OPINION | Question everything, especially when WeHo tells you not to

Idealogues want us all to be on the same page, even if it requires a little coercion.

Take Alan Dettlaff, professor at the University of Houston, who recently wrote the editors of several influential academic journals to inform them we should all share his thinking on systemic racism — or be ostracized if we don’t.

“Please inform your reviewers that it is not necessary for authors to provide a citation when they state a system is racist,” he wrote. “This falls under the category of ‘common knowledge’.”

The last thing the free people of West Hollywood need is someone deciding on their behalf what is common knowledge and what is fringe theory.

Mayor Sepi Shyne may believe wholeheartedly in the Center for Policing Equity and the study they were paid by the city to conduct, which accuses the Sheriff’s Department of treating Blacks and Latinos worse than Whites.

But she has no business discouraging her colleagues or constituents from coming to their own conclusions.

“America has structural racism built into its fabric,” Shyne said at Monday night’s Council meeting, where a vigorous dissection of the study took place. “What I saw this evening was a lot of ‘How can we disprove that there is racial disparity?’ And that comes from a place of fragility and defensiveness.”

There’s nothing fragile or defensive about challenging groupthink, especially when people in power are warning you not to.

Structural racism may in fact be built into America’s fabric. There may in fact be racial bias within the Sheriff’s Department.

But that’s what we’re still trying to figure out.

The whole point of the study was to answer all the ifs, whys, hows — to size up the presence of racial bias among law enforcement and to measure the impact it’s having on West Hollywood.

We need to know how bad it actually is (or is not) in order to address it. We need to know exactly where it’s happening and to what degree. We need clear, solid data and we need whoever’s crunching the numbers to have no interest in tilting the results one way or the other.

That seems like common knowledge. But Shyne might not agree.

“I want to steer us away from continuously focusing on ‘this deputy did this’ or ‘that’s not happening here,'” Shyne said. “No, we’re not different. In West Hollywood, there is racial disparity, similar to other cities. What I want to emphasize and be proud of is our Center for Policing Equity in partnership with the City Council. It has recommended a lot of alternatives to address these disparities and bridge the gap.”

So why spend all that money on a study if the specifics and the details don’t matter?

Nevermind that the survey ignores some very pertinent facts — that the number of Black people living in WeHo doesn’t have anything to do with the racial makeup of people who commit crimes here. That Latinos make up a large part of the Sheriff’s Department force. That racial trends in crime aren’t solely determined by law enforcement.

When all is said and done, Shyne wants what we all want.

“Everyone who works, plays, and lives in West Hollywood, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender, color of their skin, ethnicity, or background, should feel safe,” she said. “This sentiment is crucial to our identity as a city.”

Also crucial to our identity as a city is the freedom to think individually, to evaluate logically, to contradict the mainstream and to speak out against those who would discriminate against us, even when we’re on the same team.