Absolutely true. However, there is not much assuming being done. The absolutely stark, clear, and unassailable fact that many police in the US are violent, racist thugs has been repeatedly shoved into my face over the last few months. Not all of them are, by any means. But even the good cops are part of a system that enables and rewards racist, thuggish behavior.
“Good” cops regularly stonewall investigations into bad cops, and vote for police unions that will do everything in their power to literally allow bad cops to get away with murder.
Well I can't argue with that since you said 'many' police in a country of 350+ million people. But what is many? 5? 100? 1000? It's easy to pick these instances and assign blame retrospectively when in reality, things like this almost never happen. If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it. Business as usual.
This is a nonsense argument. Police in the United States kill civilians at a rate more that 3x the rate of the next first world nation. In almost all cases of police acting with bias, those same officers are surrounded by other officers who do nothing. All of these bystanding officers are guilty of the same crime. These cases are just the ones that are brought to the national attention there are many more that are not. In very many of these cases several police body cameras just stopped working or were not on.
"in reality, things like this almost never happen"
I am willing to bet your life experience is very different than those of minorities.
" If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it"
Not sure what you base this on, I feel like to could be based on nothing but the narrative you are attempting spin. Is your argument that police should be more aggressive based on what could happen? Should police just gun everyone down because they may have a gun and pull it out and shoot them in the head?
In this country, police have godlike life or death power, every instance of police killings should be heavily scrutinized by neutral parties and stringent protocols put in place to prevent it with harsh criminal penalties for those that dont follow the rules. How you can just shrug and accept any cases of police brutality is beyond me.
1. I am black.
2. There is no police brutality in my area, or crime for that matter.
3. I don't shrug and accept police brutality, those are your words.
4. I am not trying to spin a narrative, merely point out a narrative that is being spun by the media that directs attention away from actual solutions in favor of self-dealing sensationalism.
Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made.
There are very few areas on the United States with no crime...
"Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made."
They are but when they make mistakes people die or are sent to jail for decades or are stripped of their property. To give people this much power and shrug and say its a mistake is not acceptable. Very often these same cops have many / dozens of complaints against them and they still continue to act with impunity because they know that they are not going to be punished. A mistake is a mistake, 10 / 15 mistakes in and it is a pattern, extrapolated out over tens of thousands of officers and it is a systematic problem.
>It's easy to pick these instances and assign blame retrospectively when in reality, things like this almost never happen.
In reality USA has 3-10x the number of police shootings per capita than a random western country (heck, worse than many developing countries of even dictatorships).
So, yeah, the metrics are off.
If your counter-argument is "yeah, but US has more crime too", then maybe think long and hard if your whole legal system, approach to crime, society goals, etc, are justified then....
And it's not even up to the individual, racism is systemic in police, part of their everyday talk, their (real, not lip service) training discussions, their protocols, etc.
I've googled up the bodycam videos of the incident [0]. I think, the police started acting the way they did, because the suspect didn't stop when the police clearly asked him to do so, and pushed one of the officers when they grabbed him.
It would be fair to call it racism, if there was another instance of a white suspect acting the same way, and getting treated differently.
Elijah was wearing headphones. Since you’ve seen the video, how long from the moment the police are out of their cars before they put their hands on Elijah?
Would you put your hands on someone Who showed no physical resistance in that amount of time?
The Police escalate quickly, and then, since the situation has escalated, feel justified in their response, which killed Elijah. They killed Elijah.
Well, how many people wearing masks (pre-pandemic) would be trying to avoid getting identified while committing a robbery? How many people pushing the officer away would be trying to attack them next? Does police have a way of knowing in advance, whether this exact mask-wearing arrest-resisting individual is actually a threat?
I don't think it is entirely fair to put 100% of the blame on the police. A much healthier solution would be to try de-escalating general tensions between the police and the population.
"I don't think it is entirely fair to put 100% of the blame on the police. A much healthier solution would be to try de-escalating general tensions between the police and the population." Right, its not the fault of the armed people with godlike power to kill, arrest and detain to their hearts content based on nothing but a feeling or bias. Its the fault of the people being harassed and killed for not properly genuflecting before the the ones killing them. I am sure your user name is meant to be in jest but I am having a hard time thinking you are not just a human bot in a call center that is bad at their job.
Well, the day-to-day job of these armed people is to deal with other violent, and often armed people, before they go out on the general public.
Besides, there are quite a few cities that have considerably limited the police power by now. Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland for example. The safety of regular law-abiding people has considerably dropped. Murders are up, gun sales are up, almost every type of violent crime is up.
If you don't like police, go ahead, move to one of these cities. Or at least, search for some videos from them on DuckDuckGo.
I find it very disheartening and hypocritical to hear anti-police rhetoric from people living in 7-figure-property neighborhoods, completely shielded from the problems that the police is supposed to solve.
And no, I am not a human bot in a call center, I happen to be a Canadian that is actually satisfied with the way RCMP works here. And I don't understand why our southern neighbors would rather shoot themselves in their feet and have their cities burnt, than try to copy some techniques that do make police more efficient up here.
I am sure you are satisfied, your police force kills civilians at a rate 1/3 that of the US. What techniques work there that we are ignoring? Does your police force use de-escalation? Majority of ours does not.
Perhaps the problems that the police are meant to solve are in part caused by the police? If I was always treated as a suspect after a while I may start to become resentful. If I was a minority representing 13% of the general population but represented 38% of the prison population I may start to become resentful and argue that there is a problem. Your argument that just because people live in peaceful 7-figure neighborhoods they should be grateful to the police for suppressing the riff raff, poor and minorities is very grating, classist and very much racist.
The NYPD has a budget of $10 billion dollars, and the only limits imposed on it were to please stop beating, murdering, framing and raping people. If those limits are too stringent I am not really sure where to go from here.
The Canadian approach to police violence is the starlight tour -- rather than bringing someone to jail, drop them off in the middle of nowhere to freeze overnight.
Some parts of the US could take this approach, but there's a lot of places in the US that are either too nice out or there's too many fast food restaurants/Starbucks to take shelter in
I'm not a person living in a 7 figure property neighborhood, and the cops definitly make this worse.
If you want to know about how great the RCMP, you should read how nice they are to help local police departments to give free one-way tours into the forest at night in the winter to minorities, by very helpfully shielding them from the evil bureaucrats.
Just to give some local context about Portland. We're getting some reforms pushed through, and it's now very likely the Mayor will lose his runoff election to someone that has promised far more substantial reforms. That said, the police continue to behave in unaccountable ways including blatantly violating the law on camera. This is going to be a very prolonged fight for reform.
Explaining how the US got to this state is a long discussion, but it helps to understand the origin of the police here in the south was to catch escaping slaves, and in the north was to keep "undesirables" out of wealthy neighborhoods. In more recent times politicians have used the War On Crime rhetoric to motivate people out of fear to vote for them, even though actual violent crime has been steadily falling.
This is why we shouldn’t be employing people whose job it is to snatch people they don’t know anything about, who just assume you’re a threat until YOU PROVE that you’re innocent.
That would be fair if you could detangle if from specific suspicious behavioral patterns. Like wearing a mask (pre-pandemic) in a neighborhood where robberies by mask-wearing perpetrators are common.
Is it illegal to wear a mask? If the answer is no then the police have no right to stop him for wearing a mask. Police having the leeway to determine what is suspicious vs having to obey the law is what leads to thousands of minorities being stopped, roughed up and arrested for resisting arrest. If you are a minority and do nothing wrong, how many stops for being black would it take before you became a little defensive or frustrated? Imagine your life being constantly interrupted by uniform wearing people with a track record of killing people with your complexion.
> It would be fair to call it racism, if there was another instance of a white suspect acting the same way, and getting treated differently.
That comment really didn't age well, did it? I think just about anyone can see what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse and recognize that racism was a factor in the disparate treatment.
Sure, I don't mind; it was something like 15 years ago anyway, and obviously didn't amount to anything in the first place.
Baltimore PD officers wear black uniforms. One night one of them was standing in the middle of the street I was driving down, and there weren't enough streetlights in that section. I was doing something like 40 in a 30, and the first thing I knew that anything was wrong was when I heard a loud thump from my left side. Looking in the wing mirror, I could see the guy in the light of the upcoming streetlight, where the one I'd last passed was too far back to show him.
So I pulled over and got out, because of course I did; I saw no personal benefit in complicating my upcoming arrest with a chase. Imagine my surprise when, on seeing my white skin, short hair, and slacks-and-button-down professional attire, he waved me off and went back to what he'd been doing!
In retrospect, I have to figure the mirror clipped something on his belt, rather than the car striking his actual person. But the fact remains that, had I not been white or not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Especially since, being as I was on my way home from a visit to my connection, I had a quarter ounce of pot in my left front trouser pocket. Remember, this was back before decriminalization, more than a decade before dispensaries even existed in this town; not only that, but my guy hadn't had any baggies that night, so he just gave me the smaller portions he got from his own guy, who mostly did street work. So it would've been charged as possession with intent, and that's a felony.
The time I hit a cop with my car while I was carrying wasn't a major reason why I quit smoking that shit entirely a couple of years later, but never having another few seconds of that kind of sheer terror was not absent from the list of reasons why I was glad when I did quit.
Just imagine if I were a black man, though. That cop could have shot me dead on the spot and who'd have said a word? I mean, I so obviously would've had it coming, a drug dealer doing drug dealer crimes and, if that weren't enough, I swerved my car to try to murder a police officer in the middle of it. Probably had a gun in my back pocket, or in the glovebox at least. Who would dare blame an officer of the law for doing what he had to do in the face of an obviously murderous criminal like that?
...is what white people would mostly say. But that's the thing. I had that moment of terror because I was acting like a damn fool - I could drive more carefully and just quit buying pot, and I did. People of color can't "live more carefully", or "just quit" having their skin. And there is a night in my past that, if I had skin of a similar shade to theirs, it'd be through bars that I saw the next sunrise - if I had lived to see it at all.
I don't blame you for saying it sounds unrealistic. I'd probably likewise have some trouble taking a story like that seriously on its face, except that I happened to live it, and a lot of other wild stories too. But there are far more stories that I haven't lived, and some of them sound as wild to me as the one I've just told sounds to you. That's how life is, though. The world is far wilder than any one of us, with our individual and limited perspective, ever gets to see. If we want to understand how things really work in the places and times and lives that we don't get to see, we have to listen to the stories people tell us who do see those things - listen, and not assume that they must be lying, any more than you would assume I had been lying to you just now.
If you take anything away from this conversation, I hope you'll make it that.
>So I pulled over and got out, because of course I did; I saw no personal benefit in complicating my upcoming arrest with a chase.
>not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
This may have had more to do with with him waving you off than anything else. The type of people police are purportedly there to handle are not those who would do what you did. If this is Baltimore we're talking about, he may be tuned to a much more violent type of normal criminal encounter. Keep in mind that given the limited resources of the judicial system, they are better spent on more disruptive crimes to the social fabric.
Perspective is important in these things. Those that come to you to be dealt with are practically priority zero. They know they screwed up, and as long as you (the officer) is okay, then all's good. They'll sort themselves out.
It's the ones that don't the police are out and willing to do paperwork for.
Oh? And suppose he'd assumed when I got out of the car that I was going for a gun? They tell you these days that you do not ever get out of the car during a traffic stop unless instructed, and while this wasn't precisely a traffic stop, it wasn't all that far off - and I was far too frightened to be thinking about being careful with my hands. Or even to be thinking, really; I knew I was about to go to jail, and all I could fit in my mind beyond that was, I had better not try to make things even worse.
That officer made the judgment he did in a matter of seconds; as I noted in another comment here, I didn't have time to speak, or to take so much as a step toward the officer, before he waved me off - which was just as well in retrospect; God alone knows what I'd have said. But if any one aspect of the gestalt I presented had in any way varied from "harmless", he might well have drawn on me, and if he hadn't done that then he'd for damn sure have come over to see whether I was drunk or high or whatever the hell. And then he would have found my dope, and I would have gone to jail that night.
None of that would have happened because I was actually dangerous! He wasn't wrong to read me the way he did. But I was still extremely lucky that he did read me right. I could very easily have been less fortunate. And given everything I've seen in twenty years living in this town, I am very sure that the vast bulk of my good fortune that night lay in the accident of my having light skin.
Freddie Gray could talk about that, I think, if he were still alive to talk about anything. The federal consent decree that followed his death did not come about in a vacuum. And it is not in a vacuum that BPD officers interact with other citizens - both like and unlike myself - of this city.
I didn't apologize! Dude was sixty feet away still standing in the street when I got out of the car, I didn't say anything and neither did he. He looked me once over, waved me off, and forgot me.
And that's just my point. Based entirely on how I looked, he judged the incident to have been a harmless accident and not worth pursuing, despite that I had a felony charge worth of dope in my front pocket at the time. Pretty important, if you get to make that bust! But he never had any idea of the chance that passed him by, because, to him, I looked like somebody who wouldn't.
What I'm saying is, think for a minute about how that could've played out differently if, in that cop's eyes, I'd have looked a different way.