[quote]smh_23 wrote:
As for what I meant when I said that my position is a blend of yours and theirs:
You are right about black men and crime – particularly violent crime. It takes the most ludicrously idiotic propagandist to fail to understand that higher proportional rates of violent crime will necessarily lead to higher proportional rates of cop-community interaction, including hostile/tense/dangerous interaction. BLM and Ta-Nehisi Coates and all the rest of them essentially remove moral agency from black people by sidestepping this entire aspect of the conversation. There are many related points, but I don’t feel like going into all of it, and I’m sure most people around here are pretty familiar with this stuff.
On the other hand, the BLM folks are right about many (not all – see Brown, Michael) of the individual cases they’ve chosen to highlight, and they are right that it ought to be our goal, as a civilized society concerned from the utter outset with things like individual liberties and rights (and opposed to the concept of collective guilt), to minimize outcomes like, e.g., Garner’s. Most conservatives I’ve met agree with this. Where they stumble is in failing to understand that the famous cases – the ones to which we can all refer by name – aren’t just bad-apple-cop narratives. They also tell stories of general and structural problems which contribute to and increase the likelihood of abuse, tension, etc. The Justice Department report I’ve been referring to evidences this in microcosm. There is a P.D. obsessed with revenue generation, aggressively pestering specifically black citizens in order to make up projected budgetary shortfalls. There is a ridiculously corrupt municipal court. There are actual, good old-fashioned racist emails exchanged among officials. Most importantly, there are daily interactions like this one:
[quote]
In the summer of 2012, a
32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a
Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man?s car, blocking him in, and
demanded the man?s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer
accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and
ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the
man was armed. The officer also asked to search the man?s car. The man objected, citing his
constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging
him with eight violations of Ferguson?s municipal code. One charge, Making a False
Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., ?Mike? instead of
?Michael?), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver?s
license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked
car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator?s license, and with
having no operator?s license in his possession. The man told us that, because of these charges,
he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years.[/quote][/quote]
No one is saying, certainly not me, that black people have not been mistreated by law enforcement on occasion. My response to that is that all walks of life have been mistreated by law enforcement on occasion. The fact is there are some bad cops. While they represent less than 1% of the total they are certainly out there.
However, there is no denying that black on black crime harms far and away more black people than officers of the law have. Perhaps the ratio is 1000 to 1, perhaps 10,000 to 1, I have no idea but it is large. So, my question…oh wait you don’t like questions forget it. My point is there seems to be no outrage over blacks harming blacks.
Further, there seems to be no black community outrage over black males impregnating black women and then leaving the scene and like an amnesia victim forgetting all about what they just did.
Yes, black people are still singled out by some bad cops. And bad cops don’t discriminate they treat most very badly. But that pales in the face of what blacks are doing to each other on a daily basis and have been for decades.
Police are the least problem that black people have in the US. They have created the biggest problem and the second biggest problem is that many refuse to face it!
