Tonight I witnessed a young girl get knocked out cold by a tear gas canister shot into her face from about a 40 ft. range. She was holding her hands up.
There was nothing but peaceful protesters standing around, not blocking traffic. No vandalism anywhere in sight. This was in Louisville, KY.
The police fired rubber bullets at the group of people carrying her away to a place on the other side of the line of humvees blocking the street to where the ambulance could reach her.
Everything most middle-income Americans think about our police forces is wrong.
You don't even need to leave your porch to get shot. Police and National Guard are patrolling neighborhoods and shooting civilians with paint canisters on their own property in Minneapolis. In one case they yelled "Light 'em up!" before starting to shoot [1] with ammunition that could blind people.
It's legal to be outside your house during the curfew in Minneapolis [2].
> Can I be outside my house (on my property) after 8 p.m. and before 6 a.m.?
“Follow up on video of people getting rubber bullets shot at them in their doorway from a source that was there. This was personally texted to me. Source is a teacher that works at my elementary school.
Here’s what was posted.
‘That is my blue house across the street. Apparently this video has gone viral. What they didn’t show was the 20- 30 minutes of the rioters that surrounded the houses, were all over our neighborhood, the street, rioters running through my yard and screaming on the other side of my garden level bedroom window, and hiding in my alley. The neighbors are saying they were ‘just having a beer outside,’ as if this came out of nowhere and while it seems extreme from the national guard/police, the rioters were flooded in our neighborhood and they were trying to get them out. That was terrifying, and to be honest after being at the Minneapolis community clean up today and seeing all the burned down buildings, I am glad nothing was burned down or broken into. And they got them out. Idk who is out there at night! And yes black lives matter!!!! But these riots are scary AF. And they haven’t returned and are gone now and we are totally safe, and all had been quiet for hours. And apparently my upstairs neighbor had no idea the rioters were here at all ... #minneapolisriots #blacklivesmatter #georgefloyd #helpusall #feltprotected”
Edit: apparently, additional information is... controversial? I don’t agree with the police conduct, but there is additional context here.
Nobody managed to get a video of the rioters? Doesn't that seem odd to you? Additional context is welcome as long as it's either verifiable or doesn't serve an obvious agenda.
Here's some additional context that's just as valid as yours: the "rioters" were actually defending the neighborhood from the police who had been there before your context began. The police were beating random people and shooting pets. The person that told me this lives in one of the houses in the video and she's a retired nurse who volunteers to care for hospice patients.
Both your claim and the parent's claim are equally shocking, and the evidence for both is hearsay from someone who lives on the street. How do we know who is being sincere, who is pushing an agenda, who is mistaken, who is experiencing cognitive dissonance, etc.
I think there could be an aspect of availability heuristic. You don't watch news of police not acting aggressive towards protestors. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or doesn't happen even more often than it does. Same with the comment below about why cops aren't speaking up. I've read some articles where they are, but again... it's not going to make news nearly as much as the bad apples do.
This doesn't negate the bad apples and all the bad things that have happened or in any way go against the protests. Just try to be aware when classifying an entire group as bad based hand picked information presented to you.
Of course there is that history. But there are also people who paint the police in an unwarrantedly bad light. People tend to forget that humans are overwhelmingly cooperative and good. Society would not be as stable as it is if people were as consistently bad as some people make them out to be. There are ideologies misrepresenting reality on both sides of this situation. It's so hard to concretely say anything in these situations without examining all the context available.
Well, if the police are overwhelmingly good, where are the representatives of the police unions that are condemning the “few bad apples” that are killing unarmed Black people?
Where are all of the “good policemen” who are saying racial profiling during “stop and frisk” is wrong.
If they are complicit and silent they are not “good”.
And I bet you have never been thought of as “suspicious” for walking from your house down the street to your mailbox.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they were rioters, they would likely not be rioting on their own porch. Hence, ordering them to go inside would mean breaking into someone else's house. On the other hand, if they're legitimately on their own proerty, and if they're not being disorderly, then what is the rationale for that use of force?
I hate to say it, but I'm doubting the veracity of this account. There's nothing in the video - trash or debris from a large crowd, in particular - to indicate that the area they were in, specifically, was in need of such force. And, again, the curfew did not forbid being outside on one's own property.
If we're going to second-guess what we see with our own eyes - that these people were shot at by police without provocation - it's perfectly reasonable to then continue to drill down on what happened; question accounts, question logic. Or, we could employ Occam's Razor.
Anyway, as a practical matter we should also be asking for the RUF that these police were operating under. That would clear up a lot.
I’m not disagreeing with anyone about the inappropriateness of the police actions, but the account is not claiming that those shot in the video are rioters. Simply that the police we see were actively clearing rioters from the neighborhood and the porch people were caught up in it.
The alleged presence of rioters in the neighbourhood justifies the police being there in armed convoy through the neighbourhoods. It doesn't justify any of their actions shown in the video, which shows a large section of street with no evidence of rioting and unprovoked fire on people in their gardens to a enthusiastic call to action usually reserved for strikes on military targets.
The area does look remarkably clean to have just had rioters on the street. There’s zero trash or debris on the ground, zero evidence of paint or smoke canister usage anywhere, and all of the houses and cars are immaculate. If there were people on the street prior to these police/soldiers arriving, it’s hard to imagine that they were looting or rioting.
The assertion that shooting someone on their own porch is wrong doesn't invalidate the claim made by the OP's friend. I completely agree with you that an unnecessary amount of force was used though, to the point where it almost seems criminal.
That video wasn't of the national guard it was clearly police of some kind based on the uniforms. Also typically the national guard units they activate for stuff like this are often the MP units so they would be trained on law enforcement specific things. Either way it doesn't excuse or justify that blatant misconduct in the video.
I'm a member of the national guard and I, along with many of my friends, did not sign up to be police officers. That said, in Minnesota they called up every unit it seems. I'd understand civilians to easily confuse police with the military particularly after seeing a Humvee drive by, but if you take a closer look its easy to distinguish.
Also note, we take orders directly from the governor of the state, not the police, nor the president of the US unless activated.
The other thing to think about is, if they activated the entire MN guard, many of these folks are not military police or have received any kind of light MP training. Typically the guard is there to just provide assistance. If they end up doing heavy-duty police work or real riot control, this is how we end up with a kent state type situation--most guardsmen have civilian jobs, so imagine one day your working your IT job, the next day your expected to be a police officer.
The National Guard is effectively the militia of each state. They report to each governor first, and if activated, report to the US military. A traditional guardsman has a civilian job, 9-5 M-F, then one weekend a month 'drills' as a part of the unit. You can get activated, at which point your civilian job has to let you go serve. Most common activations are for statewide disasters--tornados, floods, hurricanes--but most recently medical units were deployed for covid relief. National callups would be to help the us military in Iraq etc., but at all times the guard serves the state first.
Did all of the five young adults on the porch live there? You don't know. And neither did the cops. The cops took the safest route and ordered them inside. The group responded by not complying.
It's a chaotic situation. They (the police/nat-guard) likely wanted people inside their homes to prevent further chaos and confrontations. It all becomes more volatile if everyone's on their porch, outraged, as the police "parade" comes through.
I know folks on HN like strict interpretations and reasoning of what's legal or illegal, but all of that gets very blurred during a riot when the situation at any given time is on the verge of getting out of control. It just isn't time for a high-school forensics debate when people are in riot gear.
If a group of highly armed police or military are marching through your street and demanding you go inside--- it's probably better to GO INSIDE at least until they're gone.
But again, that’s not the law (the executive order here). They can’t go enforce things not the law. It’s not like there are armed folks running around that street making exigent circumstances. Why do you feel the need to defend something obviously indefensible?
Edit: just to be clear, given all the huff and puff by police of needing riot gear, armored trucks, giant guns, I haven’t seen any report in Minneapolis of any armed protestors or any cops coming under fire. But that doesn’t stop the cops from shooting (less than lethal) rounds.
Reasonable police orders have to follow the law - the police cannot and should not be allowed to enforce things that are not the law. Of course, there's a presumption that they're in the right when they shoot you after you ignore an illegal order, and apparently you agree with that. Good luck with your freedoms.
Where? Do you have a link? Let’s assume that’s true, that a crime was committed across the country. Does that give this group of law enforcement to shoot ltl rounds at unarmed people on private property and in compliance with the law? I don’t understand your reasoning.
That’s where you missed it: it is not reasonable to give unlawful orders, it is not reasonable to order someone on private property to go inside. They can request folks to go inside. They cannot order it until their powers are elevated by law. Might doesn’t make right.
I agree; but it is possible to have a lawful order to control someone on private property. An example was the Boston bombing manhunt where police were doing door to door searches because there was a specific, articulated threat in a defined geographic area (note, I don’t know that’s the real legal test, but I’m sure it considers factors like that).
What you're calling for is the suspension of the rule of law.
No crisis justifies this unless you're willing to throw the whole thing out permanently. If you have a problem with a lack of police powers to compel house arrest without cause or to search without permission or warrant, write a new Constitutional amendment and get it passed.
That is a possibility, and one I think you need in a complex society. If police have a real threat of harm coming from inside a private home, they might need to enter the home before they can get a valid warrant. The problem is, police—-by doing the things in this video and though mistreatment of minorities—-are losing credibility (if they had any). Society needs to hold bad actors in police accountable so that we can be protected when they’re actually needed.
No, I was arguing against the parent comment. In this situation there were no exigent circumstances and so no expansion of what the law enforcement can do. I wanted to clarify that in special circumstances it is possible for a LE to order someone to move inside their house. You need consequences for this bad action so that the police have credibility to use the action in the proper situation.
They were either going to or coming from a riot area.
Their responsibility is to make sure the riot doesn't spread and stop the riot. They can't do that effectively if they have to wade through a massive crowd of onlookers appearing wherever they go. Bad actors easily mix in to situations like this and make the situation extremely dangerous for everyone. If someone doesn't respond to direct commands in such an emergency, they're going to be seen as potential bad actors.
It's totally reasonable to demand that people stay inside their houses while the police are securing the area.
If it was reasonable, it would encoded into the law. It is not for the police to create new laws on the spot, and even if it were, the use of force to enforce it is not reasonable.
Proportionate force is justifiable in an emergency, and we'll see if it is really "against the law" for police to demand that people get inside temporarily.
My guess? Absolutely NOTHING will happen to those police that paintballed the porch gawkers after very clearly telling them to go inside.
Having seen what happened in Baltimore in 2015 and now Philly, I am terrified of the idea of a city going up in flames when a riot gets out of control. It's been too close the times that I've seen it personally. Historically, it has been far worse.
The irony, how everyone was howling a out infringements of rights (free speech etc) when youtube banned some right-wing conspiracy theorists, but as soon as we see the most blatant major infringements of rights (shooting at people who have every right to be where they are on their own propert) and the same people find all sorts of ways to make excuses why it's OK.
What's next? Saying that George Floyd was clearly at fault because he was trying to breath, where clearly the officer didn't want him to, so the officers actions were justified?!
> Everything most middle-income Americans think about our police forces is wrong.
That statement is a bit vague, everyone is going to substitute their own interpretation in. The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist. People who want power over others sign up for policing - and then go after groups who have the least ability to fight back.
The middle income might know the symptoms, but they are missing the cause. The cause is that if a fellow wants to hurl someone else to the ground, kick them and keep them down without a fair fight then their best chance as getting to that situation is to sign on to the police. This is an inescapable structural pressure that needs constant attention.
I agree it's a severe problem, but I don't agree it's inescapable.
It's a job that attracts brutal people only because it's a job that lets them get away with brutality. If the cycle of allowing brutality and attracting brutes could be broken, there's a good chance it'd stay broken.
The police fraternity knows all about getting other cops to fall into line - just look at the "blue wall of silence" and police union "get out of jail free" cards. That same pressure couldn't be applied against brutality.
I wonder if part of why it seems particularly bad (for a developed country) in the US is the local police force system. In countries with national police forces, misconduct investigations are often conducted by specialist staff who may be from the other side of the country, who likely aren't really in the same org chart, and so on. It seems intuitively less likely to produce a fair result if the people investigating work in the same place and under the same org structure as the people being investigated.
The reason why it’s particularly bad in the US is that we’ve got insanely high levels of violent and organized crime. Baltimore, where I used to live, the homicide rate per 100,000 people is 30-50 times higher than in say Berlin, Madrid, London, etc. It’s almost double the rate of Bogota. That creates a police force that treats policing like its war, and public systems that give wide latitude to errors or misconduct, just as we would give soldiers in war.
Cause or effect? I would argue that the warrior cop mentality escalates violence. That style of police training was banned by the mayor in Minneapolis, yet it continues to be taught and implemented.
You have a very sick society and until you realize it is not all the fault of one group it will persist.
I think it’s a cause, not an effect, because the US has always had very high levels of violence compared to Europe, long before we even had professional police forces and formal police training. It’s definitely not the fault of any one group, though, because the problem has been widespread across various times and various groups.
More aggressive policing does not imply more solved crimes. It does not imply that actual worst wrongdoers get caught with some kind of effectivity.
However, it implies antagonized population where even innocent people will avoid police contact, whether reporting of crime, informing to police or otherwise cooperating with them as much as possible. It implies that people dont see police as an institution to protect them and dont use them as such.
More aggressive may mean quotas for arrests - leading to arrests that have nothing to do with public safety. It is easier to arrest someone apparently poor for loitering or sorta kinda open bottle of alcohol then someone actually violent.
Same with fines. For example, if the masks are mandatory outside, cops can either issue warning or give you a find. In most cases, warning is enough to make people comply and take it seriously. Fine is used only when people refuse to comply. If cops were aggressive and issued fine immediately to everyone who had half nose out of mask, we would not be safer.
More aggressive means exactly that and nothing more.
Yes, the entire spectrum of fiat crimes such as "the war on drugs". Without the existence of these, or without the will to aggressively enforce them, large swaths of crime would simply disappear. The disastrous results also spill over and create real crime, as people are unable resolve commercial disputes through the courts, but have to DIY.
At any rate, even if general society is more violent, that is not a justification for supposed police to add to the mayhem. When police officers are not bound by the law they purport to uphold, then they are actually just another gang.
It's a cause: we here in the USA are pretty fucking nuts. I've heard a group of off-duty police discussing their work talking about going into a house and literally not knowing if the folks inside are going to open fire with automatic weapons. FWIW, I agree that "the warrior cop mentality" is a problem, and professionalism in police work is crucial, e.g. the Peelian principles ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles )
> You have a very sick society
Yeah, but it's slowly getting better. Not this week, obviously, but the trend is there.
And yet police officer are number 16 of the most dangerous jobs in the US just behind first line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers and before construction workers.
So the reasoning that they act like this because of their dangerous job is a myth.
I'm curious if anyone has a data source on this that actually breaks down by duties? A "police officer" can be a beat cop in Baltimore, or a desk sergeant in Omaha, or an IA reviewer etc.
When people say "being a police officer" is risky they obviously mean the part where you go around physically enforcing law and order, not the other parts that are actually the majority of many long-term police careers. But the fact that the current beat cop will in 5 years have a much safer job doesn't mean that the current job is not very risky.
The national police force in Canada rapes and murders native women with complete impunity. It might be a bit better in that there are less extrajudicial murders, but it's far from being great.
It's hardly inescapable. Police in the nordic countries acts and behaves more or less as a service branch of the government rather as a bully. But they have several years of training whereas US has only - what, a few months? I would say it's about skimping costs in the wrong place. US system is weird that in it's local search of frugal solutions it creates inefficient systems (like the medical sector).
What’s the situation with Nordic police and minorities? Because in the not really Nordic but reasonably civilized Netherlands the supposedly well educated police force is also a known hotbed of racism. Members of the police force in The Hague refer to themselves as “exterminators of Moroccan vermin”. Ethnic profiling is rampant and on at least one occasion a man of color was held down by a group of cops until he died as well.
Police in Denmark are bullies too. Breaking basic rights, assaulting citizens, covering for each other, lobbying against body cams and visible identifiers on cops like numbers, etc. Profiling is legal and used extensively.
Until we realize that tribalism is human nature, it won't change.
Racism is universal amongst humans. We are tribal primates, after all. We need to admit the biases exist and address them head-on.
It stands to reason that having a bias against out groups once increased an individuals chance of survival. Now it is actively harming society. If we can't rise above our primitive impulses, we are doomed.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's important to understand that the actual politics of reform pose a serious obstacle to admitting biases exist. If a police department produced a document saying "10% of our officers are moderately to severely racist, we're aiming to get that below 3%", they'd be eviscerated.
Bigotry is universal amongst humans. Racism is a systematic application of that bigotry such that it can operate on an "undesirable" population with or without the consent of the people supporting and maintaining that system. Racism is not a natural sociological phenomenon; it is a deliberate effort to twist the nature of human behavior and cognition towards cruel, cynical, violent, and destructive ends.
We need to stop telling ourselves these lies about who we are and what we're capable of.
Profiling is seen as bad, but I honestly don't think many grandmas will be the ones committing violent crime (or females in general). If you have some statistics to prove otherwise please show me them.
Let's also, for the sake of argument, say all crimes are committed by black people.
Of the general population, 10% is black.
If you profile all black people, you will indeed profile the 1% of the population that commits crimes, but you will also profile 9% of the population that does not commit crimes.
And before you say "not the entirety of the 10% black population is profiled": maybe ask some black people about this. It's not 100% of the black population that gets profiled but certainly a very significant percentage.
And even if it's just half or even a quarter of the black population that you're profiling, you're still profiling a lot of innocent people.
This is the reason why profiling is bad.
(and note that in reality the figures are even worse).
The conclusion doesn't really follow from the premise. If all crime were committed by one racial group it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures.
If there are credible reports of a white man committing murders it doesn't make any sense to waste resources listing mainly female Asian suspects, for example. There are also other similar issues. For example, if a crime happens on my street I expect to be treated as more of a suspect based only on my proximity.
The issue of racism is (and needs to be) grounded in things other than rational resource allocation.
The majority of crime in America is committed by white people, in terms of absolute numbers of arrests, value of stolen goods and funds, etc. By your logic, it would be most effective to target white people. This is without even taking into account that white suspects tend to avoid arrest, prosecution, conviction, and long jail sentences at higher rates than other racial groups (that is to say, when brought to a particular level of the justice system, they are less likely than others to proceed further).
However, it's clear that the vast majority of resources are devoted to black areas and poor areas, and to responding to directly "violent" crime. A mugging is more sensational than white collar crime, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint, I'm not sure it's rational to devote more resources to catching the mugger when, for example, there is widespread wage theft depressing incomes in the mugger's city. Which causes more damage in the long run?
A dead reply to this post expressed incredulity at the disparate treatment of Bernie Madoff and countless black convicts when comparing the scale of the damage they respectively caused. They illustrated this with the erroneous "factoid" that Madoff stole more than the value of all robberies and burglaries by black people in the country's history. This is probably untrue, due in no small part to the nature of his scheme. That said, the trillions in value lost during the Great Recession, which was the result of completely unpunished malfeasance by executives and regulators across the financial industry, and which stripped black families of roughly half their wealth, almost surely eclipses whatever figure one could come up with for the proposed above. I agree with the spirit of his comment.
If all crime is committed by South Asian women, you're right that it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures such as, for example, only looking for suspects that are female and have a South Asian suspects.
Profiling, however, where you preventively search if not outright harass people, is something entirely different: if one in ten South Asian women engage in crime, every time you preventively search and harass one of them, you have a ninety percent chance of searching and harassing someone who is innocent.
So it better to target 99% of the population that don't commit crimes rather that 9%? You haven't convinced me. Interesting that you chose black people for your example, its almost like you are profiling them.
I don't know about minorities but the level of unprofessionalism obvious in the most egregious cases of police violence would feel improbable to me in countries like Sweden ,Finland or Norway. Yeah, they are tiny countries so the sample size is really small. But the police culture is different. Guns are not used, and if they are, their use is strictly monitored.
For example, Finland has a large number of firearms, but police don't come to a crime scene guns ablaze unless they have a very good reason to think there is a need to use them.
I would love to see better funding for education everywhere, But, no, that's not the real root of the problem.
To see the real root of the problem, compare the USA to other western democracies such as in Europe. The structure of society is very different, the nature of poverty, the number of people living as an economic underclass, the acceptance in the USA that poor areas of cities will just be fucked and that's normal, the presence of a never-ending source of ignorant, and often racist, people from small-town America, and the presence of a never-ending source of guns. Of course a lot of the above is related to the lack of a strong belief across the voting population that government should protect and support the poorest in society.
Things won't change in America until the above changes meaningfully. That would require the majority of the population to start thinking more like the liberal half, and there is no reason to think that that will happen any time soon.
"the acceptance in the USA that poor areas of cities will just be fucked and that's normal"
This is certainly not limited to the USA and you will readily find it in European democracies as well. A significant portion of French people have long since assumed that the banlieues are hopeless and there is little sense trying to improve them. In Eastern Europe you will find the same attitudes about Roma neighborhoods. Even in the Nordic countries which are held up as models of social equality, one finds the genesis of immigrant-heavy neighborhoods that, local people tell themselves, will forever have the problems that immigrant-heavy neighborhoods stereotypically have.
That does not seem to be the case. The US spends more on education than any other country. $16,268 a year per student vs global average of $10,759". It's evident that money does not translate into better results.
"According to the Washington thinktank the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), the average student in Singapore is 3.5 years ahead of her US counterpart in maths, 1.5 years ahead in reading and 2.5 in science. Children in countries as diverse as Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Finland, Netherland, New Zealand and Singapore consistently outrank their US counterparts on the basics of education."
What's the money actually spent on? I'd argue that massive American football stadiums for grades 9-12 are perhaps incorrectly prioritized as compared to e.g. teachers.
A decade ago, I was a high school teacher in inner-city San Bernardino. At the time, the district had more administrative personnel than teachers. I’d wager that kind of spending surpasses stadiums.
The problem with these sorts of averages is that it doesn't paint an accurate picture. There are schools with buildings in disrepair and schools without the same resources as other schools. And some have waaay more resources and spending per student than most schools. This is, in part, because a lot of states don't fund their schools by redistributing money across all schools. Instead, they rely on the school district's tax base - which means if you are in a poor neighborhood, you probably won't have as much funding. The same goes for being in an area that doesn't utilize the public schools as much as other areas (using private schools) - this decreases federal funding that is reliant on the number of children going to your school.
All this means that it isn't really evident that money doesn't translate into better results. It isn't strictly funding, that is true - poverty seriously affects how well students can perform, for example - but it should be quite obvious that a school that cannot afford maintenance, proper computers for students to learn on, or enough staff so that classes are a manageable size can't really teach as well as a moderately funded school.
This is false. State and federal funding makes up the discrepancy between more well funded and less well funded school districts in nearly every state. There is obviously differences between states, but states have vastly different costs of living. But even then: Mississippi spends as much on education as France. Overall, the US spends more not just in dollar terms, but as a percentage of GDP than most big European countries: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/15434.jpeg
Some of the worst cities have the beat funded schools. Minneapolis spends as much per student as Switzerland. Baltimore spends more, and spends as much of more than the rich suburban schools around it. The US also has relatively low rates or private K-12 compared to the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.
Your banks writing $10,000 on a piece of paper, followed by some saying "this basic service costs $10,000" has no relation to value transactions in real countries.
US police have been receiving advanced training in Israel. The changes in tactics, gear, are all part of this training.
This incident in MN with United States citizens getting shot at on their own porch is a much milder form of thuggery — it was not legal application of force — that Palestinians have been living with for decades.
Racism is in all our hearts — what’s important is in developing calm relations with your own strengths and weaknesses so that you can work on yourself if you choose.
Embracing this human weakness is part of developing the structures to keep us accountable.
Having internal prejudice which you wish to understand and eliminate, versus actively and purposely organizing or facilitating violence against people of color, are drastically different things. The long history I'm referencing is not people who have hidden prejudices and need to face their demons, it's people who are malicious toward groups of people for their race on purpose.
These are just different extremes in the expression of racism, which is the unjust treatment of other human beings due to race.
Those who are vehemently racist are likely only a minority of the expressions of racial injustice which minorities face as a lifestyle in America. The answer to both should point to structural solutions rather than making this an individual moral matter, asking people to monitor whether they're consciously racist.
> These are just different extremes in the expression of racism
No, they're not! One is quite obviously extreme, the other is quite obviously not. Some things are, and some things are not. Something that isn't can't be. I apologize for paraphrasing a disgusting piece of crap guy in this context, but... please understand that your nothing-matters philosophy is helping people get killed/the people killing them go without accountability.
Racism is not in our hearts - it's in our brains. A combination of in/out group bias, categorization error, inductive thinking and belief perserverance. Understanding these cognitive errors, and yes, that most decision making processes are made in our emotional centers, thus needing emotional intelligence training; this would all go a long way towards a more conscientious society.
These things can be taught directly. There is nothing special about it, and it's not about strengths or weaknesses. Most human brains work pretty similarly and have the same strengths and weaknesses, all of which can be managed or improved.
I know a number of cops and don't believe any of them signed up to be cops because of what you're describing. you are missing the cause, and are misattributing it individual malice.
The police exist to preserve the established order. If you believed a social order can exist without being preserved by violence, then i'd call you an anarchist, (i'd call myself one too.) If you believe anything remotely resembling the present social order can be preserved without violence then you're naive, and very few people are that naive, least of all the police. Under what circumstances violence is required to preserve the established order may be shocking, but the individual police officers aren't pushing the system around, the system is pushing them around.
Sociopathic bully cops would ve weeded out. They are covered for instead. Video of them murdering people would prompt action from the system to get rid of them, but the system declines to prosecute them, and i'd guess a third of the country hmms and haws and theorizes about what the murder victim should've done to avoid getting murdered. The victims of these bad cops would be treated by the media the same as any other person whom tragedy befell, instead the media digs up dirt on them.
Individual bad cops can't exert the kind of pressure on the system needed to do all that. It's the established social order expressing itself.
> The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist.
Depends on what you mean by “they.” Individual officers are a mixed bag, but someone else mentioned the ties between police and right-wing/racist groups. “The police” as an institution however is definitely racist.
> The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist. People who want power over others sign up for policing - and then go after groups who have the least ability to fight back.
The fact that racial minorities have the least ability to fight back is a significant component of institutional racism. Why are they in that position in the first place? Because the USA has not yet excised from its culture the racist policies, values, and attitudes that it has held since before its foundation.
> Everything most middle-income Americans think about our police forces is wrong
After moving to the suburbs, I realized that most Americans base their opinions on their own police forces. The last time I got pulled over in the exurbs where I live, the officer basically apologized for pulling me over. Things are very different an hour away from here in DC.
This exactly. I have yet to hear any complaints about police in my town, but the next town over has one of the most corrupt police departments that I've ever heard of.
I think that's an extremely unhelpful oversimplification. There isn't some subset of humans (as a high enough percentage of the population to be considered) that's simply missing empathy. At least in their own minds they are good people, so that's where they have to be met.
So IMO we need to start by assuming that they DO care, but they have different assumptions about the difficulty and danger of police work. They live in safe communities and go into cities and see poverty and homelessness, mental illness on the streets, read about the gun crime, and think that it's scary. They're not entirely wrong.
Where they ARE wrong is in failing to realize how often police officers are the ones to create violent situations. Why did they use force over a counterfeit bill? Why would they bust into someone's apartment in the middle of the night over a drug charge? Unless there is an in-the-moment violent situation going on, they should not be entitled to use force. They should be required to wait, plan, and deescalate. The last thing they should be allowed to do is play out their masturbatory fantasy on the public. If that makes police work more boring, so be it.
it may seem that way, but I suspect it is a bit more nuanced than that.
I think most people understand, at least on some level, that the news is generally about outlier events. when every interaction you have with the police is polite or even helpful, it's tempting to think that these incidences of police brutality are just isolated events. if you live somewhere that you experience aggressive policing in your daily life, it might seem more like the stories that make the national news are merely the tip of the iceberg.
I think it's unfortunate that the national discussion centers so much around these high-profile killings. it obscures some of the more subtle impositions on marginalized communities and leaves gaps for motivated reasoning to reach a less uncomfortable conclusion.
While death at the hands of police might be infrequent, you can find plenty of longitudinal studies showing that “pro-active policing” like stop and frisk and pulling people over disproportionately is aimed at Black people.
Not to mention that statistically, Blacks are punished far more harshly than Whites.
This isn’t new, it’s just being filmed more often. Rappers like NWA and Tupac have been speaking out against police brutality since the 90s.
All the while White people preach to a Black people about how we “should act” not to the be beaten and shot by the police.
There was nothing but peaceful protesters standing around, not blocking traffic. No vandalism anywhere in sight. This was in Louisville, KY.
The police fired rubber bullets at the group of people carrying her away to a place on the other side of the line of humvees blocking the street to where the ambulance could reach her.
Everything most middle-income Americans think about our police forces is wrong.