avoid dystopian science fiction as well.

But, it seems to me that nothing good can come of rich folks obtaining increased access to our publicly funded law enforcement system. And, given my past experiences, I know that it's quite easy for those with means to twist a public agency into basically a semi-private agency while still having it funded by the money of the peons.

Trust me, it happens all the time.

So, while some folks might see this Times story as another predictable treatise on the pay to play phenomenon, I see it as more. I see it as opening salvo in a much deeper game. A game that we all need to be aware of and vigilant about because it could have dire consequences.

Guns and money create power.

Who has the guns and the money?



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