DACA is back in the news and for a good reason. The dreamers got a reprieve from the Supreme court and if their case goes back to court, it won’t be until 2021 before it would reach the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided to not allow to rescind the DACA program due to administrative reasons, filed incorrectly, which I think Elaine Duke might or might not have done somewhat intentionally. I know she received a lot of angst by the people that support the dreamers and now by the people that oppose it but I don’t think she deserves it. I always thought there was an easy fix for these dreamers, a sort of go around that would allow them to stay in the country. The U.S. gives away a certain number of visas every year to foreign residents for legal entry into the U.S.. Nothing states that those people, the ones that receive these visas for legal entry and residence, have to be outside the U.S. when they receive it. These dreamers are proven good citizens, hard working and intelligent, and to no fault of their own, already inside the country. There is nothing that says they can’t be the recipients of these legal entry passes that gives them the right to live in the country. I believe this would solve the problem on both sides of the political aisle and allow everyone to be happy. There are very few opportunities to grant entry to people that show that they could not only live in this country without being on public assistance but also speak the language fluently, are professionals and have a good work ethic that would only improve the country. I don’t know if this a legal or workable solution but I do know that uprooting people that only know one country and sending them to a foreign country where they have never lived and forcing them to sell all their belongings and leave their jobs is absolutely not nice.

I always thought that, with the bettering of technology, we should send satellites into space, every 5 years, in a straight line, that could communicate with each other and send images to each other and finally relaying images back to us, on Earth, just to see how infinite space really is. I would enlist several other countries and split the price tag evenly with them and share the information with them. You never know what will be found. You would probably have to have some kind of solar rechargeable battery and some kind of imminent collision device that would allow it to avoid Captain Marvel or the Guardians of the Galaxy (I know that they’re not real) but just in case an asteroid or other debris….. and Captain Marvel or the Guardians of the Galaxy are to busy to prevent the collision, then we should have something there to do evasive maneuvers.

There is an ever growing movement to defund the police. This should scare the hell out of all law enforcement around the country. It’s a reaction to people that are seen as the enemy in some neighborhoods. Being former law enforcement, I understand both sides of the story. There is an adversarial relationship between law enforcement and its citizens but it doesn’t have to be that way. When I worked with the Border Patrol, I saw the illegal citizens coming into the country as my customers, much like a retailer would see a shopper. I treated them that way because they kept me employed. Sounds strange doesn’t it but that is the view I had of them. I would go talk to them sometimes prior to them crossing over and ask them if they needed any water or just to talk to them to find out their story. I would spend an hour sometimes just talking to them. Most of the time they wouldn’t try and cross after we talked but if they did, they wouldn’t give me a hard time when I caught them. And like a good customer service person, I understood their needs and what they wanted, even though I couldn’t really let them have it, in this case entry into the U.S.. But the fact that I took a little time to know my customers, their names, their story, made things easier. It also helped that I spoke their language, being hispanic, and understood where they were coming from, in terms of their hardships. Community policing, which means actually interacting with the community, would help a ton in alleviating the mistrust. I rarely had a problem with my customers and knew them pretty well and treated them like I would like to be treated. While I agree with some of the steps that they want to take; mandatory body cameras and audio feeds, diversity training, implementing a non lethal police squad for community relations policing, lowering court protections for police wrongdoers; I also don’t feel like defunding the police significantly is going to help. And this goes both ways, because the years of mistrust is on both sides, so the community have to talk to the officers, and remember that they have kids at home and that they like to drink a beer and watch sports or go to the beach and hang out. Until a better plan is put in place to rid the country of crime, because there is going to be crime, then what we have to do is engage both sides into real discussions on how best to come up with an equitable solution so we don’t see each other as the enemy.

There is a way to construct a non lethal force from the current force. You make a non lethal force and have them respond to non lethal calls, traffic accidents or in the case of Eric Garner, which should be trained in hand to hand combat, and you have roving armed force waiting to respond to any situations that might require lethal fore, i.e. an individual with a gun. Non lethal forces should be armed with intermediate weapons, but should also be trained in de-escalation.