Police Kill Too Many People–White and Black (2016)

Policing isn't even a top 10 most dangerous job. Yes police offers are shot on duty. But the practices they use & their racist bias create confrontation and escalate encounters to violence.

'Warrior', 'killology' training has instilled quick to fire, ready to kill dehumanizing behavior and literally teaches Black neighborhoods are 'battlegrounds.'

Chicago is definitely a hard example combing the worst of our gun fetish, laws, and consequences of racism stealing opportunity and wealth from generations of Black and Brown communities. I'm sure it feels like a battleground for many that live there. No one could argue the situation there is under control or easy to control.

But there are a lot of other examples of bringing guns into peaceful encounters for instance traffic stops where they come up guns drawn as just an example with many recent tragedies created. Briana Taylor no-knock is an extreme example of policies that create deadly confrontation.

Each comes with its own set of problems. Urban poor tends to be violent. Rural poor tends towards suicidal.

If you break it apart, we’ll off America doesn’t have a violent crime problem.

This is besides the point. We have a real policing problem in America which we can see by the rate that U.S. police injure and kill citizens as compared to other countries. It's not even close.

There are many reasons for this, but we have to start by recognizing that there's a problem.

What do you think the "socio" in "socio-economic" refers too?

Obviously culture plays into it, the racist treatment of blacks over history didn't just affect financial capital and heritage, it had direct effects on social aspects, restricted access to education, broken family dynamics, cycle of abuse, religious indoctrination, ancestral cultural erasure, and probably contributed directly to a glorification of crime as a means to upward movement, since nothing else seemed to work or be offered to them. All these in turn affects economic outcomes as well, but also economic outcomes have affected those social aspects.

Your culture is a result of your environment, and if you take someone and force them into an environment of abuse and discrimination like was the case of afro-americans, whose culture is it really? In my mind, afro-american culture is American culture, this is all our culture. Our culture has put a race at an absolute disadvantage for generations, resulting in a lack of economic and social prosperity for that race today. You can't then go and say, that's their fault, their culture, not mine, when your culture had a direct impact on theirs. So now it's time to say, let's grow our culture to one of healing, inclusion, and reconciliation together.

And here's where it matters, the next time someone is caught with possession or selling of drugs, will you choose to incarcerate them for years? Or will you decide to reinvest in their education, rehabilitation and support them for whatever led them there.

The next time a budget is voted on, will you vote to build more prisons, or to invest the money in services and safety in communities of color. Will you choose to more heavily invest in education, employment, housing, and health services in the country, or in police funds?

And here's where it matters even more, the next time you encounter a black person, will you treat them with an underlying bias that they are probably more violent and crime driven just because of your association of their skin color you've made with your belief in their culture leading to crime? Will you have your guards up, and will you likely favor another race over them due to this?

An asteroid can't be racist, but the response to it might be.

If you were playing a boardgame, and the rules said I get to role 2 dice for every 1 dice you roll, at that point the game wouldn't be fair. If we were playing chess and I got to start with 2 queens, then you would be within your rights to complain that the game wasn't fair.

And if you complained about the rules of the game, and said that game wasn't fair, and I hand-waved that by saying that you were misusing fairness to push back against "any outcome where you lost", it would be reasonable to take issue with that.

Systemic racism isn't just any outcome where Black people get hurt, it describes a reinforcing mechanic in society where Black people are repeatedly hurt and where their disadvantages perpetuate themselves. Crime drives people into poverty, which imposes social and economic disadvantages which keep them from rising out of poverty, which drives them into crime -- increased attention on those neighborhoods leads to preconceptions and biases among officers, it leads to fewer opportunities for the people in those neighborhoods, and the cycle continues. It's reinforced by the system itself, and by people inside the system who mean well but contribute to it, and by people outside of the system that use it to support their own racist agendas.

It's a lose more mechanic that reinforces unequal outcomes for Black communities, and its a mechanic that was very obviously set in motion by redlining, voter and wage suppression, by explicitly racist housing policies, and by slavery itself. It is not an accident that poor neighborhoods tend to be predominantly Black, that happened deliberately. "Racist" is a perfectly fine word to describe the outcomes of that system, it's nothing like an asteroid.

“No dwelling shall be used or occupied except by members of the Caucasian race, but the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”

Slavery, redlining, race segregation, displacement, racial slur, racial biases are all real racist practices that were the result of a large number of racist individuals in the past. Maybe most of that is gone at the individual level today, but a lot of the systems were put in place from before and still harbor a legacy from that racist past, such as a black child likely having poorer parents, living in a worse community, thus starting off at a disatvantage in equity and opportunity.

That means the inequalities we see generated in the systems today are not the result of randomness the way an asteroid would, but of a racist legacy, and that's why we say it's systemic racism caused by a history of systematic and individual racism.

Now, other people, some white as well, similarly suffer from lack of equity and opportunity. The system is similarly unfair to them, and that can be due to other factors, a white child can be born poor, from parents with addiction issues, in a bad neighborhood, and the system similarly won't be as fair to them and make things harder. Those are issues we should also solve, and maybe how we solve systemic racism can solve other forms of systemic issues, in fact that be a great outcome of all this. Still, that doesn't change anything about the fact that some of the disproportionate inequalities in the black population (in the US) is likely due to systemic issues caused by past racism, making systemic racism an issue that still needs solving.

You can't honestly believe that if an asteroid hit that anyone would all it racist.

That's just a distraction at best; my read is that's an example of the implicit bias in our society that you disregard flat out.

At those density levels, how can you compare a city to an entire country?

On top of that police are typically younger men - the demographic that commits almost all murders. Police always have guns. They are the kind of people willing and able to deal with hostile and potentially violent people. They have natural inclination to violence, to be able to deal with and dispense it. Personally, I'd expect the police to be more likely than average to become murderers, not less.

This is also blurred a bit further because we can imagine a class of killing that's "kind of justified" that we'd expect the police to sometimes engage in. Something like killing through negligence or incompetence. A certain fraction of people are likely negligent or incompetent. If you're an incompetent plumber, pipes may burst. If you're an incompetent, lazy, whatever police officer you may cause someone to die. We should also expect some level of this too.

Like, Google is blamed for bad copyright enforcement on HN right now.

Group X is horrible when there are consistently minor consequences when these things are exposed. In this case the brutality occurred months ago and only came to light through a lawsuit being filed. It was only then that the officers faced some repercussions. This is common and widespread. So called good police routinely coverup and protect the bad ones. Consequences only occur if there is publicly released video and even when there is released video convictions and real consequences are rare.

There is widespread usage of extra-judicial punishments by police with little to no consequences. Citizens exercising Constitutional get arrested where the only charge is resisting arrest. There is a policing problem in the U.S. Let’s not pretend that there isn’t one.