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It is sad to see this downvoted, I know several people who were outcasts for "acting white" by trying hard in school (their words, not mine).

The issue really isn't about race though, it is about poverty and culture. I know a kindergarten teacher from a very rural, very white, very poor school district who was cussed out by one of her 5 year old students. The parents don't care, and it shows in the students' progression through school and young adulthood. If parents show up at all, it is to yell at teachers for giving their children bad grades or any sort of discipline.

Of course, putting any sort of onus on the parents gets talked down, as it undermines the argument that things will magically get better if only we threw more money at the problem... because the problem isn't the school or the teachers at all.

What responsibility do we have as a nation to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? Have we no courage, no sense of moral obligation to make things right?

The culture of black communities dealing with poverty and crime that you refer to didn't come from nowhere. It was not simply imported from 17th century Africa, in the way that the apple pie was brought over from England. It is a product of a people who were bravely struggling and striving to cope in the worst possible circumstances.

Brutally enslaved for more than 200 years, their literal chains finally removed, they continued to be viciously abused and systematically and savagely oppressed throughout the following century. They weren't event treated as fully human by the federal law until 2 generations ago. Only two generations! Many states had incredibly racist and oppressive laws even more recently than that. The most cursory research reveals an utterly depraved history. One simple and terrible example is redlining, which unfortunately was occurring even after the civil rights act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining).

We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. It is impossible to fully mend what we have broken, but we damn well better try.

> We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused.

25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population.

[1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation...

They moved here knowing some things in the US are broken. They can pitch in to help us fix it. I’d guess that most would be be honored to do so.

What exactly is your solution?

If you're talking about reparations, I think you might find that the math doesn't really work in this case.

Most people who come to US are escaping horrid conditions of their home countries (a good portion of which is not unrelated to US foreign policy).

Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process.

Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.

That’s rather presumptuous of you. I’m an immigrant (and now a naturalized US Citizen), and I want no part of “reparations”.

Only 1 in 5 Americans supports it: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/504511-1-in-5-supports-rep...

Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.

That’s rather presumptuous of you. I never said the solution is reparations. I’m not sure what the solution is. I have some ideas, but obviously it is a non-trivial problem.

We aren’t talking about other countries. I’m familiar with history. I know many terrible things have happened.

You're right — s/reparations/<responsibility [...] to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? >.

Whatever it may be, I want no part of it. To assume that all immigrants, who today represent 25% of Americans, are willing to sign onto policy positions that are focused on correcting (distant) past wrongs as opposed to solving the problems we have TODAY — is what I'm calling presumptuous.

I think we are still miscommunicating. I don’t want to ignore present day problems and solely focus on some sort of atonement for past wrongs. We should fix current day problems with a proper understanding of how they can be, taking ownership of our failures as a nation.

Radical delegitimization of the nuclear family in the late 60’s and early 70’s got intertwined with the black power movement which essentially argued that single mother’s are better off than married. They have more agency and the nuclear family is a patriarchal tool of male supremacy. Then taken further into the black power movement with aid of that eras new feminism, it was argued that the nuclear family is a white European ideal and a tool of oppression.

So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal.

Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t.

Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s.

Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations.

So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough.

Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.

Do you have a source on this? I’m interested to see if we’ve actually quantified the effectiveness of this delegitimization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Marriage_for_White_People%3...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...

https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...

And one of BLM’s stated goals is to abolish the nuclear family. They are doing far more damage to black communities than anyone else right now.

It goes all the way back to The Communist Manifesto. These are old ideas that have just been recast through a new lens. Conflict Theory just takes on new forms from one based on class (made sense at the time) to one based on so called “identity” which makes sense in a multicultural country.

In the end these ideas are illiberal and it is my hope they wither away after enough people are able to look past the facade and the tyrannical machinery is exposed. And then maybe some of these orgs can grow into something that’s actually useful.

We already have. It’s time to stop blaming people who had nothing to do with the problem but are guilty of looking like someone who did.

> You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.

To really underscore this point, it’s worth looking at the inflation adjusted total per-pupil education expenditures over time: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...

We can argue about the marginal benefit of investing in late-stage interventions, but it's certainly doing more than cops buying Humvees and LARPING as tacticool warriors.

Generally armored vehicles police get as surplus are sold at basically the price of gas / transportation to get them to their destination. The feds just want them off their books. That compared to the price of a new Lenco Bearcat is hundreds of thousands of dollars less for a more capable vehicle.

I have never once seen those vehicles used in regular law enforcement duties such as traffic stops.

They are used in exceptional cases like active shooter situations, hostage / barricaded / swat scenarios, natural disasters like flooding due to their high clearance, and the occasional parade or community day to let kids play in the big truck. In all, they are a defensive vehicle with no weapons that costs the department very little and has a wide range of uses if the shit hits the fan.

I really don't get the outrage of them other than the optics of it "being from the military" and idiots calling them "tanks". If there are specific bad uses of police force those are great to call out, but the utility of the vehicle which is basically free for a real world need is a no brainer.

I mean, they buy all kinds of military surplus or "tacticool" gear. Here's a random article going over a bit of it: https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2020/08/03/police-in-tam...

My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.

They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things. People standing around chanting. Then they wait until curfew is over, maybe declare the assembly unlawful, and start using chemical weapons and intimidation on the crowd.

> rock-throwing protesters versus police officers wearing body armor and gas masks, carrying ballistic shields and lobbing flash grenades.

So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...

The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.

> My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.

How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization? I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose. They also still use fire hoses in many other countries which we stopped doing in the 60s due to the bad optics of them during the racial tension.

> They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things.

Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so. Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too. But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg

> So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...

Yes, militarization of the police is normalized in many countries. That doesn't make it acceptable. They're trigger-happy and violent. It's part of the culture.

> The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.

Do you believe that there needs to be a line of officers wielding rifles behind a line of riot cops with flashbangs and tear gas launchers (used liberally and indiscriminately) behind a line of shielded riot cops grabbing things from protesters and generally trying to provoke a reaction? These things all work in tandem, in this context. That line of cops is part of their show of force, as they take anti-cop protests very personally. It's a form of intimidation and escalation.

> How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization?

Half of that is literally military equipment and US police departments are frequently under a "warrior" mindset. It's been heavily exported to various different PDs. They treat confrontations as a fight between them and the "bad guys", not public safety or law enforcement. Having a bunch of military or tacticool gear is part of that mindset.

> I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose.

Normalization is not the same as moral or acceptable. Plus, this isn't quite a consistent take when it comes to these kinds of things. When Soviet bloc countries used far less serious responses to color revolutions, they were decried as totalitarian, antidemocratic monsters. But we do worse here and it's just normal business as usual.

And those "crowd control" agents are chemical weapons, explosives, and "less lethal" weapons causing permanent disability and injury. I watched a woman get shot with a grenade (either flashbang or teargas) and she went into cardiac arrest, only living because medics rushed her to the hospital. She was forward but still 30 feet from any officers. She was shot straight in the chest. She was just standing there and yelling.

> Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so.

They absolutely are not. It's a form of escalation and the cops have frequently provoked these responses with theses "shows of force".

> Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too.

The cops aren't trying to stop people from burning down communities. They don't actually do that, they don't deescalate, they don't actually even defend the private property (which is usually much of their function) so much as blast through and hurt people indiscriminately.

> But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg

I'm very familiar with their tactics, they used them against me.

Are you familiar with the Rodney King riots, or the national wave in the late 60s? You seem to be presuming that large groups of angry protesters will never start trying to kill people, that this isn't even a problem the police need to plan for. And I'm just not sure that's true.

You don't need to militarize the police in order to have a riot response. The warrior mentality is toxic and actually exacerbates the problem.

In every protest I went to where things escalated, it was the police doing the primary escalation. Bull rushing the crowd. Trying to grab things from the crowd. Shooting teargas and OC gas and flashbangs into the crowd prior to even making any announcements. Bicycle cops hitting passersby with their bicycles. A kid got maced.

None of this requires the straw man that protests never turn into riots.

But that's the goal! When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly. Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.

> But that's the goal!

This is incoherent. Beating peaceful protesters doesn't serve the goal of deescalation. Every single time, it resulted in more anger and frustration. Water bottles being thrown.

> When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly.

End the situation? It escalated every single time, exactly how you'd expect. Cops becoming aggressive and violent against protesters is not going to cool any heads. They teargassed kids, you know. In what world is that considered a way to "end the situation"?

> Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.

This is part of that dangerous warrior mentality, treating every group like an immediate existential threat that must be neutralized with violence based on nothing but speculation.

If you're justifying police violence and aggression based on what you imagine might happen, you're part of the problem.

We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats, and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.

Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.

> We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats

I've never said this.

> and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.

That is absurd. Damaging property is nothing like hurting people. In fact, alleging that the two are comparable is somewhat dehumanizing, as it's used to justify hurting people over damage to things. Things* should not have any level of parity with human life, particularly things like broken windows.

> Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.

Last time, you said the police could preemptively assume a protest will hurt people and start engaging in the violence we've been talking about. Now there's the good protester / bad rioter dichotomy, something often decried by civil rights leaders because it was the rallying cry of segregationists. That and outside agitators.

I was gassed and flashbanged in a protest where we were holding our hands up and chanting, "hands up, don't shoot".

Where have you gotten this idea from? I have no doubt some police subscribe to this reasoning, but it's horribly anti-American and illegal.

I would add that the LA Bank Shootout provided a lot of justification for effective firepower. Two men pretty much pinned down several law enforcement organizations due to superior firepower.

>I mean, they buy all kinds of military surplus

If you are going to post an article to support your argument, you might want to make sure it actually supports your argument.

Police don't pay for surplus military gear, the DoD offers it for free. Police only have to pay for shipping. It has been this way since the program was created in 1988.

The police often pay for shipping, maintenance, and kitting out the equipment. They might receive a free stripped-down M16, but they still use their own budgets to make it tacticool. Just an optic and light run $1k or so.

Humvees and tactical cops make up a tiny fraction of policing costs.

Most policing is just policing,

The 'tactical cops' should be punted for reasons other than cost obviously, but that's not it.

This is exactly the OP's point - it's 'luxury thinking'.

Usually when police presence goes down, crime goes up. We see this in London over the last few years.

We want more, better, police in rough ares, not less.

And good jobs, obviously, parents with stability create better conditions for their kids.

Look into studies that evaluate self-reported crimes or violence, etc. Not police stats. Police stats are highly unreliable for drawing these kinds of conclusions a lot of reasons before you even consider malevolence or corruption.

Nearly all crimes that are policed are crimes of poverty. Rather than focusing so thoroughly on punitive measures, it is far better for everyone to focus on the root causes.

Throwing money at the problem helps a lot to some extent:

- putting food on the table

- putting kids through school with at least one new set of clothes a year

- having food in your belly makes it far easier to cope with the endless "why" questions of the curious child

Sure, there are social issues to address as well, but don't go assuming that throwing money at the problem won't help at all.

So invest that money there, too?

> having respect for the law

Additional humvees buy you fear not respect.

>...we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.

Poverty. That's the root issue. But it's cheaper to blame the poverty on bad additudes and poor choices rather than acknowledge the causality goes in the other direction and pony up the cash for programs to break the cycle of poverty.

Then home come the poor migrants from China, India, Mexico and even Africa who come to America end up doing so well?

Not only is that a copout and demonstrably false, but giving people money makes poverty worse, not better. It’s counterintuitive, and unfortunately proponents of hand-outs act out of emotion and (naive) intuition, not data. They often harm those they intend to help as a result.

Poverty is the result, not the cause. Bad attitudes and poor choices lead to poverty in America, not the other way around.