In case you had not yet found out…the city of McKinney is currently in the news for all of the wrong reasons.
There are a few obvious things about how to handle this kind of crisis that i learned when reading the classroom materials from a class that a work colleague attended in 1997 called “how to deal with the media”. There are several simple (and rather obvious) rules:

1. If you screwed up, admit it
This is the most obvious, and the most ignored. The reason for the old saying “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” is that humans have a far higher forgiveness threshold for people and organizations who admit to error than they do for people and organizations who obfuscate, bullshit or lie in an attempt to deflect accountability. (Obvious note – with video in existence of at least part of the incident, it is not a good idea for the law enforcement bodies to try to impose a false narrative. Arguing against what people can see or interpret from a video is a Really Really Bad Tactic).
2. Make Good on recompense
The case study for this is Intel, who discovered an obscure (and rarely used) math processing error in their Pentium chip. Rather than sweeping it under the carpet, they admitted to its existence (tick Rule 1). But then they did something far far smarter. They announced that anybody who felt that they no longer had confidence in their Pentium CPU could send it in and get a replacement AT NO COST TO THEM. The gesture removed just about all remaining negative impact from the initial announcement. Intel had stood behind their product and their reputation, and backed it up with action. Their long term reputation was unaffected, and possibly even enhanced.
3. Hold the Right people accountable and show how you held them accountable
This is more tricky. The temptation in large organizations is to circle the wagons and diffuse accountability, via a number of rhetorical devices (prominent among them is the use of the passive “mistakes were made”, which de-personalizes and diffuses accountability). The aim is to ride out the storm. Those tactics communicate that you are not really interested in changing for the better, you just want the noise to go away. The challenge is that it erodes your credibility and trust with the public.

McKinney has a window of opportunity to Do The Right Things. Some of them may be unpalatable in the short term. However, failure to do them will result in Google searches of McKinney returning hits that are a lot more negative than positive in the months to come. (Obvious parallel – google Ferguson).
Ultimately, it is all about credibility. Failure to respond correctly will reduce and possibly eliminate the credibility of the city of McKinney.

“If you don’t like this country, then leave”

“If X happens, I’m going to leave”

I read these statements all of the time. In fact, I have had the first one used against me in Facebook and blog comments.

My first response is usually some variant of “is this all you have”? It’s not an argument. It’s an attempt to shut off the conversation. It is, like many rhetorical tricks used by people who are not into reasoned debate, intellectually risible, unserious nonsense. It reads like childish petulance, the sort of thing you would not tolerate from one of your own children.

It is hardly surprising that these kinds of invitations are usually written by authoritarians. One thing I notice about authoritarians is that many of them have a binary worldview. When they think they are in the ascendant, they suggest or demand that anybody who does not agree with them leave the country. When they fear they are not in the ascendant, they decide that they themselves are going to leave the country.

My response to “If you don’t like it leave” is usually “no, I am a citizen, I am not leaving. Now, do you have an argument?”

What I always think after reading the meme “I’m going to leave the country” is “so where the hell are you going to go?”. The challenge  is that when they say “I am going to leave this country”, that is not all that they are saying. Unspoken is the addition “I am going to go somewhere else and set up a place where We Are In Charge”. That unspoken pre-condition tends to limit where they can go.

Not Europe, that is a socialist hellhole. India is hot and full of people of the wrong color. China is communist and therefore scary. Russia is too cold. Latin America is strange and mostly socialist. The Middle East is full of terrorists…The list goes on.

I can really only think of a handful of countries that authoritarians might decide match their worldview. The snag is that they are all failed states occupied by corrupt venal and dictatorial regimes. And they are in dangerous parts of the world. In short, they would be a long way down any sensible person’s list of places to visit, never mind places to go live. The other thing that they are also overlooking is that they are never going to be In Charge in any countries run by authoritarians, and if they annoy somebody in the government, they will probably start to disappear in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.

As I said, these kinds of petulant foot-stomping comments are unserious.

From time to time i see people posting slogans or images over which somebody has plastered a slogan. You know the sort of thing. The slogan is a variant on “If you don’t like this country. leave”. Or “if you don’t love the country, get out”. There are numerous variants of it.
Folks, it is time to grow up and get real. Life is not binary. Things and people are not all bad or all good, with nothing in between. Countries are the same.
The world in which we live is flawed and imperfect because a lot of it is controlled by humans, who are imperfect, inconsistent and prone to flights of everything ranging from love, vivid fantasy through panic attacks, anger and (sad to say) violence.
Dissent is not disloyalty, and blind obedience to some idealized view of a society or country is not progress. It’s actually the sort of requirement placed on citizens in a totalitarian state, the sort of state that treats citizens as mere subjects, peons who should be seen and not heard, and know their place and obey their superiors. In other words, a country remarkably like some of the countries that the Founding Fathers left in order to form the modern-day United States.
Living in this country does not require you to fail to notice its imperfections, nor does it impose any requirement on you to keep quiet about those imperfections. There is a First Amendment for a good reason. There is also no Constitutional right to not be offended.
There are a number of sub-optimal features in the modern USA. From time to time I will comment on them. If you think that makes me “un-American”, “anti-American”, “unpatriotic” etc. etc.. then so be it, but, frankly, it says more about your binary mindset than it does about my opinions.