Does it matter? They're being investigated and prosecuted regardless[1], because they're criminals. We expect police to behave better than criminals.
Society is always going to have some crime, and we will continue to investigate and prosecute it. But there should be zero tolerance for crimes by cops. Otherwise we can't trust them, and everyone becomes less safe.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295301/philadelphia-pro...
Where crimes, such as burglary and assault, are being committed, police will generally be called upon to act. A subset of those responses will involve police violence. One would hope that such police violence only occurs in self defense, but we know that to not always be the case. So yes, the two things are mathematically correlated. One drives the other. It would be interesting to be able to tell what the incidence rate is, rather than just seeing a group of cherry-picked incidents designed with the sole intent of satisfying the public's appetite for a specific narrative.
Let’s get to the fun part: “if cops perceive someone to be a criminal, how violent will we allow them to be, relative to how violent the perceived criminal is?”
In the case of the cops assaulting that vigil for Elijah McClain (it was a peaceful gathering with people listening to a couple violin players) I’d argue that the cops were perpetrating violence at a level about 100x relative to the people they were trying to police (even if you consider that folks may have been “yelling mean things” at them).
Personally, I would consider 1.1x acceptable, maybe 1.5x in some situations. And so every time I see cops blowing through that threshold and being even 5x or 10x more violent than the people they’re policing, I perceive that as a massive injustice, I think those cops should get fired, and I get pretty angry.
My interpretation is that the majority of people are simply responding to the trend of police responding with extreme violence more and more readily in situations which absolutely do not require it.
Right now we are seeing video after video of cops tear gassing civilians for throwing empty water bottles at them, running over civilians using SUVs for "refusing to disperse" and knocking out old folks who are going "Hey man, what if this is a bad idea though?".
The ratio right now is so high, the kinds of conversations you may want to have aren't even relevant.
This is the most insidious justification of police brutality I’ve ever seen, here or elsewhere, even if it’s unintentional. It takes a position that police brutality and rioting/looting are two sides of the same coin and that we can (or should) only address whichever one is worse by some numeric calculation.
Who cares what the RATIO of cop violence vs protestor violence?
Do you know why we don’t need the “other side “of this? It’s because the police already do this on the other side. They are free to make arrests using their own evidence, including their own eyewitness, their own body cameras, their own dash cameras, and any CCTV they get access to. Some even use these videos!
Police are arresting protestors like crazy, thousands in the last month alone.
You know who else is documenting all the violence and looting caused by protesters? Every news outlet, it’s the only protest related content they bother to show because it’s the only part of the protest that’s interesting to watch for most people.
The purpose of this database is to collect and display evidence so that violent police can be arrested and charged. Violent protestors are usually arrested immediately, many are picked up later at home and a small handful of organizers are assassinated in the years following (see Ferguson)
We don’t need any help stopping protestor violence, we need help stopping police violence.
And, if caught, protestors are being held legally accountable (as well they should), while police officers, even after egregious misconduct, often get reinstated:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/police-in-misconduct-cases...
This "both sides" framing is irrational. If criminals perform a number of bank robberies does that mean police officers should be allowed to perform a similar number of bank robberies? Of course not, that would be absurd and missing the whole point of a police force.
On one side you have police brutalizing journalists and shooting people in the face. On the other side you have not people getting brutalized by the police. Fair and balanced, I'm sure. Or do you think that shooting people in the face is the appropriate police response to property damage?
No, but it does _include_ it. Is it your opinion that only journalists should not be shot in the face? What are your feelings re: knees on necks for 8 minutes and 46 seconds with hands in pockets looking around like nothing's wrong even though the guy with the neck went completely unresponsive minutes before the knee moved? Maybe we should ask how many police necks George Floyd put his knee on.
How can any reasonably intelligent person be against fact-based decision making?