Right, but he was answering the question without challenging the assumption, so I assumed he shared it.
This occurred to me as well, and you are correct that they can be disconnected. It is still a silly place to begin a problem-solving session with. A better start would be
How do we improve outcomes involving the application of force?
This has been asked many times and answered many times, but it is obvious to both of us that there is clear room for improvement. Like any other field of study, we know more than we did yesterday, so let’s ask that question again and again, until we get it right.
Again, we still don’t know why that cop did what he did. Calling him a racist is certainly convenient and it certainly paints a nice, neat picture of “why?”, but I can’t say for certain that hatred of black people is what was going through his head and all of the other cop’s heads as it was all going down. Maybe it was, maybe it was anger fed by racism, who knows? I don’t.
We are being led and conditioned to primarily consider the race of people involved over any other circumstance. If it even remotely fits the narrative, it is time to fire up the outrage machine. We’ve seen it time and time again.
I am optimistic that police as individuals can do better when it comes to calling out their own. That’s a culture thing, not something you can write into law. You can set up rules and laws to support a culture like that, and I would agree that would be worth examining. Maybe some of it can be found on that list. But you can never, ever legislate bad human behavior out of existence. Not in a pool of people as large as law enforcement in the USA, which is something like 800,000 people.
I’m not optimistic that our leaders and our news media will do a good job of making that point. I expect that no matter what might be done, the gears already in motion will continue to churn whenever the next bad outcome takes place. Getting the gears of outrage to stop turning will be a much bigger challenge than making whatever realistic improvements can be made on an already good institution staffed by imperfect, but largely self-selecting people with good intentions.
I don’t see any major leaps being made without science, just incremental improvements interspersed with more bad outcomes that will, unfortunately, be similar to what is already being rioted over.
Hopefully Elon Musk’s got his bad apple detector in the works. Perhaps a neural interface and/or improvements in behavioral studies, neurochemistry, etc might give us the insight needed to weed out those prone to bad behavior with a higher rate of success than the current process. Maybe we’re right around the corner from Minority Report. You’d know better than I.
