Deracialize the Police

holy crap that was terrifying. Basically, an economist and a law professor very authoritatively talking as though the last ten years didn't happen. I guess it figures-- in America you have the Chicago school and the Originalist camp: the two shit slices of shit bread in the shit sandwich we're eating.. and everybody defines themselves relative to that, more or less. So I guess these people lack even the language to talk about community investment, generational trauma, social services, infrastructure, city budgets, civic corruption, oh yeah POLICE UNIONS, yadda yadda. Jesus christ we all live in fear of the police in the US and these guys have no idea. What a red blooded wank.. I don't even have to quote just pick any random paragraph.. jesus. Oh, props to never mentioning gun laws once! Wonderful.

What really boils my clams is the ignorance-so-profound-it-must-be-wilful of the MASSIVE roles the two classes of people represented here (lawyers and economists) have played in the fucking up and routing out of the poor in America, and of the perpetuation of our primordial slave state. it's just so damn arrogant. Kinda reminds me of Russ Roberts: perfectly smart people for whom reality just does not exist.

Maybe the unifying thread of all this is just not understanding human frailty at all, and so missing the mark on everything that depends on it.

I wonder if it's especially bad because it's a transcript of a podcast.. people might be used to hearing spew like this in audio form because of talk radio, but you don't often see it written down quite so baldly.

Yikes. This is an incredibly tone-deaf take.

You cannot "deracialize" a discussion while simultaneously framing the situation in fundamentally racial terms like "the crime problem has a racial coloration", or while repeating racist tropes like "those boys killing themselves over sneakers".

"a disproportionate number of violent crimes are committed by black people" which completely ignores the more meaningful statistics:

* Police are more heavily present in black neighborhoods, because of historically racist policies - so more likely to have police involve

* Police are overwhelmingly more likely to use force, including lethal force, against PoC, irrespective of the crime involved.

* Police overwhelmingly stop PoC w/o any cause (see NY's stop and frisk, traffic enforcement)

* Police systematically punish PoC at higher rates than white people, even when no crime is committed (see FL police reporting PoC to landlords, even when no crime is committed, and getting them evicted)

That's ignoring anecdotal evidence that domestic abuse in white households is systematically under reported.

Counterpoint: who is racializing the police? It’s these articles and news reports claiming that “Twitter is abuzz over white cop blah blah”. Meanwhile it’s all of two tweets that are “abuzz” and it’s unclear if the author didn’t just plant the two themselves.

Instead of “deracialize the police”, how about “no more Twitter-sourced articles”?