[ExcelSaga]

I grew up in a place where the racial bias narrative of policing was just something I knew to be true. It took a long time, and a lot of statistics from a ton of sources to realize that aside from sentencing, it’s mostly that the system as a whole sucks. The problem is the correlation between race and poverty, and poverty and crime. It’s fair to point to the history of mistreatment of black people in the US as a root driver of poverty, and therefore crime, but that’s often lost in the noise.

Take the recent shooting of a young black man in his grandmother’s yard. The narrative is now that he was unarmed, and shot in the back. While true, both points are deceptive. He was unarmed, but he ran from the cops, at night, didn’t follow commands, and had a metallic object in his hands when he turned to face the officers. This was all caught on FLIR. He was shot in the back, after the first shot to his front spun him around. Don’t run. Don’t resist. Comply with commands and argue your case in court. Your odds of being shot go down to near zero when you’re not running away or acting like a lunatic. Even in cases of obvious abuse like that poor bastardized NYPD cops strangled to death, were predicated on resisting arrest.

As long as people fleeing and resisting gets conflated with cases of compliant people being abused, not much will change. As long as cases of disproportionate arrests rates are conflated with wrongful arrests and convictions, not much will change. The two major predictors of have a bad time in the system are socioeconomic class, and how you act with officers. Race is a factor in sentencing, but that seems to rarely be the issue talked about in popular cases.

[tptacek]

WThe narrative is that an unarmed young black man was shot in his grandmother's yard because the police did, in fact, shoot an unarmed young black man in his grandmother's yard. That narrative isn't "deceptive". It is what in fact happened.