Unless your point is that the police did not enforce slavery or segregation, then I do not see how that in any way contradicts what I said.
They enforced the “Rule of Law”, and the rule of law of the time was slavery and later segregation.
Floyd wasn’t a citizen? Was terrorizing his community?
Where are you getting this from?
Or is this just more of your speculation, akin to your earlier speculation that the two of them were running a counterfeiting operation, and that Officer POS killed George Floyd in order to keep him from talking.
I’d say that what is destroying our country is this tendency to blame the victims of a crime, rather than deal with the crime iteself.
I’m not sure what you mean? How would he be found guilty without a trial?
Who is calling for there not to be a trial? Please point them out to me, so that I can point out the error of their ways.
Now, there are those who do not think that he should have a trial, as they don’t think that he did anything wrong at all. But that’s a whole different group of people that have entirely different motives.
So, if you could please point out those who are asking that Officer POS be found legally guilty without a trial, it would be most appreciated.
I got that impression from the OP’s post about what was not “open to debate” and some subsequent comments seemed to veer in that direction.
Ah, I see. You took the OP not wanting this thread to be about the guilt or innocence of officer POS to be the OP declaring his legal guilt. I can see how a simplistic or motivated reading of the OP could lead one to that conclusion.
With that “impression” in mind, I can also see how other posts that do not talk about the guilt or innocence of officer POS may allow one to bring themselves to the incorrect conclusion that those posters also do not think that he should have a trial.
Now that you’ve seen what you error is, you are good now?
I always was good.
The police were created to enforce the status quo order, and for the vast majority of US history, this order was in service to white supremacism and required white supremacism to enforce it. Law enforcement institutions and systems being racist was a feature, not a bug, for the vast majority of our history. And we’re seeing quite clearly that this has yet to be eliminated.
It’s not a coincidence when the department who killed Breonna Taylor left the report of the incident almost entirely blank, or that cops routinely stand by and fail to intervene when a racist cop commits brutality, or cops stay quiet when they know their comrades did something wrong. This stuff has been the norm for decades and decades, and only since cameras have become so much more common have white Americans, broadly speaking, started to notice or care. But black people have known for decades that this is so. They just were ignored and gaslit.
The police enforced the laws some of which were racist. That does not mean that the ones working now are now tainted by that. Schools were segregated, that does not mean the teaching profession is rooted in racism. The same is true for doctors and nurses.
Can you tell me exactly when it was that the “taint”, as you call it, went away?
If you have a cop who enforced segregation training a new cop hired after segregation ended, are you telling me that because some politicians in DC signed some pieces of paper, he’s not going to pass his biases along to the new officer?
While there are certainly racial biases in both education and healthcare that severely affects the outcomes for minorities, neither of those professions were ever charged with enforcing segregation, unlike the police.
For instance, it was the police who were using firehoses and sicking dogs on people for trying to end segregation.
So, as you say, teaching and medicine were not rooted in racism, and yet still suffer from bias. Yet somehow, the police, who were actually used to enforce and uphold these institutions, do not?
IIRC, you were/are a cop. When you were trained, were you told what were the “good” parts of town, and what were the “bad” parts of town?
They’ve proven they’re tainted by it, over and over again. Maybe it wasn’t inevitable, but this is the way it is in the present. When they stand by bad and racist cops, over and over again; when they deliberately hold back the facts about an incident that reflects poorly on them; when they applaud brutal cops; when they resist accountability and transparency; when they place the blue wall above justice and decency; and when most black Americans report personal mistreatment by police; they’re demonstrating the taint continues, again and again.
People are not guilty of the acts of others, only their own. When cops stopped enforcing segregation the guilt and taint of that went away. It may be that those who were employed during that time never got over the bias, but cops in general go where the crime is and are not biased.
I don’t believe that teaching and medicine still suffer from bias.
I am not a real cop, I only pretend to be if I need to get a statue back for a friend. The good parts of town are the parts that have less reports of crime and the bad parts are those that have more reports of crime. Since cops know the reports of crime by area I imagine that they are very well acquainted with the good and bad parts of town.
People are also complicit in the acts that they allow. If your partner is a racist, and you allow him to abuse his authority, then you are no better than he is, even if you have no bias whatsoever.
Is there a training course that they take that removes bias then? How do you know that they are going to where the crime is, and not where they know the crime is?
As far as teaching and medicine, the results argue with you. Yes, bias is still a major issue in both
So, it sounds like you are agreeing that the law is enforced differently based on geographic location. Are you just saying that it happens to be a coincidence in who lives in those different areas?
It’s easy to trust the status quo and institutions when they’re not brutalizing and killing your family and people who look like you. Many Americans don’t have this same luxury you do.
Great article on 538 about how racial bias in policing is probably even more egregious than we think, since so much of the statistics are intrinsically biased because the policing practices they’re based on are racially biased: Why Statistics Don’t Capture The Full Extent Of The Systemic Bias In Policing | FiveThirtyEight
Of course laws are enforced differently by location. High crime areas have more police presence because it would be dumb to have cops patrolling low crime areas while crimes are happening in other neighborhoods.
It is not a coincidence, young black men commit lots of crimes so areas where young black men live are high crime areas. High crime areas attract the attention of police. Should high crime areas be ignored by police and let the criminals run amok? What is the alternative?
So, we have more police presence looking for crime in areas with high crime reports, and less looking into crime in areas with lower crime reports.
You do realize that crime happens in the “good” neighborhoods as well, right? That it just gets missed or overlooked by the cops, when the same crime that happens in a “bad” neighborhood will result in an arrest.
If you are looking for crime, you are going to find it. Even if you have to make up things or plant evidence.
Do you get that the more you police an area, especially with cops who know that there is crime going on, the more crime you will find? That a “bad” area will remain a “bad” area no matter how the community improves, so long as the cops still think of it as the “bad” area.
When a cop is in the “bad” neighborhood, they are looking for people committing crimes to arrest. When a cop is in a “good” neighborhood, they are looking for people who don’t belong there.
That’s why we need to break that whole cycle. We need to stop allowing laws to be enforced differently by location. That is the definition of oppression.
The “good” neighborhoods tend to have more calls to the police than the “bad” neighborhoods. But, the “bad” neighborhoods tend to have more arrests.
They go to “good” neighborhoods when called, they go to “bad” ones to look for criminals.
The alternative is to not give into racial bias and start with the presumption that young black men commit lots of crimes so areas where young black men live are high crime areas. That is an extremely racially biased view, that is unfortunately shared by quite a number of cops.
That leads to things like:
https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/the-killing-of-elijah-mcclain-everything-we-know.html
Where, because he was a young black man in an area where young black men live, he was assumed to be a criminal and was killed for it. Well, to be fair, he wasn’t just killed, he was tortured to death.
That leads to people like this:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/nation-world/story/2020-06-24/3-north-carolina-police-officers-fired-over-racist-rants
I’m sure that they can tell you what the good and bad neighborhoods are.
As long as the attitude that you articulated is in effect, that areas where young black people live should be considered to be high crime areas, police discrimination and brutality will continue.
Seriously, just walking down the street in a high crime area, which you define as being a place where young black men live, can end up with you being killed in a horrifying way. There’s something really wrong with that, and we shouldn’t find it acceptable.
ran over the 3500 character limit:
I grew up in one of the “good” neighborhoods, and let me just say, there was plenty of crime. It just wasn’t caught by the police, because they were busy patrolling where young black men live, rather than where young white kids are dealing drugs, breaking into houses and cars, shoplifting from stores, committing assault, including sexual assault, vandalizing, and all the other fun things that kids do when they do not see any negative consequence to their actions. I knew a bunch of kids and teens that got into quite a bit of trouble, but it was never with the law.
The only white kid I knew that actually got into legal trouble actually dropped an ounce of weed in front of the assistant principal.
I’ll agree to some extent with the idea that where young men live, crime is probably going to be higher than where young men do not live, but I do not agree that the color of the skin makes nearly the difference that you do. It just makes it more likely to get caught and prosecuted because cops share a similar attitude to the one that you have shared with us.
Considering the fact that a majority of black Americans report that they personally have been mistreated by police, it seems entirely appropriate to suspect that those Wilmington cops are actually close to the norm, and the only aberration is that they got caught on recording.
First:" lots of crimes" aren’t committed by young black men. “Lots of crimes” are committed by young poor men with little or no opportunities. The alternative to more police (who just react to crime after it’s already happened, anyway) is to use that money for job training and career placement, and tax breaks for businesses and industries to locate in those communities and commit to hiring locals to give those young men opportunities so they dont commit “lots of crimes” in the first place.
Second: (as has been pointed out) the oft quoted statistic that blacks commit crimes at twice the rate of whites is not true. Blacks are incarcerated at twice the rate of whites. But that’s becuse they are arrested and prosecuted more aggressively. But if you wanna play the statistics game, how ‘bout this: There are 41.4 million African Americans in this country. Let’s say half of them are men (safe bet) and half of those 20.7m are of crime committin’ age (not a child or elderly) which puts us at 10 million young black men. Approximately 2 million are arrested each year which means that approximately 20% of young black men are criminals. Which seems seems like a large number until you reverse it and see that 80% of young black men are not criminals. So if you stop and frisk and treat each encounter as a possible criminal you’ll be wrong 8 out of 10 times. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I chose a tactic at my work that failed 8 out of 10 times I would be fired so fast it would make and audible sound. And yet some amongst us think it’s a good idea to have strict policing policies.