The Black Lives Matter movement

You’re stuck on the police part of it. The police aren’t at fault here – in my opinion, they actually did their jobs correctly by questioning a black man they got a tip about instead of killing him where he stood. The tip was bad because the lady looked at him, saw “black man,” and ran to the cops.

It’s like the lady with the barbecue, or the dudes at Starbucks. These aren’t police killings, but they’re part of the same problem.

I totally agree with you. My mistake for focusing on the cops element. The woman was wrong because she took the photo before any crime occurred.

But it goes kind of deeper than that.

Part of the problem is that there is this widespread, inherent, distrust of black people. That woman, for some reason, felt like that guy walking his dogs was suspicious.

At this point, a common knee jerk reaction might be, “Oh, well it certainly wasn’t because he was BLACK! It was just because she didn’t recognize him!” But the reality is that, no, it probably was because he was black. And acknowledging this is an important part of figuring this stuff out.

Black folks deal with this kind of crap all the time. White folks don’t deal with this, and on some level, it’s really hard for us to even grasp it. It’s on something of an unconscious level much of the time. A lot of the time, I wouldn’t call it overt racism… it’s not. But it’s a kind of “baked in” racism that we’ve been conditioned to internalize over our lives.

It’s tempting to just deny it, to pretend it’s not there. Because it’s embarassing. Part of us knows its wrong, and we don’t think of ourselves as bad people. Certainly we’re not racists! But it’s there. And in order to become better people, and make the world better, requires acknowledging it and making a conscious effort to change it.

And it’s not just for the sake of others. It makes the world better for us too. There’s an instinctual drive to have some amount of fear of “others”, people and things which aren’t part of our daily routine. There are strong evolutionary reasons for this. But most of the time, in modern society where you’re not living in a tiny village that never sees anyone else, it’s overkill. And if you can get past it, not being afraid of other folks on that subconscious level makes things less stressful for YOU, while also making you less prone to do shit like call the cops on a guy walking his dogs.

I think people who deny this problem exists just don’t seem to be willing to admit that yes, stuff does happen just because someone was black. It’s like not seeing the forest for the trees at this point, but there are people who just don’t get that.

My neighborhood uses the app to stress out over loud noises and helicopters flying overhead.

We need to start a next door app thread i think.

This is my experience with Next Door as well.

Stories are still being shared. I tried to find out the source of it, and it looks like it’s Mic.

I am going to keep posting issues that remind us that there is still work to do. i don’t know if we have one person who wants to attack me for that, or if multiple people who don’t like it but… these issues didn’t go away even if our president can’t handle being out of the headlines for more than one minute and creates new spotlighting problems, daily

At least with this scenario, the chief has already begun to make some changes, directives he calls it, so most of what we see does not happen again. It’s still not quite there but the head hitting stuff hopefully won’t happen again.

Fuck him, he’ll disappear once people stop responding to his bait. Police misconduct is one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Yeah, fuck anyone who dares to point out that emotionally charged anecdotal evidence, in any context, is exactly what can lead someone to think a statistically insignificant problem is in fact “one of the most pressing issues of our time.” He’s just baiting, and anyone who disagrees with BLM orthodoxy is clearly an evil person. We can’t have dissent.

It’s great to point out police misconduct. Not so good when people draw false conclusions from individual instances.

A good counter point: https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/police-shootings-media-created-fake-crisis/

Thanks. We need to keep highlighting it. It’s not going away anytime soon but we need to keep reminding ourselves we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Something that happens like several times every single day = anecdote.

Thing that maybe happened once several years ago and is vague = perfect defense of something I like.

You seriously believe that the problems we’re seeing with cops interacting with society is a statistically insignificant problem?

There was a time where I didn’t buy into all of the folks saying cops were doing bad things… but now we have video footage of them doing it. And in all those cases, if not for the video, folks would have should denied they happened.

At this point, I cannot in good conscious just pretend like it’s not happening. It is happening. A lot.

Guess I’ll be doing this in many threads! @arrendek’s Tampermonkey script works great for ignoring people.

I tried to install it and get a message that says it can’t be installed on this website.

I had to restart Chrome, now it works A+

And it’s not just the scale, relatively speaking ‘only’ a little over a thousand people are killed by police in a given year. Compared to some other things, it’s small potatoes.

But!

These are people with the power of the state, these incidents tend to disproportionately affect minority communities, and the police are nearly immune from consequences. We have direct video proof of gross police misconduct, instances where police straight up lie to justify shootings, even cases where police have planted weapons on the victim after the fact, al caught on video.

To pick a not entirely random example, Phillando Castile. The old mantra from people used to be ‘just do what the cop says and nothing bad will happen, ergo if someone gets shot they did something to deserve it’. Well in his case he did what he was supposed to, informed the officer that he legally had a gun in the glove box, as you are supposed to.

The cop freaks out and seconds later he’s dead.

We’ve got no knock raids (another major, but separate issue) being done on the wrong houses, and the homeowner winds up dead, or a toddler has a flash bang thrown through their window into their crib causing nearly deadly injury.

These things have been happening for years. And the problem isn’t that incidents happen. Yes, every single wrongful death is tragic. The bugger issue is the response. There is almost no accountability. The officers close ranks and, rather than confront an officer who acted eggreguousl, they attack the fact that the misconduct was caught on film. They try to prevent the release of dash or body cam footage when it would show their claim and report inaccurate, or perhaps even maliciously false.

Because the fact that you could have an encounter with the police, do what you are supposed to do and be innocent of wrongdoing, wind up dead, and have the police cover it up and claim you were a threat, perhaps even fabricating evidence? That has profound impacts on people. That has profound impacts on communities. That makes everyone less safe because , now, would you really want to call the cops? I mean if you live in one of those neighborhoods that faces the kind of policing I don’t out here in white muddle class suburbia, is certainly think twice about it over some petty matter. Have neighbors fighting? Unless I see a gun, no way. There is a very real, and not inaccurate, perception in those communities that the police aren’t there to protect you, they are there to protect themselves. And inviting the police often increases the chance of a situation turning deadly.

And that is why the David French article is wrong @gman1225. It’s wrong because when the officer who killed Castille faces no consequence, and the police attack the fact of the footage rather than the bad officer, people lose faith. It’s wrong because this

In addition to focusing on race, Vox explains the frequency of police shootings by reference to the legal rules of engagement governing the use of force. “Legally, what most matters in these shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their or others’ lives were in danger,” they write. “Not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat.”

Think about that statement. How, pray tell, is a police officer supposed to discern whether a shooting victim “actually” poses a threat other than through their “objectively reasonable” beliefs? How can anyone tell?

Is bullshit of the highest order. He immediately poses a hypothetical about a man brandishing a knife. But what about all the instances of people without weapons. What about the time where the racist asshole in a Walmart calls the cops and straight up lies about some kid holding a B.B. gun he had picked up off the shelf and was minding his own business shopping, and the police storm in and execute the kid who had never posed a threat to anyone, and was not aware of the police until the moment he was shot? What about people brandishing nothing other than their wallet or cell phone who wind up dead?

No David French you do not get to ignore those. And if they make your argument weaker or even untenable? Perhaps you need to rethink it then.

This is the stuff that forced me to change my tune.

These are supposed to be the good guys. That’s what I was always taught as a kid, and I still believe that MOST cops are good guys.

But there are clearly a frightening number of bad guys mixed in there, and those guys are corrupting the entire system. They are teaching bad habits to younger cops. They are destroying the relationship with the community. All of this makes it harder for the good cops to do their job.

For the sake of good cops, not to mention the civilian population, we need to be ultra strict in handling the bad apples. People need to know that if the cops break the law, they will be held accountable.

Exactly!

It’s not that bad cops do bad things. Obviously that’s a problem, but that can be corrected. It’s that the ‘good’ cops defend and protect those bad actors.

That’s far more corrosive to society, and why you see such distrust in some communities. It also further emboldens bad actors, and makes it more likely for people to commit bad behavior.