Ah, so black folks shouldn’t fear police because there are a lot of arrests of black folks. That makes perfect sense, then.
“Being on guard” /= shooting people in the back
Is this like how you were almost sure there has never, ever been a first timer convicted on crack possession? Forgive me if I don’t trust your say-so.
For the most part, I agree with the principles that BLM is espousing, but in its current iteration I cannot support that movement at all.
1) The BLM message. They have muddied the water trying to appear deeper than they are. If the BLM movement solely existed to “highlight and oppose law enforcement mistreatment of minorities”, it’d be on target. The racial disparities in not just the killing but arrests, ticketing, and judicial system are all atrocious. But then I hear the message on the boards, on the streets, and on their website. Go to the “guiding principles” and see items like: We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable. Being generous, that’s barely and tangentially on topic.
2) The protests. I get it that the BLM movement wants to be “disruptive”. As a lifelong liberal activist, I’ve seen how some movements work well and others falter. First off, protesting in an illegal way-especially while asking the police to behave legally, sets itself up for self-contradiction. It pisses people off and that’s not a good thing. The drag queens at the Stonewall Inn brought the LGBT movement to the center stage or the suffragists who chained themselves to the White House under the banner “Kaiser Wilson” let the world know that equal voting rights for women were necessary. The problem is, these were not the groups that solved the problem. Capturing the hearts and minds of the centrists is what’s needed to create real social change. Blocking the highway is divisive. It creates an us v. them mindset in a very binary age.
3) The local groups. I live in Minneapolis where we have had definite policing issues in not just the city but the metro area. There is a definite need for a group like BLM. But when the group and leader interrupts the Minneapolis Park Board meeting and when is told they’re interrupting, the leader responds “Don’t talk to me like I’m a slave” I have a problem with the rhetoric being used when it’s solely meant to inflame and shame. Then there are the meetings that BLM-Minneapolis has hosted where they do not allow whites to attend.
So yeah. Occupy Wall Street had a great message. Then it got muddled. And then the protests. And then collapsed like a flan in a cupboard without getting anything really done. I don’t want to see this issue go that way but the trajectory that BLM is going makes me not want to support it.
Right. That kid’s fear of priests is absolutely unreasonable… after all, he’s met dozens of priests, and only one of them raped him! Sure, a lot of the others kept silent about the rape, and didn’t turn in the priest… but it was just one rape.
What does the “racism” mean in this use of the term “institutional racism”? Is it synonymous with “inertia”, or are you connoting something else?
Pretty much the same question. “Black communities” have disproportionately higher rates of serious, street-level or violent crime. Law enforcement therefore (IMO appropriately) pays a correspondingly disproportionate amount of their time and resources “targeting” black communities. If blacks use crack disproportionately, then they are going to get busted for it more than “white communities” using powder cocaine get busted for that. Not because of any sort of racism, but because the overall crime rate, and therefore the overall “targeting” is going to be different for communities with different overall crime rates. Especially if those crimes are the sort that the beat cops are put in place to combat.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve been told by cops that the first time you catch someone for drunk driving, they’ve probably been drunk driving for years. It’s easy to believe the first time you bust someone for crack it isn’t the first time they’ve used crack. It’s possible someone has gotten busted the first time, but i haven’t heard that’s a problem. The problem is blacks being targeted more than middle class white coke users, not that they get caught the very first time they commit a crime.
How often do blacks get sentenced to prison on a first offense?
The word you probably wanted to use is “proportionate.” “Disproportionate” is part of the problem.
If police were “proportionately” targeting black people, then the percentage of, say, black people they pulled over and subsequently arrested would be the same as the percentage of white people they pulled over and subsequently arrested, right? I mean, by definition of the word “proportionate.”
Here’swhat actually happens:
In the four states that track the results of consent searches, officers were more likely to conduct them when the driver was black, even though they consistently found drugs, guns or other contraband more often if the driver was white. The same pattern held true with probable-cause searches in Illinois and North Carolina, the two states that carefully record them.
So here’s the catch-22 the police are in: On the one hand, if they practice what they consider good proactive-policing techniques (have a heavy presence in high-crime areas, frequently stop drivers in those areas, and search vehicles frequently) they get accused of institutional racism because it turns out that those high-crime areas are also high-percentage black neighborhoods. If they don’t do these things, they get the “Ferguson effect” and more people die, particularly black and Hispanic men.
I don’t know that that is true, rarely will you see negative stories about Islam but it’s open season on Jews and Christians. Reporters aren’t the brave souls they show in the movies.
I agree that there is a difficult balance between trying to fight crime by doing everything that the police want to do to fight crime, in their opinion; and respecting civil liberties. Two of the examples you give – pulling over more cars and searching them frequently – have often been of questionable legality (cite of one example).
For a moment, let’s just set the accusation of racism in such policies aside: to the extent that police violate civil liberties of one group of people (in the name of peace and security), surely you can agree that such tactics will create a divide between that particular community and the police, right? I’m curious if you are suggesting that the relevant community should simply be less upset about violations of their civil liberties?
I think we could also set aside accusations of civil liberties violations (even though I know they happen sometimes), because even non-racism-driven, proper-and-legal policing is going to “create a divide between [the] community and the police”. It’s the nature of police work, even when done within constitutional bounds, to engender resentment from the people they are policing. Here’s a quote from the NYT article cited in post #208:
Even if the search is performed with consent, or probable cause, it’s going to piss almost anyone off to have the contents of their car dumped in the street and have someone rifling through the inside of their vehicle.
If I get pulled over for a burned-out tail light and the cop writes me a ticket and uses that as an excuse to check my ID for warrants and see if I’m drunk, in the eyes of the police he’s doing his job and fighting crime, but it still irritates me and leaves me disliking the police more.
I’d strongly suggest that citizens push back against any unconstitutional acts by the police. What happens when the police aren’t violating the constitution, but just doing their job properly creates a divide between them and the community they’re attempting to protect. Should the police pull back, allow crime to surge but lessen the complaints and criticism they receive? Should the community members tolerate the inconvenience / annoyance / “harassment” from a heavy police presence in exchange for the increased security and lower crime rates?
Here is the problem, if blm really cared about black lives, instead of just taking advantage of, and inflaming anger against police and white people in general, they would be routing out crime and violence in the black community. That’s why the cops are there because those communities have fundamentally broken down. They should be shaming fathers who abandon their families, they should be ensuring that drug houses are made aware to the police and testify against them and other criminals in their midst. Support officers who are forced to kill in self defense. These things would quickly decrease the violence against blacks in the area and the numbers of unjustified police shootings and violence would shrink substantially.
Instead they seem interested in inflaming racial hatred and violence against police and others which in no way will lead to their goals being achieved.
This is such a ridiculous argument. BLM is an organization meant to organize and advocate positive change towards people and organizations outside the black community (i.e. the general public and law enforcement organizations). What you’re advocating is organizing and advocating for positive change within the black community, which is fine. But tons of black-led organizations already do this. Not every organization needs to do both things.
And no, BLM as a movement isn’t interested in “inflaming racial hatred and violence against police”.
Based on both the statistics and (more significantly for this argument) individual reports and polling from black Americans, black children are far, far more likely to see their fathers or other relatives mistreated by police than other groups. Kids who see their fathers or brothers mistreated by police are far more likely to, reasonably, see the police as a dangerous enemy. Even if some cops might have reason to be a bit more fearful around black suspects, every time they’re jumpy and mistreat a black person out of nerves and fear they’re making the problem worse. They (law enforcement) have all the power in these situations. If they’re so jumpy, maybe they should do more community policing and develop relationships with those who live in these communities. What they shouldn’t do is make the problem worse, and make more black children see them as the enemy, by mistreating people out of nerves or fear (or racism, obviously).
No, you can’t handwave violations of civil liberties away. Come on.
Do you agree or disagree with my point that modern police work, even when done without a hint of racism or any violations of civil liberties, still engenders resentment from the policed populace?
I’m happy to criticize police for their constitutional infringements, but I don’t think it’s the driving force in community resentment of police. A lot of the shootings that have raised the ire of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and harmed police-community relations have been justified. When the police shot Sylville Smith, from what we know so far, it appears to be entirely justified and within the boundaries of proper Constitutional police-work, and yet the town had a riot and burned shit down.
Your being hopelessly naïve if you don’t think they are doing just that.
Oh, did the tests come back from the lab?
The police poisoned community relations through decades of abusing the black population. Oppression of civil liberties, tearing apart families, destruction of communities…it doesn’t surprise me at all that the black community simply doesn’t believe or trust the police at all at this point. In fact, I’m frankly surprised that the protests have been so civil.
You can’t fuck someone over and fuck them over, and fuck them over, and fuck them over, and fuck them over, and then act surprised when they push back. And if your defense is that “well, this one time it was probably justified,” you probably shouldn’t be surprised if that doesn’t settle the issue.
In fact I think there’s a fable about that. Because we expect little children to understand something that’s apparently beyond the cognitive reaches of a significant portion of the adult population.