Lamar White over at Cenlamar.com transcribed the radio ad being run by Earl Hilton on “black radio stations”. For those who have not heard the ad, here it is written:
Since Rapides Parish Sheriff Chuck Wagner has taken office, more and more of your sons and daughters are behind bars. Nonviolent drug offenders need rehabilitation, not mass-incarceration. Wagner’s aggressive invasion of poor black neighborhoods adds to this state having the highest wrongful conviction rate in the world. Criminalizing poverty by locking up the poor, people who need treatment and the underemployed is not the answer. If we don’t stop Boss Wagner now, we could be stuck with Chuck for another 30 years. Your children and grandchildren deserve better.
Paid for by the Committee to Elect William Earl Hilton for Rapides Parish Sheriff.
The general consensus, at least from those who are doing most of the talking, is that the radio ad is racist and attempts to manipulate the black community into voting for Earl Hilton. Well yeah, so what. Is this a new tactic?
For whatever reasons, chief law enforcement officers are often elected within our society meaning they have to be a politician first and then, and only then, may they be a policeman. RPSO has a finite amount of resources and those resources must be allocated for maximum effectiveness. The question is, do I want significant resources invested into busting non-violent drug offenders? Do I want non-violent drug offenders being fed into a legal system which is already overburdened and stretched to the limit?
…..locking up the poor, people who need treatment and the underemployed is not the answer.
Well, I agree.
I think Tony Brown, the messenger, was trying to incorporate this into the message:
Do you want a Sheriff who takes the easy route to get the arrests numbers up by targeting the poor?….
or
Do you want a Sheriff who will invest the limit resources available to him and go after the real problems within our community as a whole?
Perhaps the black community understood the message just a little better than some of their white brethren. Maybe the “white community” should listen to the message again. Don’t white people want the laws enforced in their own neighborhoods or do they believe the problems are just in the black neighborhoods? Perhaps that belief is the true racsim.
These are only my thoughts this Saturday afternoon.
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