Justice for Jemel

Author

By: Paul Scott
​Featured Editorial Author

​At Jemel Roberson's funeral on Saturday, November 24, 2018, Officer Joseph McNeal came to the podium to speak.  McNeal shared that he mentored Jemel having met him when he was seventeen.  McNeil recalled Jemel telling him that he (Jemel) wanted to be like Officer McNeal.  McNeal  wore a T-shirt inscribed with the message, “Justice for Jemel”.  His remarks included a tearful expression of his regret that if only he could have been there responding to the call.  He said, “if I would have been there, my brother would be here...” He went on to add that it wasn’t really about him being there.  It was about officers responding who believed in equality, justice, and restraint in the face of having the power to take a life.  It was about recognizing that though a black man with a gun can be a criminal, that another black man with a gun can be a hero.  “That’s what my brother was,” McNeil said.
 
If you are wondering how it is that a Midlothian police officer was on the scene of this Robbins shooting incident, many villages have reciprocal enforcement arrangements due to limited resources.  Robbins is a poor primarily black community near Midlothian.  The Robbins police department doesn't have a website.  It does have a Police One web page which connects them to the larger community of officers and departments from across the country and the world. The current Robbins police chief, Roy Wells, whom I met just a week before this incident, is retired from another department, and as I recall,  has been at the helm of Robbins for four years.  The mayor of Robbins summed up his thinking on the tragedy this way: “I wish it would’ve been one of our guys [from the Robbins Police Department] that came across that situation, because they may have been more familiar with security.” I believe what Mayor Ward was saying is true.  I also think he was pointing out much more.  He was pointing to the value of having a force that is diverse, the need to improve interagency training in reciprocal support arrangements, generally improving social interaction between people from various demographics and with the police as a profession in particular, and, the need for proactive engagement with the police by the entire community of citizens throughout the country. 
 
While this incident is currently still being investigated, this situation, and others, such as the recent shooting of the soldier in an Alabama mall, reinforces the often negative view of police, supported statistically, that minorities are at significantly higher risk of being killed by police than are whites in our country.   At Jemel's service, I saw a young activist from Chicago, who addressed a conference in Naperville last spring.  He made the point to me at the spring encounter that we must elevate the profession of policing lest its legitimacy be lost.   We (Unity Partnership) continue to discuss policing throughout DuPage County and beyond.   We are a changing demographic here and elsewhere, and we cannot ignore the danger of inaction. Most police departments acknowledge that these changing demographics present unique challenges.  I think they feel helpless as a police agency to solve the challenge alone.  They don’t seem to know what to do to improve relationships.   Our most important role must be to tell our police partners the truth.  We must also ask them to make substantive changes, not just superficial ones.  We also need to continue to work with the community so that they can better understand the role and responsibilities of the police, and theirs as well.  We have a lot of work to do.
 
Paul Scott, Law Enforcement Committee