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Comment by Georgelemental | Hacker News Reader

He's been involved in many extremely high-profile cases with a racial element to them—police brutality, civil rights law, and so forth. These cases often involve very high dollar amounts. In the course of representing plaintiffs, he's repeatedly lied and distorted the facts to impute racial animus where there was none, and those lies have been repeated by the media, reaching millions. Most famously, he was instrumental in spreading the "hands up, don't shoot" lie about the shooting of Michael Brown. In my opinion, a non-negligible portion of the responsibility for worsening race relations in the US falls on him.

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Would you describe someone spreading a pro-police coverup and lie as responsible for worsening race relations?

Or just someone spreading an anti-police one?

Does one side in this kind of affair get held to a higher standard than the other?

If anything, people like Crump make genuine police reform harder. To solve the real injustices (and there are many), you first have to sort them out from the made-up nonsense. This isn't a football game, it's not a question of "pro-police" versus "anti-police"—it's truth versus fiction.

The problem you're running into is that you haven't said anything that proponents of fiction wouldn't say.

It's not a nice game. Any serious move you make can be pigeonholed into pro-police or anti-police, irrespective of whether you're motivated by truth, fiction, a pro-police position, or an anti-police position. And so long as there are enough people who play the pigeonhole game loudly enough, whether on mainstream or social media, it's the default game. You can't start by assuming the person you're talking to is playing a truth game, because then you'll waste all your time on trolls.

Right now, pro-police people will think you're covertly supporting their side. Anti-police people will think you're covertly opposing theirs. And truth people won't be able to tell which game you're playing.

Even if you're lucky and you start talking to a truth person, as soon as you or they, having to be alert for trolls, misunderstands or misinterprets something, the belief that both of you are in good faith will shatter, and a difference that otherwise might have been resolved instead convinces both of you that everything the other one said is something trolls say.

There, I think that's enough defeatism out of my system for a few days.

They are not even equivalent.

Every police department has internal affairs. Most have a citizen's oversight counsel. Plus, they are overseen by state and federal agencies which frequently attempt to maintain good policing (not saying they always succeed). Then we have the media to keep cops in check, the ACLU and SPLC who agitate for police reform and leniency for actual criminals, and hundreds of other anti-police organizations whose bread and butter is rooting out police corruption.

Thus far, there is no organization dedicated to tracking falsified and/or exaggerated claims of racial injustice or animus, claims which have directly led to dozens of deaths, billions in property damage, lawless cities where DAs dismiss charges against the same people dozens of times and a fractured society.

Why did Smollett lie about the race and political affiliation of his attackers? He was clearly trying to drum up violent reprisal against whites and conservatives. Smollett is but one prominent example; a Google search will lead to hundreds more. Are such incidents unworthy of being tracked? Why?

You know what worsens race relations? People shouting, despite all evidence to the contrary that there isn't a racism... Or a police accountability problem in this country (And that !actually! the demographic that holds most of the political power is the real victim of it.)

> Every police department has internal affairs.

Which does squat all.

> Most have a citizen's oversight counsel.

Which is at best a committee with no disciplinary power, whose suggestions go straight in the paper shredder.

We've seen the outcomes of IA and oversight councils, and they are, quite frankly, rotten.

> Plus, they are overseen by state and federal agencies which frequently attempt to maintain good policing (not saying they always succeed)

Consent decrees are also completely worthless, but, in an ironic twist, have been used to prevent city-driven reform.

> Thus far, there is no organization dedicated to tracking falsified and/or exaggerated

The organizations you've listed aren't working.

It's doubly ironic that while you're tilting at falsified and exaggerated problems, you are both falsifying and exaggerating what you're complaining about.

And by lawless cities, do you mean the ones where the police act like they aren't bound by laws, with the lack of DA action on this question proving them right?

> You know what worsens race relations? People shouting, despite all evidence to the contrary that there isn't a racism...

Is there? It's actually hard to tell. A review of the evidence: https://manhattan.institute/article/fatal-police-shootings-a...

> Or a police accountability problem in this country

I agree. Police union corruption is a huge issue, "asset forfeiteture" is a total scam, police officer immunity is too strong… But the solution is not "turn a blind eye to all of it until something happens that you can pigeonhole into a politically convenient racial narrative, at which point burn down the city." It also isn't "stop prosecuting crime, and allow criminals to victimize the least privileged people in society with impunity."

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