Myths, shibboleths and dogma

BY TONY BOUZA The job sucks. The Chief is a psycho. We’re going to hell in a handbasket. Morale has never been lower. These are a few of the bromides that drive police thinking. Civilians, though, are looking at Atlantis and don’t know it. An unfathomable world, several fathoms deep.…

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Bravo, Trump

BY TONY BOUZA On these very pages, on more than one occasion, I pleaded for the one thing I felt America needed most. I even wrote a book about the subject, and the result? Silence. I begged the President to convene a National Commission on the issue—and a black president—for…

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The Justine Damond killing: some modest questions

BY TONY BOUZA Do you want to know why police departments across the breadth of America are screwed up?  Look no further than the July 15, 2017, shooting of Justine Damond—a white woman—by a Minneapolis police officer who is black. In this ghastly tragedy we encapsulate the nation’s ills.  Race,…

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McCarthyism and you

BY TONY BOUZA “An enemy of the people!” What irony. Does Pres. Trump even know the reference he uses so freely actually attaches to an Ibsen play in which a doctor discovers the therapeutic springs that attract tourists actually cause disease? The dilemma is obvious but the good doctor makes…

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America’s police are still out of control

BY TONY BOUZA I wrote a piece in this space years ago with that title (excluding “still”), and the passing years have only deepened and confirmed that view. And how many objections/refutations did I receive for such an outlandish claim? Zip. Well, save your pennies, because your pocket is about…

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Censorship

BY TONY BOUZA Humans learned the importance of controlling the extremes of other humans very early on—about contemporaneous with learning of the efficiency and importance of conveying their messages and controlling behavior. Artists were called “the antenna of the race” by a poet who saw them as key definers of…

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“Deja vu all over again”

BY TONY BOUZA “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana Metempsychosis—the Buddist theory of transmigration of spirit-lives.  The spirit of Charles Stenvig (remember him?) has landed on Chief Janee Harteau.  How deliciously ironic. In 1980 I was hired to exorcise the spirit of…

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