Somehow I’m unconvinced.
Disagree. My place of work has police everywhere. And I mean goddamn everywhere. I don’t have to worry one whit that I’m going to be illegally searched, profiled on thin pretext, or whatever.
What are you talking about? “Destruction of communities”? Huh? “Tearing apart families”? Are you talking about when the police arrest suspected criminals?
If you’ll go back to post #211, you’ll notice that Ravenman said, “For a moment, let’s just set the accusation of racism in such policies aside …”. That’s what I was doing in #212 and #217. Do you understand that neither myself nor Ravenman are claiming that there’s no racism in police, but that we were focusing on different factors / aspects of the police-community relationships?
I think he’s talking about most of American history, in which black people had plenty to fear from law enforcement. When do you think it is that, say, the all-white police department of Birmingham Alabama (which didn’t allow it’s first black policeman until 1966) stopped being a white supremacist institution that utilized casual brutality against the black people of Birmingham (or dozens of others cities throughout the country)? Do you think they stopped all at once, and in 1966 there were no longer any white supremacist cops in Birmingham? Did the white supremacist brutality stop all at once too, or might it have lingered for a matter of years or decades? Is it possible that decades and centuries of incredible brutality against black people by law enforcement might engender some feelings among some black people that police are brutally violent enemies?
I don’t know anything about your workplace, but my point has nothing to do with whether one has to worry about being illegally searched. I’m claiming that the act of being searched by the police, even when it’s perfectly legal, is annoying, harassing, a tad humiliating, etc, and that that act, even when legal, causes the person searched to dislike the police and the way they are being treated by them.
Let me ask an aside: what % of police searches do you think are illegal or unconstitutional?
He said set it aside to consider the issue of civil rights violations qua civil rights violations. Because whether or not it’s racist to conduct illegal searches, it is illegal. He was referring to a specific subset of cases.
You then said no, let’s set aside both race and civil rights violations, and asked him whether he believes that non-racist, non-rights violating police work angers people.
I’m asking you, what’s supposed to be his data set for that question?
Well, the paragraph from the NYT I cited in #212, and the data it was based on, seems to be a pretty good starting point for that discussion. Here it is again:
I have no idea how many civil rights violations police commit.
But let me understand your claim better: are you contending that people - and communities - are just as annoyed by legal police methods as they are by illegal police methods?
As a white dude, I have no way of even hazarding a guess. Popo tend to treat me with respect.
Now, we have a friend, a black woman, who will no longer visit us and go horseback riding. On three visits she was pulled over twice for driving while black in our rural town. The first time the cop kept his giant flashlight trained on her face and asked her if she was lost, the second time the cop told her she was driving erratically, which was a totally manufactured lie.
No, not exactly. To answer your question first, I suspect that having the police illegally search me / my car / my home illegally would be more annoying than if they did it legally, but I suspect two additional things about police searches:
- the overwhelming majority are probably done legally
- most people in America, particularly those subjected to police searches, probably aren’t very capable of distinguishing between a legal search and an illegal one (they probably don’t understand much about consent, probable cause, warrant requirements, etc.)
So, like the NYT found, I think it’s the act of searching (and other police work like arresting people, traffic citations, shooting people who are perceived as threats, etc), that does more to engender the ‘divide’ between communities and police than the small fraction of police work that’s done illegally.
What does being white have anything to do with hazarding a guess about the % of police searches that are illegal? Do you think you could hazard a guess about the % of police shootings that are justified or not? I’ve never been the subject of a police shooting, but there’s enough second-hand information out there about them for us to draw some reasonable conclusions about most of them.
You are sitting in front of a computer, which is connected to the internet, which contains billions of pages of information about every topic under the sun. Thanks to the miracle of the modern age you are capable of educating yourself to an arbitrary amount about any topic you choose. On the topic of the treatment of black communities by the police, the arbitrary level you have apparently chosen is zero. Which seems like an odd choice for someone engaged on an active debate on the topic. But you do you.
If at some point you decide to educate yourself, maybe you should start with the DOJ report on the Ferguson police department. I won’t hold my breath.
As a response to this and your previous post, I’m at a loss of what you’re trying to get across here. If a community is subject to more frequent searches, both legal and illegal, but the number of illegal searches is subjectively judged as low; that the community should stop complaining about how the police do their job?
Even though you’re the one making the point that even legal searches make people not like police?
Wow, that was a fun read. So let’s recap.
On one side, we have a group of people who:
- Believe that protesting about unjust shootings of black people is evil/stupid/wrong (insert word of choice) because… any of the following:
a) Black women apparently don’t get targeted too (Which was false and police shootings is only part of institutional racism.)
b) Some protestors go too far, therefore we should ignore the issues or the message and call it a wash and that nothing is fixable.
c) They’re not also protesting gangs simultaneously because gang violence causes more black deaths. (Even though there are plenty of marches and protests about gang violence, and gang members are prosecuted and put in jail, meaning it’s already being addressed on an institutional level, while police shootings are reacted to defensively by police organizations, and with lies and cover-ups.)
d) Some police actually do get put on trial for their crimes. (But without evidence that the police have resisted allowing, and actively suppress, many walk free.)
e) Those being shot are sometimes criminal “shitbags” warranting an on-the-spot execution for drug possession or stealing beer, when such actions are not proportionally taken against white suspects (nor should they). If the person was committing a crime, obviously they need to be shot to death, not apprehended lawfully in similar proportions to white suspects. I guess white people who commit crimes or carry guns are less scary for some reason.
f) They don’t like aspects of the movement itself. Obviously the movement needs to be 100% accurate in defending victims of police crime and never try to defend someone who then turns out to be shot in a justified manner, or ever behave unlawfully themselves. Meanwhile, the police need no such flawless record to be defended indiscriminately, and given the annoying or sometimes hypocritical or inconsistent nature of a nation-wide movement, versus actual immoral killings, obviously the annoying political movement is worse and the cop killings are ok. Or what was your point?
g) Unjustified shootings are simply a narrative being spun by race-baiting thugs. They’re probably not happening or aren’t happening, and when an example exists of a justified killing, that obviously means BLM should just pack up and go home and ignore the unjustified ones.
h) “Black lives matter” seems to imply white lives don’t matter. Which is obviously false and not the point of the slogan, and very few people misunderstand it that way. You’d have to have a serious lack of empathy and/or imagination to believe that is what it means. If this is the reason you don’t support the message behind BLM, maybe that’s a you problem.
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Can’t be bothered to read before debating a subject they obviously care so much about. They’re obviously *deeply *invested in this debate and aren’t just being contrary because of other less wholesome motivations such as bigotry, or lack of empathy.
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Are obviously more concerned about black lives than the protesters. The protesters don’t care about black lives, obviously. Highlighted here. Just experts telling us dumb people what to think because we’re too dumb to take care of ourselves or be concerned for ourselves. Kind of like how the people who write for Forbes are more *concerned *about the well-being of those on the minimum wage than those who are fighting for a wage increase. (I believe I referred to that kind of *concern *as a type of… :rolleyes:)
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Believe that unless perfect results are achieved by counter-measures taken, they’re not worth taking.
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Speculate that body cameras don’t help based on hypothetical comparisons between what actually happened and what might have happened if there was no body camera. Eh? In other words, reality isn’t perfect and isn’t as good as the reality that exists in my imagination, so obviously progress in reality is bad, and no progress is better. Just like how in Seattle, wages and employment and hours all being up is actually *bad *news, when compared with the *even-better-than-Seattle *imaginary Seattle in supply-sider’s brain in the minimum wage debate, where everyone would have been better off with less money and depressed wages and voodoo economics would have caused a mythical boom that is always just around the corner if we just had kept wages stagnant. That’s a great way to argue, btw, compare fiction with reality and go fiction is better, let’s live there instead of in the real world.
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Say that since black communities are often rife with drugs and crime, that must be a symptom of their being black, not a symptom of their being poor and marginalized due to their race. So before we enact any changes, we must first… what? Insist that crime and drug usage in black communities is reduced to levels in white communities? Or what was the point of that? The argument that nothing should be done because crime is higher there means what? They deserve all the unjustified police shootings? What is your point, exactly?
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Think that BLM are imagining racism exists, and blaming cops for something they’re not doing. It’s obviously exaggerated, and nothing compared to… oh, wait.
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Say that since blacks experience other problems, fixing this one shouldn’t matter to them. :rolleyes: After all, since most problems in your life aren’t a result of racism, fighting institutional racism that results in needless deaths is silly.
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Are pretty sure they’re the experts on this subject matter that doesn’t affect their lives. Reality notwithstanding.
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Most police are decent, therefore… what? No response to unlawful killings or immoral killings, institutional racism, concealment of evidence, tampering of witnesses, telling people to turn their cell phone cameras off, falsifying reports? How about some training and more consistent application of the law regardless of race? How about not being more afraid of a black man with a gun than a white man with a gun? Is that possible? How about not pulling people over for driving while black? Since there are good cops we can’t do anything about bad ones? We don’t need chicken shit cops who are afraid of the scary black man, but same-sized white guy with the *same *gun is less scary to them.
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Shootings of police happen in a vaccuum and have nothing to do with the behavior of police toward the black community or the history of the police. Even though black people exist elsewhere besides just the United States, aren’t unfairly targeted by the police there, and don’t have disproportionate numbers of police officers shot by black suspects.
On the other side we have a group of people who ask that something be done about police officers shooting unarmed black people, or black people who are legally carrying a weapon and cooperating, or black people who are resisting arrest but do not pose an immediate danger to the lives of the officer or others, who ask that black suspects be treated like suspects in the same way white suspects are, and that they aren’t summarily executed when the cameras are off for the crime of having a bag of weed, stolen alcohol, or something else that should be policed, not exterminated.
Things like: Training programs to help target and eliminate bias by police. Such programs have been carried out successfully before.
Like here, and here, and here.
With results including:
With reasonable alterations and expectations:
And changing of obviously flawed mindsets on the institutional level:
So we have a debate between people with ideas, with a record of positive change, trying to have an intellectual debate with people who (a) don’t care (b) aren’t impacted (c) can’t be bothered to read (d) are simply reacting out of dislike for the movement, and don’t give a damn about the deaths and racial mistreatment. Not enough to allow for any meaningful action to be taken, and (e) have zero ideas of their own and a proven record of no changes resulting in even worse relations between police and communities they police.
It’s a good debate. It’s like debating with a five-year old. Except this five year old has the ability to vote and seems intent on blocking all progress. A real worthwhile debate between two equally valid positions.
It sucks, but that’s politics in a America. Progress and empathy versus apathy and ignorance, and status quo because change makes me feel bad.
Don’t be a dick. I read the summary. It read like a NYT op-ed (which, coming from me, is not a compliment), so I decided to not waste my time with the rest. I will say that the two areas of focus I saw were 1) the municipal police department and court seem focused on generating revenue, which is probably true of most muni PDs and courts across the country (I certainly feel like it’s the case with my city, and it’s got nothing to do with race here in lily-white Utah), and 2) there has been disparate impact on blacks, which seems to be a bit light on analysis of the racial disparities in crime. The emphasis seems to be on “2/3 of Ferguson residents are black, but more than 2/3 of searches / arrests / fines are for black residents”. Look, if one particular neighborhood in a city is on fire, I want the fire department to dump all the water on that neighborhood, not spread the water equally amongst all the neighborhoods in the city. The same idea is true of policing too: I went them to focus on where the crime is happening. So should the victims of crimes.
I think the point is comparing the relative causes of negative feelings toward the police. Illegal activity by police is definitely a cause. Legal activity by police is also a cause. IOW, most police contact is non-consensual and so any increased contact will engender negative sentiment. What I think **HD **is saying is that even eliminating all illegal police activity will have a small impact on people’s sentiment towards police.
We should still eliminate illegal police behavior.
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ETA: Referring to pizzaguy’s post.
I think a reasonable conclusion to draw from this thread is that everyone agrees with the vast majority of BLM’s objectives, it’s the tone of that movement a few take issue with. Apparently that is enough for these individuals to not support them.
So let’s just say that African Americans made up 1% of a population and were 100% of the searches/arrests/fines.
That must be where the fires are, huh?