It’s incontrovertible that we have a serious problem of police violence against black Americans in this country. “Hey, look at all this black on black violence” severs only as an attempt to distract the discussion away from that problem.
And the problem is that we have thousands of police departments all operating more or less independently. Anyone looking for a federal answer to this problem just doesn’t understand the basic organization structure of police departments in the country. This is a problem that is going to have to be tackled state by state, county by county, and city by city. It’s going to be a long slog, but it’s something we have to do. Ideally, as more and more municipalities deal with this problem, those that don’t will be so obviously outside that mainstream that they will have to get on the bandwagon.
But again, when white extremists hole themselves up, it seems like extreme care is taken to make sure they come out alive. David Koresh was given basically 3 months to surrender. The Bundy clan was left unfettered on federal property that they had hijacked for more than a month. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, extremely violent and armed to the teeth, are taken into custody. As is the South Carolina church shooter. These are people who basically antagonized law enforcement, were heavily armed, and in some cases had already murdered multiple people. And yet, black men on the street get put to death for minor infractions. If you don’t see why blacks are angry about this, then you shouldn’t comment. It’s common sense, really.
The white man’s law is the the law that put blacks in ghettos, denied them education, denied the access to fair housing, denied them access to credit, denied them basically the same opportunities as whites, but want to pretend that we have equal opportunity in this country because a white president finally said that the Constitution and the law apply equally in 1965…300 years after blacks were brought over as indentured servants and slaves, and nearly 200 years after the Constitution was ratified.
The United States Constitution, as great and as long-lived as she is, is probably the only Constitution among modern industrialized nations that exists today which still refers to blacks as 3/5 of a person. Yes, I get that there were amendments, but still…most other Constitutions were rewritten. We on the other hand worship a Constitution and Founding Fathers who imposed race-based inequality. The American Constitution embodies White Supremacy. It is a White Supremacist Document.
American law is the white man’s law. All of our laws today are white men’s laws.
That’s an important point. The federal government’s power is limited here. It can lead by example, issue recommendations, and investigate misconduct. But the real change is local.
I also think it’s important to state the obvious, which is that police have tremendous power in this country. Police unions are among the strongest interest groups in every jurisdiction, and wield pretty much unrivaled influence when it comes to setting police policy. If you try to force policies on them that they don’t like, the policies won’t make any difference.
A good example of this is body cameras. A lot of departments have adopted them in recent years, but many (maybe even most) aren’t introducing policies that discipline cops for failing to capture incidents. Or giving the subjects of the footage access to it. Or forbidding cops from reviewing the footage before giving accounts in response to excessive force claims. In some jurisdictions, body cameras are pretty much just being used for evidence in petty prosecutions instead of stopping police misconduct. Which means the cameras will only make things worse in those places. It would be like if we forced standardized testing on teachers, but then told the teachers that they get to write and grade the tests and the only person that sees the results are them. And the reason police can adopt such policies is that while there are spurts of political will, there is no sustained counterbalance to the power of the FOP.
So a big piece of the solution isn’t the nuts and bolts of better policies, for which there is already a lot of consensusoutside police unions. Instead, what’s needed is a political movement. If BLM got their entire policy agenda agreed to today, the inertia and power of police culture–at least in the most troubled departments–would probably subvert it in a decade. You’ve got to build the serious political will and cultural change first.
Black-on-Black and the reaction against, as mentioned earlier, it ARE both overlooked… by mainstream media outlets. That the minority communities get together to fight crime in their own neighborhoods is somehow “not news”.
That particular quirk of constitutional editorial technique, by which the Constitution is changed by later article of amendment but we don’t consign the invalidated text to oblivion, in part helps the reader know what version he’s looking at. If it’s got 27 articles of amendment you know it’s the current one, if only 12 you know it’s the pre-Civil War one.
And one could turn around and say that this way the later amenders do not erase the tracks of the original document, but instead leave it all right there so future generations know what was it that had to be changed.
Unless you know of some laws or official police procedure that is racist, I think it’s fair to say that there’s no “system” against black people. It’s just easier to think that than to admit that stereotyping is racist. The country is full of racists. You’re probably mildly racist, he’s probably mildly racist, I’m probably mildly racist. That’s not a system, it’s a bunch of people who, as individuals, have chosen to accept stereotypes at a deep enough level that it causes us to misperform under certain scenarios.
Probably the only way to fix it would be to do things like testing cops with sniffer dogs to see if they cause the dog to give more false positives than others, and don’t hire or fire those who fail this. Maybe assign those guys to tasks that involve less street work.
If the problem is that the country is full of racists who think that black people can’t be trusted and that it is reasonable to expect the worst from an encounter with them , how exactly is getting a bunch of bored college students and pot heads in the middle of the street supposed to help?
The problem is not that the cops are racist. Well, I’m sure a bunch of 'em are, but that’s not the point. The problem is one of systemic bias and flawed assumptions, which is driven by a million little things woven into the very fabric of society. And it’s not just affecting the cops.
Part of the point of the “what about black-on-black shootings” response is that it demonstrates how much more likely it is that any given police shooting is not driven by racism. If someone is willing to shoot a civilian, even if the civilian is black, that someone is going to be willing to shoot a cop, no matter if the cop is white or black.
Look at the database to which XT linked. I only scrolled thru twenty or so of the black shootings, but nearly all of them are not even questionable. Over and over, you see “he shot at police”, “he tried to run police down with his car”, “the police received a report of someone threatening his family with a gun”, “she refused to drop her sawed-off shotgun”, “he had a history of mental health issues and had recently been released from the hospital”, etc., etc.
Cases where some black guy gets shot in a traffic stop where he did everything “right” are extremely rare exceptions. Nearly all the time, black people are disproportionately the subject of police violence because black people are disproportionately responsible for serious street crime, and resist arrest when they get busted for it.
Sometimes - rarely - a black person gets shot when he or she shouldn’t. That’s a tragedy. Very much more commonly, a black person gets shot when he or she shouldn’t, but the shooter is another black person who isn’t police. Where should we be focusing the majority of our attention, and press coverage, and political capital, and protests and marches? On shark attacks, or cancer?
Unfortunately for the cops, there is too much “circle the wagons” going on so that I’m unwilling to accept self-reported causes at face value. I’m sure there are lots good, honest cops out there, but how are we supposed to know which are the good ones and which are not? Unless something is captured on video, it’s suspect. And that’s a big problem.
There’s a key difference between curing shark attacks and curing cancer.
And, indeed, a key difference between the two cases you mention. Press coverage and political attention is necessary to effect a change in policing training, standards, and internal reviews of police shootings.
There is comparatively less value in demanding media and political condemnation of black-on-black street crime, because black-on-black street crime is already illegal, and already condemned, genuinely, by the government and society actors involved here.
I think we’re sort of saying the same thing here. You’re putting “system” in quotes, like you think I’m suggesting a massive conspiracy. But I’m not. I’m using it just to describe the complex assemblage of law and culture and practice that is criminal justice. And, yes, we’re all probably a bit racist, and that racism will show up in various places if we don’t have really good
If the problem is that the country is full of racists who think that black people can’t be trusted and that it is reasonable to expect the worst from an encounter with them , how exactly is getting a bunch of bored college students and pot heads in the middle of the street supposed to help?
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The problem with this, of course, is that the police reports say those things even in cases where later accounts and video evidence suggest otherwise. The most recent example I’m aware of is Michael Slager, who claimed that the man he killed went for his taser. Then a video was released that showed he had shot the fleeing suspect in the back and planted the taser near his body.
This isn’t surprising. If I killed someone in the heat of the moment, I’d sure as hell say that he attacked me and that the killing was justified. But the collective statements of killers are not evidence that their actions were justified.
We ought to be able to say that having multiple officers on the scene would provide confirmation of what happened, but the culture and practice of police circling the wagons to get their stories straight and covering up the actions of bad cops makes their claims unreliable.
The standard for not getting shot by police ought to be higher than doing everything right.
Already answered. We already punish non-police for killing black people. The protests are about the injustice of no one being held accountable for these deaths.
And did you consider whether white suspects in the same circumstances were fatally shot by police as frequently? The point isn’t “all black people shot by police are innocent”; it’s that lethal force is used far more quickly and frequently in situations with black suspects compared to similar situations involving white suspects.
Take this example from the link above and compare it to the Philando Castile case:
Here’s a guy who was drunk, belligerent, actively threatening other civilians including waving the gun around, and had already behaved similarly in the recent past. If he’d been black and the police had shot him he’d be another “not even questionable” statistic on that list. Yet he didn’t get shot. Why not?
In the majority of cases one will be able to find a justification for the shooting, but that ignores the fact that there remains an inherent bias in the way the police react to black suspects vs white suspects. Of course, this bias could also be addressed by getting the police to shoot more white people, but no one ever seems to advocate that position for some reason.
ISTM that illegal police shootings are illegal as well. See the example iamthewalrus(:3= mentions of Michael Slager, who shot someone and is now charged with murder. If political and media pressure are ineffective in cases where the action is already illegal, it would have been ineffective to get Slager charged. If they are effective, then they would be effective against black-on-black crime, which is also already illegal.
I disagree that press coverage and political pressure is ineffective in combatting black-on-black street crime. If it is, then the examples given in this thread of BLM and similar groups speaking out against black-on-black crime were wasted effort. Do you believe they were?
If you read the disclaimers on the database to which I and XT linked, you will see that they are not simply based on the police say-so, but other sources of information as well.
Video certainly helps, but it is a tool rather than a cure. Because [list=A][li]There are cases where no video was available, but it is as plain as the nose on your face that the shooting was justified, and [*]Even when video is available, people see what they want to see. As in the Tamir Rice case - it was established that Rice had a gun, and the video shows the police kicking away the gun after he drew it from his waistband and got shot. Yet the narrative remains that the police opened fire without giving him a chance to do anything. [/list]I understand your objection, but it is not simply either accepting the police’s say-so or having video. Think of the Michael Brown shooting. Officer Wilson is brought before, not simply a shooting review board, but a grand jury, where it is made screamingly obvious that the shoot was justified. Even without video. [/li]
Sure, there are cases of cover-ups. But there are far more cases of independent review that show no cover-up.
Yes, I did, but your 8 anecdotes don’t go very far to show that police shoot white people less often under the same circumstances that they shoot blacks.
There is a study linked to upthread that purports to show that police do not shoot blacks more often than whites. Hotly disputed (of course) but better than your AlterNet link.
You’re wrong about the Rice video. It directly contradicted the officers’ own reports after the fact, and no gun was visible in the video (which was grainy enough that details as small as a gun in a waistband couldn’t be discerned).
You demonstrate my point. The later video is not necessary to establish the presence of a gun. That Rice had a gun was reported, earlier video showed Rice waving the gun around, the person who called 911 reported the gun, the gun was found on the scene, and the later video shows the cop kicking the gun away after Rice drew it.
You further demonstrate the limitations of video - the refusal to believe in anything else.
‘I don’t see the gun on the video, so the cops were lying.’
‘You don’t have to see the gun on the video to know that a gun was there. You can see it on earlier video, the person who called 911 said she saw the gun, the gun was found, you can see the cop kicking the gun away, his mother said he had a gun.’
‘But I don’t see it on the video, so the cops were lying.’