Words from the Other Melvin Carter

If you're not from the Twin Cities, or maybe even from Saint Paul, you may not know that our mayor, Melvin Carter — the city's first Black mayor — is Melvin Carter III.

His father is a Junior, and also a now-retired Saint Paul police officer, having served almost three decades. The mayor's father recently had an op-ed in the Star Tribune that didn't get enough attention, in my opinion. It was called Define policing, once again, as a peacekeeping endeavor.

The subtitle was "Over the past century, the term "law enforcement" has hijacked the mission" and that gives you the gist. He lists the principles of community policing, established in London in 1836:

1. To prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to suppression by military force.
2. To depend on public approval and to maintain public respect.
3. To achieve police objectives by means of public cooperation.
4. To earn public trust and cooperation, which declines proportionately with the use of force.
5. To nurture public favor by means of fairness and good-faith services.
6. To always use the minimum degree of force, and only after persuasion, advice and warnings fail.
7. To recognize that police are the public and that the public are the police.
8. To refrain from corruption.
9. To evaluate police effectiveness as the presence of peace, not on the visible use of aggressive enforcement.

I propose these principles as irrefutable, a foundation upon which to rebuild a principled model of peacekeeping. If it ain’t community policing, it ain’t policing at all.

Compare these principles to today’s professional law enforcement. How many, if any, of these nine principles do you see locally or nationally?

I took my oath of office as a “peace officer” in 1976. Nowhere in the oath was the term “law enforcement” mentioned.

The foundational principles of our democracy are sound, but they were written during the time of American chattel slavery, when the Constitution counted African descendants as three-fifths of a human, so none of the good stuff ever applied to Blacks in America.

Peacekeeping. Peace officer. What a difference mindset from law enforcement.

Words are not everything, but they are something.