Then focus on one of them, or all of them. Don’t pick one that has very dubious claims of racism.
The problem with the Brown case is that within seconds there were rumors swirling that Brown was just standing there with his hands up and there was no justification for the shooting (and some witnesses, not all, described seeing that). And so it took on a life of its own in the media. An activist group didn’t pick it as a good test case. It just happened. It turned out to be a bad one.
And this, of course, fits in with my greater theme about the damage done by hasty accusations of racism.
In my mind, whether or not this was a “bad one” does little to affect the actual argument – that police mistreatment is a systemic and large-scale problem and should be addressed. I understand it hurts the optics and the “cause”, but this is not a top-down movement and these kinds of things will probably always happen in such movements. People should be careful but not to the extent that they are afraid to suggest that some particular instance of violence might be problematic.
In other words, I think the problem of misidentifying the cause of a particular instance of police violence is miniscule compared to the problem of systemic law enforcement mistreatment.
Sure, but this isn’t what is in your mind, it’s about the minds of millions who people were trying to influence by pointing to this case.
But the more false or shaky accusations are made, the more people will be afraid to point to real ones.
But they aren’t comparable. Law enforcement mistreatment is the problem. Identifying cases of it accurately is part of solving that problem. To misidentify actually hurts the cause of stopping police mistreatment. It backfires.
I oppose misidentification and inaccurate accusations – but I think focusing on these instances just makes it easier to ignore the others. Other than telling people to be careful and pick the right examples, which is already being done, I don’t think there’s anything can be changed for a large and relatively uncentralized movement.
Then they should be able to pick a better example.
I think the trouble is that BLM and similar movements need a clear example of an innocent victim, clear cut racism, and indifference by the system. And there really aren’t many such examples. The victim isn’t all that innocent, the racism tends to be assumed rather than demonstrated, and in cases of clear racism the officers involved tend to be dismissed and/or prosecuted. Not, IOW, an indifferent system careless of the lives of blacks.
The police received a report of a man waving a gun around in a park in the middle of the night. When they raced there to investigate, and yelled at the suspect to freeze, instead Tamir Rice reached for his gun and got shot. This is not racism. Trayvon Martin, as far as can be determined from the physical evidence and the testimony of witnesses, attacked Zimmerman and smashed his head into the ground, and got shot. This is not racism. Whats-her-name the actress who was in the Tarantino movie was dry humping her boyfriend in a public parking lot, and some of the people working nearby complained to the police. That’s not racism. Eric Garner was a petty criminal who resisted arrest, even though he was morbidly obese and had multiple health issues, and died from a choke hold (supposedly). That may have been against police policy, but it’s not racism. Crack is more heavily penalized than powder cocaine, and blacks are perceived as being more involved in the use and trafficking of crack. In the opinion of multiple experts, crack is more addictive than powder cocaine. That’s not racism. Etc. etc.
Yes, there is genuine racism in the US. There are also wolves. If you want to cry “Wolf” it would help if you wait until it isn’t a German Shepherd.
The conspiracy stories aint limited to Twitter but stretch throughout the internet and public sphere, from newspapers, to facebook, blogs, youtube, etc. It’s driven by real people justifying/belittling the kid’s (most likely bigoted) treatment/harassment. I understand that you probably require clear unquestionably vocal racist telegraphing to draw such a conclusion. Not me.
To require a teacher/cop/etc to first say sand nigger before evaluating Ahmed’s treatment as bigotry is a standard that borders on unreasonable. However I, personally, know people who wouldn’t make that judgement even a person said those exact words. Crazy, eh?
But a non-innocent victim can still be mistreated; racism can still be present when not so clear-cut (and even in obvious mistreatment like the Sean Groubert shooting, racism isn’t “clear-cut”, since cops don’t typically scream racial slurs as they pull the trigger); and indifference by the system can’t be proven in a single instance, for the most part. Wildly disparate statistics, as well as the total lack of statistics on police shootings from so many localities, can be informative.
Further, there remains this fact – if most black people believe that the police can’t be trusted, then that’s a problem for the police regardless of statistics. I’m certainly inclined to accept the beliefs of most black people on the large-scale mistreatment of black people just on this basis, since in American history, most black people have never been wrong about large-scale mistreatment of black people. But even if I wasn’t, this perception by itself is a problem for law enforcement. When law enforcement resist solutions (like not totally 100% embracing cameras, and not totally 100% embracing the opportunity to fully record and report statistics on police shootings), then the problem gets worse.
How do you know? How do you know that the cops weren’t just a little more likely to drive the car up close to the suspect, instead of maintaining distance; or just a little more likely to draw their guns; or just a little more likely to pull the trigger; etc; because he was black? By categorically rejecting the possibility that racism, whether from the individuals or baked into the system somehow, was involved, you’re complicating the process of bridging this divide, in my view. The same kind of reasoning might go for the other examples you offered.
Even if Zimmerman didn’t shoot Martin because he’s black, if he chose to follow him in the middle of the night at least partially because of his race (by, say, being more suspicious of a black teenage boy than someone else), then racism may have played a role, for example.
Yes, but how can the police solve that? If blacks are seeing a specific incident as racist when it is not, what can the police do about it?
Cameras, yes, they may help. But as we know, blacks and whites tend to see very different things when watching video. The video must still be interpreted sometimes.
But you can’t categorically accept claims of racism when there is little or no evidence of it! That’s even worse. Only if you show that there is a huge disparity in blacks being shot vs. whites being shot in the exact same circumstances could you discern possible racism. You might do that, but it’s hard because every situation is in some ways unique.
Yes, racism may have played a role. But that alone wouldn’t make the shooting unjustified (assuming it was). At best you could say that a white guy might have gotten away with not being followed.
In a similar vein, blacks being followed by security in stores more than whites is a harm to blacks. But it doesn’t mean security apprehending a black shoplifter is somehow unfair or racist in itself. He shoplifted.
Wholeheartedly welcome the opportunity to use cameras, fully open up their records and policies such that all shootings are recorded and reported… just to start. Further, various law enforcement groups can stop acting as if this movement is their enemy. Some cops and police chiefs have embraced the movement, in general – all of them should.
This is hard, and exacerbated because so many stats about these shootings aren’t kept and reported. Limited stats that I’ve seen suggest that far more young black men are shot by police than young white men, even when taking into account disparities in criminal convictions. This isn’t proof of anything, but it’s a small piece of data that might help tell a story.
Right – and this makes it even a harder problem to solve. If racism played a role in a shooting, even if the racism came before and the shooting itself might have been justified, that’s a big, big problem that should be addressed. It makes just being black around police officers less safe. That’s a huge part of what the movement is trying to correct.
So let’s add better reporting of data to the cameras and such.
Not necessarily. If a shooting is justified, it is justified. If cops are scrutinizing blacks more, resulting in more justified shootings of blacks, that actually means whites are getting away with crime, but that’s not the same thing as saying that “being black” is the problem. Crime is the problem in those cases, and “being white” is the advantage some have in getting away with it.
It’s inevitable that a term so potentially valuable as “racism” has its use carefully guarded by those who want to preserve it for their particular paradigm.
Such carefeul stewardship is a pointless endeavor.
No one owns language, nor the use of language.
“Racism” is a great example of a term which has become nearly useless as a rhetorical weapon due to careless overuse and lack of any broadly accepted definition to begin with.
Not to mention the propensity of so many idiots who embrace it as a substitute for carefully-framed argumentation.
I give it about a 6th grade level of rhetorical utility in any conversation, and it’s headed lower.
That the residents of Ferguson assumed that Brown had been murdered while surrendering indicated that, whatever the facts of the shooting, the residents of Ferguson believed that their police force was a predatory gang that promoted injustice. And they turned out to be entirely justified in that belief.
If a white teenager was shot in my neighborhood, I would not assume that the police were in the wrong, because the police are a benign-to-nonexistent factor in my life (I’m white and middle class). If the police treated me the way Ferguson police treated their victims, then I’d assume the worst of them at every opportunity. That’s what the police can do: refrain from creating the levels of mistrust and alienation that lead to toxic situations like Ferguson. Better oversight of local police forces, uniform reporting on police shootings, special state prosecutors for police violence, more diverse police forces, and body cameras would be good first steps.
Consider a case we had here in Kentucky last year - a young (white) woman was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy under controversial circumstances. Under protest, the local sheriff agreed to ask the Kentucky State Police to launch an investigation - a fine idea, to avoid to prospect of the local sheriff’s office investigating one of its own. However, the state police declined the request. No parties were satisfied: the deputy couldn’t clear his name, or escaped unpunished, depending on your view. This shouldn’t be an acceptable outcome. Independent state agencies for these matters are long overdue.
The difficulty here is that racism isn’t an act in itself, but rather a motivation for acts, and in any given case, it’s almost impossible to determine a motivation. All we can do is look for other motivations, and try to rule out all of them. Was Ahmed Mohammed’s suspension motivated by racism? Unknown, but no other motivation has been proposed consistent with the facts, and the motivation proposed (that teachers thought he had a bomb) is clearly factually untrue. Was Zimmerman’s attack on Martin motivated by racism? Unknown, but he hasn’t provided any other motivation beyond “he looked suspicious” (and in what way did he look suspicious?). Was the police brutality against Eric Gardner motivated by racism? Unknown, but no other explanation has been proffered.
And when you look at individual cases like this against a backdrop of a country where black kids are, overall, suspended more than white kids, even controlling for offense, and where blacks are the victim of violence more often than whites, and where there is more police brutality against blacks than against whites, it’s not a great leap to conclude that racism probably is the motivation behind these events. Is it certain? No, but it can never certain in any individual case.
And what did they get out of the Brown case? Did it prove they were justified in their belief? Nope. They were rebuked on national TV.
But how can the police build trust if people are “assuming the worst of them at every opportunity?”
I like your first steps, but those are external factors, and some, such as cameras, are still useless if people always assume the worst.
Consider a case we had here in Kentucky last year - a young (white) woman was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy under controversial circumstances. Under protest, the local sheriff agreed to ask the Kentucky State Police to launch an investigation - a fine idea, to avoid to prospect of the local sheriff’s office investigating one of its own. However, the state police declined the request. No parties were satisfied: the deputy couldn’t clear his name, or escaped unpunished, depending on your view. This shouldn’t be an acceptable outcome. Independent state agencies for these matters are long overdue.
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I think it can be both. There are racist thoughts, and there are racist acts based on those thoughts. But maybe that’s a pointless distinction. I do think it’s useful for when someone says “everyone is racist” just because everyone may have racist impulses. One is not “a racist” if one chooses not to act on those impulses, like we do with other impulses. If that weren’t true, we’d all be racists and we couldn’t ever help ourselves.
Actually, they were vindicated by the DoJ report: the Ferguson PD really was predatory and racially biased.
I’d start by promising accountability and transparency, then actually delivering. Implementation would be imperfect as always, and there’d be a lag time, but eventually people adapt to reality.
Nothing wrong with external factors. We live in a material universe, material changes are what matter.
Even if/when people argue over what exactly the cameras show in cases where it’s ambiguous, the mere fact of having cameras is a step in the right direction, as they are a tacit admission that an officer’s word isn’t always Gospel truth, and that independent oversight is a good thing.
I don’t know about that, I recall a lot of news coverage, and a lively discussion here at the Dope.
The hard part is implementing all those steps; once that was done, their efficacy would be relatively easy. But first city and state officials have to be convinced to implement the reforms, and the police forces to implement them in good faith. That’s the hard part - police, like anyone, prefer not to be accountable, and politicians have to appease the pro-police-and-anti-black-people portion of the electorate.
McCullin is the new municipal judge because the old one, Ronald Brockmeyer, resigned after the DoJ report came out. So did Chief of Police Thomas Jackson, and City Manager John Shaw. So they, at least, cared about the report.
