The benefit the people in power get from internal racial or ethnic distrust is that is that whenever non-elites of the dominant ethnicity are scared of an oppressed ethnicity and blaming them for problems, they aren't questioning the economic elite and the existing power structure; this is why elites in many countries have stoked such distrust many times, in many places, in the past.
Police abuses can be both an effect of such tension, and -- when encouraged by the elites, whether directly through policies commanding abuses or indirectly through an absence of effective accountability -- a means of stoking it (especially since sustained abuses will inevitably produce a reaction which can be leveraged to further the fear of the oppressed group by the dominant group.)
The idea that elites in power get "no conceivable benefit" from internal ethnic strife is simply not accurate (now, it may be that the benefit is short-term and overwhelmed by a long-term costs, but even if so elites being myopic enough to chose that short-term benefit despite the long-term cost is hardly uncommon historically.)
>police are abusive because ordinary people want it that way
What?? How am i getting a benefit from unarmed black people getting shot anymore than a senator?
No if anything it comes down to misguided incentives (broken window policing, drug policies, police and attorneys wanting to forward their political aspirations, etc) This is all controlled by the government (which is of course controlled by moneyed interests.
I grew up in the 1990s. When kids would be called to assembly on a regular basis and teachers would shriek at them "just say no!" Drugs and were destroying our children, in their opinion, and no measures were too extreme to stop that. Those same people voted for mandatory minimums, three strikes laws', elimination of parole, etc. California's unjust three strikes law, which imposed life sentences for a third non-violent felony, was a ballot initiative. Trump and Romney didn't give us the justice system we have. My third-grade teacher did.
Well, in michigan we had a petition to allow voting on legalization recreational marijuana. It received far in excess of the required signatures, and then weeks later a very old rule was applied to the petition by discretion of the government to invalidate the entire petition and leaving not enough time to have it redone before the election deadline. (as in the rule did not legally have to be applied, but government officials decided to apply it anyways)
So this is an example of the government acting opposite of the interests of the people it claims to represent.
> Because from where I'm standing, it sure looks like my third-grade teacher is responsible.
And what gave your third grade teacher that idea? did she watch a movie called reefer madness?
The problem is this back and forth can go all day.
You say that people elected those politicians, and passed those policies, and i would say the reason they held those beliefs is a result of someone else influencing them through half truths, propaganda, etc.
You could say, well people choose the media they consume, but i would say the conglomeration of media companies, and the methods through which information has historically been distributed have always been controlled by moneyed interests. (reefer madness being a perfect example of a propaganda movie that influenced nearly an entire generation)
There are quotes from the nixon era from aides saying that the war on drugs was designing explicitly to fight racial minorities and 'hippies'[1]
Obviously the nature of all of these things is so interconnected, thats its impossible to unravel and reach an objective conclusion. In my opinion its pessimistic to believe that people are so inherently against other people - there is usually some more learned reason that someone would believe things like 'black people are dangerous' or 'all mind altering substances are bad (wait, except caffeine alcohol prescription medications etc.)'
I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat and saying george soros or whoever is controlling the world, just that people's relationship to the truth and their perceptions of things outside of their lived experiences are heavily influenced by the information they consume, which has been controlled by companies since the printing press
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...
Ordinary people didn't came up with the "broken window theory" etc. Some guys with PhDs did, and some rich politicians pushed them...
So you're right, they don't want unarmed black people getting shot, they just want them to make them money by being incarcerated.
Edit: Holy shit you're a lawyer and that's your opinion of what's going on. Maybe I need to re-evaluate how I think the system works since it's really just property owners convincing the police to murder people.
A lot of the measures that fill the prisons today (mandatory minimums, three strikes, aggressive prosecution, no parole), started back before the private prison industry even existed. So why on earth should I believe that "for-profit prison lobbyists" have anything to do with these issues? It's a totally nonsense explanation.
I don't know why there is this need to believe that ordinary voters aren't the ones ultimately culpable for the state of the justice system in the U.S. It's soccer moms and dads, shop owners, etc., that have been the backbone of "tough on crime" and "just say no" for decades.
[1] Getting rid of for-profit prisons was part of former Maryland governor O'Malley's presidential platform.
I wonder the same thing. It seems to me to be a major obstacle, perhaps the major obstacle, to improvement. We refuse to take responsibility for the natural consequences of the policies we support and the incentives we give politicians.
Of course, since our representatives (congressman, state attorneys and their offices [while some positions are appointed, they're appointed by elected officials], judges, etc.) are the people making the decisions and we vote on them, the ordinary voters are the ones ultimately culpable. Though, I believe the issues we're discussing need faster solutions than "make America less racist." If the PIC were to fall or we, via policy, were to deincentivize targeting the black population with disproportionate enforcement policies and punishment within police departments, do you really think the public would force the policies back into place?
By keeping whole minorities, blacks, immigrants, etc, down, they also keep manual labor wages down, create a scary underclass for the middle class to be afraid to fall to, justify all sorts of abuses of power (for safety, the "war on drugs" etc), play classes against each other, and many more benefits.
Historically, they've always hated those "n...." anyway (private rich clubs, until forced to, would rather accept a leper than even a rich black), Jim Crow laws, redlining, etc.
It's not like we don't know what rich republicans (which is the sort to support the police) say about black people, black mothers in welfare, etc.