[jaccarmac]

It's sobering for sure to realize those biases exist. I am a white man, who was extremely skeptical of the first few police shooting stories, starting with Trayvon Martin, then Michael Brown et al.

Trayvon was killed during a time when I was extremely politically conservative, but later that year I actively participated in a Republican campaign in Florida. That moment is when I really started to criticize my own political and religious beliefs.

Since then, mostly thanks to moving away from my parents and heading to university, I've continued to drift away from my old viewpoints. I can't say I am 100% onboard with every position BLM has advocated but the same story told year after year has started to change my mind.

And this case has a shock factor for a white man that the others did not. I'm ashamed to admit that. It's an uncomfortable way to be woken up to one's own biases. I hope it's not too late to help change things for both black and white Americans. And I hope it's not too late to fix my own thinking.

[freeflight]

It's not just shootings, it's also utterly horrible incidents like the killing of Keith Vidal [0], civil forfeiture [1] and the generally increasing militarization of US police, not just in equipment but also tactics [2], like running off-the-book black sites [3].

I'm not even from the US, but these worrisome trends have been obvious for quite a while now, in many different ways. Like the mere existence of crowdsourced maps of police killing family pets [4] and something like "swatting people" actually being a thing, which is reserved in its severity pretty much to the US [5].

Note: I'm not trying to paint a super bleak picture of "all US police are evil", I just think there's a very real problem there. A problem that seems to be mostly driven by a culture of "War", like on drugs and on terror.

[0] http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/07/justice/north-carolina-tee...

[1] https://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square...

[4] https://puppycidedb.com/

[5] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/robert-mcdaid...

[lsh123]

The police is just a part of the problem. The real problem here is the jury who let the cop walk. This is the real issue: no accountability for bad police behavior including unnecessary shootings, civil forfeiture, black ops sites, etc. Our political system is designed around balance of power. What we observe now is that the executive branch (including police) got too much power and the other branches of the government have to take it back.

[jaccarmac]

There are lots of problems. The black sites in particular have been weighing on my conscience a lot recently. I do find the combination of racism and police brutality particularly vile though. Especially given the for-profit prison subsystem and the exemption given to slavery in the amendment which supposedly abolished it.