| Policing perpetuates poverty and thus crime by forcing poor, black men to deal with the criminal justice system from an early age. Court fees, court appearances, civil asset forfeiture, jail time, and property damage from police searches are all burdens that poor, black, law-abiding people bear, not to mention wrongful conviction. Edit: missed this line in your comment before: > Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society This is what Black Lives Matter is about. They understand the problem (often by living through it) and are focused on tackling it. Because they don't focus too much on helping other people to understand the problem, this might not be clear to you. Edit: I was about to respond to your reply, but it looks like you deleted it. > too many topics seem taboo to reason about objectively I think the disagreement is about where this reasoning can/should happen. From the perspective of the BLM movement, it is not their job to educate people about race. I think this reasoning has already happened at an academic level and has concluded that (to summarize very broadly) white people have a whole lot of privilege. > Do we have that evidence? Yes, I believe so. [1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bobo/files/2010_racialized_... [2] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [3] Alice Goffman, On the Run (this is an ethnography, so you may need to have an understanding of ethnographic methods to accept the evidence here as "data") |