Cop Shooting Thread

Perhaps there’s some misunderstanding.

Neither orderly, civil disobedient, nor violent protests will stop anything completely. Police will always kill unjustly, because police are comprised of hundreds of thousands of individuals with human frailties and faults, drawn to a job which requires them to carry a gun and the potential to shoot at “bad dudes.” To think that wouldn’t involve at least a few people with the necessary personality components required to become racist murderers is kind of naive.

However, any claim that protests “don’t work” is to accept the notion that everything short of perfection is an equivalent failure. I get the “One death is one too many” concept, but frankly it’s a misplaced application of that philosophy. There are degrees of failure - ranging between one unjustified questioning and the systematic deaths of millions - and therefore there are degrees at how effective or not protests can be.

To go around and say that protests don’t work is to dismiss their effectiveness, and they ARE effective at promoting change - slow and unsteady, but still change. You have to imagine what the world would be without them, and then measure the difference between that and our reality. If “protests don’t work” becomes a popular refrain, it discourages those who might partake. Even if it’s “orderly, peaceful protests don’t work” then that still disenfranchises those who can’t risk anything more extreme and yet still can make their voices heard. That only helps those who would strive to keep the status quo.

That said, MLK was not always partaking in orderly protests and complying with the cops. He broke laws and inconvenienced innocent people by way of protest, as did a great many others in the 50’s and 60’s. So did Vietnam protesters. Both groups helped push change, and I think one could successfully argue that pissing off people helped to highlight the situation. It’s kind of like “saturation marketing,” if you’re thinking of a marketing metaphor. Companies want people to be aware of their names first, even if it’s from a really annoying character or jingle, and then they can worry about balancing it out later.

I’m mostly in Dan’s boat I think.

People pretend that peaceful protesting and nothing else worked. It was part of the whole. Annoying people who would otherwise ignore you is almost required. If you don’t they’ll keep on ignoring you and nothing will happen. I doubt anyone would say the 60’s was a peaceful decade and yet that’s where most of the change actually happened.

You are mistaken if you think the Civil Rights Movement was only peaceful protests. That’s whitewashing history to make us all feel good about the good black guy instead of the “bad” one (s).

I never said protests don’t work. There are many ways to protest, and a few of them include violence. There is a weird idea floating around here that if people ask nicely and don’t get in the way of people trying to go to work… we’ll see change. The problem is… we haven’t seen change. Since all these deaths in the modern area… what has changed. How many times must a black person be gunned down by the police before it’s okay for us to be late getting our morning coffee?

And like you said, MLK broke laws, he challenged authority and he certainly blocked streets.

Peaceful protest only works when there’s a threat behind it- the threat can be economic or political.

Even Gandhi’s protests had an economic threat behind it, and only succeeded when it did because of WWII.

Also , I do think today’s generation doesn’t have the patience for the long slog it actually takes to change things. This is one reason I was so disappointed in some of Bernie’s followers.

That said, you have to pick the right targets. Twitter-generated protest has a poor track record of doing that.

Why is today’s generation any different from yesterdays? Its not like the baby boomers were all that successful with there protests right away, and there were a lot of small protests going on.

I like the protests today, but what I don’t see is actually a solution. Compared to ‘end discriminatory laws’ it’s much harder to say ‘stop x% of the police force from exercising sub- or conscious discrimination in a situation they may perceive as violent’. Thinking about it harder police officers probably need to have laws mandating that their cameras always work.

The alternative is police forces just abandoning African-American communities as being too politically dangerous to interact with at all.

I was thinking about this driving yesterday. Short answer is that every generation has movements which exercise their politics. Today’s generation are most concerned with society validating them as individual and as subsets of larger identities. To older generations whose concerns were ideological or economic, this is somewhat incomprehensible.

You raise an interesting point about solutions. The Civil Rights Movement had very clear short-term goals, which included federal legislation to enforce 14th and 15th Amendment rights, and state actions to dismantle the legal framework of segregation in the South. These were, however difficult to achieve, comparatively low-hanging fruit. The mid to long term goals–the stuff that King moved on to after 1965, and which he failed to sell to mainstream America with anything like the success of the earlier portion of the movement–included tackling racism, poverty, militarism, and all the structural problems of the greater society. In this, neither King nor the other actors in the various movements of the era were really that successful.

The current crisis has no comparatively simple legal solution. There isn’t a law that will stop excessive force by the police, or change how African-Americans are perceived and treated by law enforcement. What’s needed now is more akin to those mid and long-term goals of the post-1965 movement, and are just as nebulous in some ways.

Those structural problems are especially hard because of politics. It’s easy and in some ways more feasible to shift the blame entirely to one community or another rather than look hard at both problems of structural racism, inheritable opportunity, and the affect of familial structures, because it requires every side to look honestly at their own effects upon the situation. And that iceberg strewn route between the possible and the politiciallu beneficial but socially detrimental is one I don’t trust the current electorate to be able to navigate.

The answer is yes. I’m actually not friends with a lot of cops any more, but I used to hang around a bunch in DC. Incidentally DC cops kill around 300 people a year. Cops in my country are taught that everyone they encounter could be a dangerous drug addict that can’t be stopped by talking to them or manhandled. It’s guns out first everywhere now. The modern day US police force has made themselves scared shitless all the time through their narratives. They have made our police a bunch of cowards, thus all these shootings.

It didn’t used to be like this. It was the War on Drugs that did it. And the War on Terror.

I can’t even be friends with cops anymore. It’s that bad. Most of them are also former soldiers who were infantry in the Middle East and are all twitchy because they’ve seen so much bad shit. But they actively recruit these kinds of people because they think the skill sets transfer. Why? They think they are at war with the public.

The War on Drugs made the entire public out to be dangerous druggies, the War on Terror made everyone a hidden terrorist. Yeah public policy!

Is there a correlation between decreasing police deaths and increasing militarization of the police? I often see claims that militarization is not necessary because deaths are going down, but no one making the claim the reason deaths are going down is because of militarization.

Expanding on what Guap said, here’s an excellent article in The Atlantic about police training:

[quote]Rookie officers are taught what is widely known as the “first rule of
law enforcement”: An officer’s overriding goal every day is to go home
at the end of their shift… They are shown painfully vivid, heart-wrenching dash-cam
footage of officers being beaten, disarmed, or gunned down
after a moment of inattention or hesitation. They are told that the
primary culprit isn’t the felon on the video, it is the officer’s lack
of vigilance. And as they listen to the fallen officer’s last, desperate
radio calls for help, every cop in the room is thinking exactly the
same thing: “I won’t ever let that happen to me.” That’s the point of the training.[/quote]

I’d say the answer to that is complicated. Bit as an initial answer I would say that crime in general has gone down over the last few decades and so by way of large statistics pools, police officer deaths may have gone down (I have no idea if that’s true, you didn’t source, but we’ll assume it is).

Also I would assume that if you start killing a lot more people you come into contact with, you will inevitably preemptively kill someone who may have killed an officer. But who knows? Police do wear a lot more and better body armor now too.

Yeah, the “First Rule: Come Home” would lead to a lot of itchy trigger fingers. Perhaps it should be “First Rule: Treat the Public Respectfully”.

Police deaths are way down. About 120 per year, which is down from 140 over Bush 2s term, down from 150 or so over Clintons term.

Top it off the biggest killer is car accidents. Over half of all those deaths are from traffic or health related (heart attacks). Only 40 police deaths per year or so are related to potential homicides.

Wait, what? They really shouldn’t count heart attacks and traffic accidents in those totals. If I have a heart attack at work they don’t include that in the “office worker deaths per year” category when accounting for safety.

If you employ violence and illegality, then you are then opening up yourself to have exactly those tactics used against you, and you will have no moral high ground from which to dispute it.

Ultimately, the only protection for minority groups, is the rule of law. If you abandon it, then you put yourself in a position where might makes right, and that is usually going to be a bad fight for a minority group to have.

… And from a standpoint of changing actual minds and laws, which part was more effective - the pre-1965 part, or the later, more violent part? (Mind you I’m talking about violence by the protesters here. There was plenty of violence pre-1965 against the protesters.)

People keep saying that “violence was part of the process,” but no one has so far given any examples of actual historic violent protest by African-Americans that resulted in unambiguously positive change.

I will just flat-out claim the contrary: the history of race riots in this country show that their largest effect is strengthen white folks’ ingrained belief that Those People Need To Be Taught A Lesson, even when the violence was unambiguously triggered by the white folks themselves. (One of the main results of the mid-60s race riots was white backlash, leading to the election of Richard Nixon in '68 and the transformation of the Republican party into the home of white racists. See the Rick Perlstein books we keep talking about here.)

Is there a single magic law that will make cops behave perfectly? No. Are there specific laws that, if enforced, could make cops behave somewhat better? Yes, like having laws that require cops to wear body cams and treat body cam footage as part of the public record. Back during the summer North Carolina passed a law making it so that body cam footage only needs to be released if there’s a court order by a judge, making getting at the truth of police shootings much harder. That’s a bad law that should be changed, and if the NC protests were truly laser focused, we would be seeing headlines saying “Protesters Demand Repeal of Body Cam Law” not “Protesters Shut Down Freeway Over Shootings.”

The genius of the most effective part of the 50s/60s Civil Rights Movement was that it was able to get headlines like “SNCC* Demands Right To Be Served At Lunch Counter” rather than “Negroes Create Disturbance In Southern City.” But that kind of laser focus needs to be created. It doesn’t just happen by itself. It takes leaders who identify the short term goals, convince their angry followers that the less-than-perfect short term goals will lead to long term progress, and convince politicians that they need to implement the goals or face political consequences.

So it is possible. But it’s hard, and requires a lot of boring, low-paid, unglamorous effort. And it’s true that dealing with police shootings today is harder than dealing with getting served at a lunch counter in 1960. The largest chunk of that additional difficulty is that police shooting protests are by their nature spontaneous and volatile: people are angry now and asking angry people to think about on-point legislation is never an easy thing. (It’s not like the leaders of the '60s Civil Rights Movement were able to stop the Watts riot.)

The other, smaller, part is that we’ve all learned the wrong lesson from the 1960s: we incorrectly believe that its the protests that are important, not the all the detailed, boring, political finagling that went along with the protests and that actually changed laws. And when I say we learned the wrong lesson I mean that literally - the high school textbooks present the '60s as, “People get worked up, protests get lots of press coverage, problem is resolved, next chapter.”

But protests, peaceful or otherwise, do absolutely nothing without the boring, detailed work to back them up. We’ve seen that recently in two movements that got tons of press coverage but produced fuck-all in terms of results - the '90s anti-globalization protests and Occupy Wall Street. People keep falling for the “Let’s have a protest and change the world!” narrative, though, because that’s how it’s presented everywhere from the movies to the general classroom.

*Not NAACP, as TheWombat gently reminds me.

Very true, and very important. During the sixties, for instance, the SNCC and the younger members of the movement tended to dismiss the NAACP and the older, more conservative actors because they weren’t radical enough and weren’t in the lunchrooms or on the Freedom Rides and the like. But the NAACP provided the lawyers that bailed out the SNCC folks, and it was the constant, behind the scenes work of lawyers, lobbyists, ministers, politicians, business people, and the like that as you note laid the groundwork to make the sit-ins and marches meaningful.