I don't think it's helpful to assume the police were racist.
"in reality, things like this almost never happen" I am willing to bet your life experience is very different than those of minorities.
" If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it" Not sure what you base this on, I feel like to could be based on nothing but the narrative you are attempting spin. Is your argument that police should be more aggressive based on what could happen? Should police just gun everyone down because they may have a gun and pull it out and shoot them in the head?
In this country, police have godlike life or death power, every instance of police killings should be heavily scrutinized by neutral parties and stringent protocols put in place to prevent it with harsh criminal penalties for those that dont follow the rules. How you can just shrug and accept any cases of police brutality is beyond me.
Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made.
"Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made." They are but when they make mistakes people die or are sent to jail for decades or are stripped of their property. To give people this much power and shrug and say its a mistake is not acceptable. Very often these same cops have many / dozens of complaints against them and they still continue to act with impunity because they know that they are not going to be punished. A mistake is a mistake, 10 / 15 mistakes in and it is a pattern, extrapolated out over tens of thousands of officers and it is a systematic problem.
In reality USA has 3-10x the number of police shootings per capita than a random western country (heck, worse than many developing countries of even dictatorships).
So, yeah, the metrics are off.
If your counter-argument is "yeah, but US has more crime too", then maybe think long and hard if your whole legal system, approach to crime, society goals, etc, are justified then....
And it's not even up to the individual, racism is systemic in police, part of their everyday talk, their (real, not lip service) training discussions, their protocols, etc.
It would be fair to call it racism, if there was another instance of a white suspect acting the same way, and getting treated differently.
What about if the white person in the same situation wasn't even asked to stop in the first place?
It's not just about "how police treats blacks vs whites who refuse to stop" but also about "how often police asks blacks vs whites to stop".
Would you put your hands on someone Who showed no physical resistance in that amount of time?
The Police escalate quickly, and then, since the situation has escalated, feel justified in their response, which killed Elijah. They killed Elijah.
I don't think it is entirely fair to put 100% of the blame on the police. A much healthier solution would be to try de-escalating general tensions between the police and the population.
This is why we shouldn’t be employing people whose job it is to snatch people they don’t know anything about, who just assume you’re a threat until YOU PROVE that you’re innocent.
Besides, there are quite a few cities that have considerably limited the police power by now. Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland for example. The safety of regular law-abiding people has considerably dropped. Murders are up, gun sales are up, almost every type of violent crime is up.
If you don't like police, go ahead, move to one of these cities. Or at least, search for some videos from them on DuckDuckGo.
I find it very disheartening and hypocritical to hear anti-police rhetoric from people living in 7-figure-property neighborhoods, completely shielded from the problems that the police is supposed to solve.
And no, I am not a human bot in a call center, I happen to be a Canadian that is actually satisfied with the way RCMP works here. And I don't understand why our southern neighbors would rather shoot themselves in their feet and have their cities burnt, than try to copy some techniques that do make police more efficient up here.
If you want to know about how great the RCMP, you should read how nice they are to help local police departments to give free one-way tours into the forest at night in the winter to minorities, by very helpfully shielding them from the evil bureaucrats.
Perhaps the problems that the police are meant to solve are in part caused by the police? If I was always treated as a suspect after a while I may start to become resentful. If I was a minority representing 13% of the general population but represented 38% of the prison population I may start to become resentful and argue that there is a problem. Your argument that just because people live in peaceful 7-figure neighborhoods they should be grateful to the police for suppressing the riff raff, poor and minorities is very grating, classist and very much racist.
The NYPD has a budget of $10 billion dollars, and the only limits imposed on it were to please stop beating, murdering, framing and raping people. If those limits are too stringent I am not really sure where to go from here.
I have been ticketed for speeding on both sides of the border. RCMP makes is extremely professional. The whole conversation almost sounds like getting a bill from a roofer guy, explaining how to pay it and why you should check your roof more often. U.S. cops have a lot more of the "Ha-ha, now you're mine, bastard" attitude. I was extremely polite and complying both times.
Police often camps out in public events, like car shows, building trust with people. Silly things like giving stickers to kids and letting them climb on police ATVs for pictures, or officers showing off the tech in their cars to car enthusiasts.
When it comes to controversial topics, optics is everything. When a couple of student protestors blocked a major train line protesting against an oil pipeline, and commuters got really pissed off, since they couldn't get to their workplaces, the officer arresting them looked like a 60+ year old grandma with the "stop fooling around, kids" look. Nobody got hurt and the media got zero chance to blow it to any kind of a scandal.
Explaining how the US got to this state is a long discussion, but it helps to understand the origin of the police here in the south was to catch escaping slaves, and in the north was to keep "undesirables" out of wealthy neighborhoods. In more recent times politicians have used the War On Crime rhetoric to motivate people out of fear to vote for them, even though actual violent crime has been steadily falling.
Some parts of the US could take this approach, but there's a lot of places in the US that are either too nice out or there's too many fast food restaurants/Starbucks to take shelter in
Baltimore PD officers wear black uniforms. One night one of them was standing in the middle of the street I was driving down, and there weren't enough streetlights in that section. I was doing something like 40 in a 30, and the first thing I knew that anything was wrong was when I heard a loud thump from my left side. Looking in the wing mirror, I could see the guy in the light of the upcoming streetlight, where the one I'd last passed was too far back to show him.
So I pulled over and got out, because of course I did; I saw no personal benefit in complicating my upcoming arrest with a chase. Imagine my surprise when, on seeing my white skin, short hair, and slacks-and-button-down professional attire, he waved me off and went back to what he'd been doing!
In retrospect, I have to figure the mirror clipped something on his belt, rather than the car striking his actual person. But the fact remains that, had I not been white or not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Especially since, being as I was on my way home from a visit to my connection, I had a quarter ounce of pot in my left front trouser pocket. Remember, this was back before decriminalization, more than a decade before dispensaries even existed in this town; not only that, but my guy hadn't had any baggies that night, so he just gave me the smaller portions he got from his own guy, who mostly did street work. So it would've been charged as possession with intent, and that's a felony.
The time I hit a cop with my car while I was carrying wasn't a major reason why I quit smoking that shit entirely a couple of years later, but never having another few seconds of that kind of sheer terror was not absent from the list of reasons why I was glad when I did quit.
Just imagine if I were a black man, though. That cop could have shot me dead on the spot and who'd have said a word? I mean, I so obviously would've had it coming, a drug dealer doing drug dealer crimes and, if that weren't enough, I swerved my car to try to murder a police officer in the middle of it. Probably had a gun in my back pocket, or in the glovebox at least. Who would dare blame an officer of the law for doing what he had to do in the face of an obviously murderous criminal like that?
...is what white people would mostly say. But that's the thing. I had that moment of terror because I was acting like a damn fool - I could drive more carefully and just quit buying pot, and I did. People of color can't "live more carefully", or "just quit" having their skin. And there is a night in my past that, if I had skin of a similar shade to theirs, it'd be through bars that I saw the next sunrise - if I had lived to see it at all.
I don't blame you for saying it sounds unrealistic. I'd probably likewise have some trouble taking a story like that seriously on its face, except that I happened to live it, and a lot of other wild stories too. But there are far more stories that I haven't lived, and some of them sound as wild to me as the one I've just told sounds to you. That's how life is, though. The world is far wilder than any one of us, with our individual and limited perspective, ever gets to see. If we want to understand how things really work in the places and times and lives that we don't get to see, we have to listen to the stories people tell us who do see those things - listen, and not assume that they must be lying, any more than you would assume I had been lying to you just now.
If you take anything away from this conversation, I hope you'll make it that.
1. The professional attire and the fact that you pulled over and apologized.
2. The cop being busy with something else that's more important than busting a random pothead.
And that's just my point. Based entirely on how I looked, he judged the incident to have been a harmless accident and not worth pursuing, despite that I had a felony charge worth of dope in my front pocket at the time. Pretty important, if you get to make that bust! But he never had any idea of the chance that passed him by, because, to him, I looked like somebody who wouldn't.
What I'm saying is, think for a minute about how that could've played out differently if, in that cop's eyes, I'd have looked a different way.
>not been easily "read" as an "upstanding citizen" type, I'd have been in a hell of a lot of trouble.
This may have had more to do with with him waving you off than anything else. The type of people police are purportedly there to handle are not those who would do what you did. If this is Baltimore we're talking about, he may be tuned to a much more violent type of normal criminal encounter. Keep in mind that given the limited resources of the judicial system, they are better spent on more disruptive crimes to the social fabric.
Perspective is important in these things. Those that come to you to be dealt with are practically priority zero. They know they screwed up, and as long as you (the officer) is okay, then all's good. They'll sort themselves out.
It's the ones that don't the police are out and willing to do paperwork for.
That officer made the judgment he did in a matter of seconds; as I noted in another comment here, I didn't have time to speak, or to take so much as a step toward the officer, before he waved me off - which was just as well in retrospect; God alone knows what I'd have said. But if any one aspect of the gestalt I presented had in any way varied from "harmless", he might well have drawn on me, and if he hadn't done that then he'd for damn sure have come over to see whether I was drunk or high or whatever the hell. And then he would have found my dope, and I would have gone to jail that night.
None of that would have happened because I was actually dangerous! He wasn't wrong to read me the way he did. But I was still extremely lucky that he did read me right. I could very easily have been less fortunate. And given everything I've seen in twenty years living in this town, I am very sure that the vast bulk of my good fortune that night lay in the accident of my having light skin.
Freddie Gray could talk about that, I think, if he were still alive to talk about anything. The federal consent decree that followed his death did not come about in a vacuum. And it is not in a vacuum that BPD officers interact with other citizens - both like and unlike myself - of this city.
I don't see that as a "Thank God I'm White" outcome half as much as a "Thank God, he has something better to do!"
He could have been: -Covering the exits of a hiding place of a known dangerous offender -recon -signaling someone or waiting for a signal from someone on the down low -waiting on an informant -up to no good in a part of town he shouldn't even have been on the beat in, and really not looking to explain why he was even there to make an arrest. -on some other Op
To assume it was simply because you were white with no other data is really quite the knee jerk. Everything for a reason, and especially so with cops; a lone cop to boot.
Heck, you don't know. He might have been glad even if you were of a much darker complexion to see a brotha dressed for the office, pulling over and making every attempt to make himself easier to deal with rather than the alternative of a brotha in a trench coat/baggy clothes with a hand in his...oh shit!
Street wisdom is a thing. Supposedly, the better cops try to cultivate it amongst their numbers.
I get it's in vogue to assume that everyone is out to curbstomp the melanin enriched, but damn man. Cut the guy some slack. I mean he waved you off. Now I wish more cops extended the favor back, but, that's how it goes. Sometimes you get the ticket, sometimes you get let off the hook.
So what you're really doing here is, you're asking me to choose which to give greater credence. On the one hand, your reasonable-sounding thoughts in a vacuum about some purely theoretical interaction of cop and "brotha" (really?)
On the other, my so far twenty years of living in the city of Baltimore. Granted, as as a white man. But nonetheless, with eyes, ears, acquaintances across pretty much the whole spectrum of skin tones - two decades living in a busy city, you have time to meet a lot of people, especially when you do what most white people in this town don't do and use public transit a lot - and a subscription to the Sun paper. Plus, on top of my own experience and that of other people who've shared theirs with me, the outcome of the recent DOJ investigation, which accurately found "widespread unconstitutional and discriminatory policing in the city" [1] and that "...the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) had engaged in a pattern and practice of conduct that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and certain provisions of federal statutory law." [2]
So, left to weigh all of that in one hand, and your vacuous theorizing in the other...look, I get that you're coming at this in good faith, and I respect that. But do you really need me to explain in detail how and why this effort falls so far short of the mark?
You're arguing essentially that Baltimore cops deserve the benefit of the doubt on questions of racial bias in policing. As I said, in a vacuum, sure, that seems reasonable. But, though I'm sure it's as tiresome to hear it repeated as it is to have to say it over and over again, none of this stuff happens in a vacuum. And the argument you've made is totally unable to survive outside one, because even the most cursory look at the recent history of policing in Baltimore is enough to see that the benefit of the doubt is in no way here deserved.
Even under the Trump administration, the US Department of Justice doesn't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt. The Baltimore Sun journalists who follow, investigate, and report on the actions of police in this city, they don't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt. [3] The folks I've known and whose stories I've heard in this town, for whom grossly excessive violence and abuse of power on the part of police have been a regular feature of life in their communities, they don't give Baltimore cops the benefit of the doubt, either. In light of all that, why should I? Why should anyone?
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime...
[2] https://consentdecree.baltimorecity.gov/
[3] https://news.baltimoresun.com/cops-and-robbers/part-one/ https://news.baltimoresun.com/cops-and-robbers/part-two/ https://news.baltimoresun.com/cops-and-robbers/part-three/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/us/Elijah-McClain-aurora-...
That comment really didn't age well, did it? I think just about anyone can see what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse and recognize that racism was a factor in the disparate treatment.