My gift to the city

I don't purchase holiday gifts any more. Everyone I know has more than they need. Instead, What my friends receive are gifts to charities in their names.

This year my charity is a domestic one -- the Innocence Project,  "a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA testing, and to reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice." (Wikipedia)   
To date, about 300 lives have not only been saved, they have been resurrected. Some of the individuals had spent years incarcerated for crimes they didn't commit.

Included among those for whom I've made a donation is the City of Pacific. It's a form of atonement for the racial profiling this city was involved in and its attempts to suppress the rights of people who protested that profiling.

We have a presumption in this  nation: personal liberty is so precious and necessary for the workings of a democracy, that some wrong doers will go undetected in order to preserve that liberty. That policy is implicit in the Constitution. And yet The Pacific Police Department  hounded people, not because they had done any harm, but  because they looked latino. The mayor condoned that and city council allowed it. If I had been mayor, I would have reduced the size of that department by one or two individuals and required the remaining officers to watch every film version of Les Miserables until they got the message.

That's a pretty moot point now, because in two weeks there won't be a Pacific Police Department. Instead, this territory formerly known as Pacific will likely be administered by Auburn, which has a sign on Peasley Canyon that proclaims it is "an inclusive community."

But we can atone for the wrongs that were done. You can go to this Web Site: https://secure.innocenceproject.org/donate and make a small donation to help save people who have been wrongly convicted. Once you enter an amount to donate, you can even designate the person in whose name you are making the donation. You can think of it as a Christmas gift and your New Year's resolution all rolled into one. That would light the way for how this community should behave in the future. You have 15 days until the New Year.

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