Lawsuit: Virginia police officers threatened man during stop

[CJD]

(04-19-2021, 03:16 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Pretty much.  If he had just exhibited a moderate level of compliance instead of refusing, arguing and debating then this whole thing would almost certainly have been handled without incident. 




I have zero issue with it being condemned.  I have a major issue with it being treated like an epidemic.  You have very powerful people in this country labeling law enforcement as a whole as a racist institution.  This is beyond stupid.  It's both hyperbolic and dangerous in the extreme.



For sure, if only because people of lower socioeconomic status are more frequently going to be involved in street level offenses that trigger this type of police interaction.  They are also more likely, by dint of being poor, to have a vehicle with problems that would cause an LEO to pull the vehicle over.


Absolutely, and it is this narrative that I believe is causing so much harm and distrust.  Studies have shown that LEO's are more likely to shoot a white offender than a black one.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877

But that doesn't fit the narrative, so it is ignored.  There's a lot of people making a lot of money on race hustling right now and there's a lot of politicians making a lot of political hay the same way.  It's a bad combination, it's volatile and we're all going to pay the price for it.

I'm not an expert in statistical evaluation nor am I extremely well versed in the study of the statistics surrounding these types of things. The studies I've been presented do say that more white people are shot than black people, but as far as I'm aware those statistics don't account for the fact that white people make up a significantly larger percentage of the population, so those raw numbers don't mean a whole lot with that additional context.

Regardless of statistics, which can be bent to say what you need them to say in many cases, I will say that black people, in general, seem to have developed a large distrust of police because of the pre-civil rights and Jim Crow policing which was objectively and outwardly racist, not to mention the drug war, which was at the very least engineered by racists such as Richard Nixon. Those black people are still alive and they are raising their children to be wary of the police as well. And racism didn't vanish in 1964. It is slowly decreasing over time (in theory), so the 70s and 80s likely had a ton of racist policing in them as well. 

When you combine that built in skepticism and, to some degree, culture that was created and defined from a time that was outwardly racist with the socio economic status of a lot of black people in this country leading to more run ins with the cops than your typical white person and throw in a dash of media sensationalism, you have a cocktail for a lot of social unrest. And individual police are not doing the situation any favors when stories like this, Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright come out. And the right wing is definitely not doing the situation any favors when they try to defend the police who carry out those shootings.

I have no doubts that there are racist cops. There are racist everythings, because there are a fair number of racists in this country (just like the black people who didn't trust cops because of their treatment in the 60s and prior and taught their children in kind, there were racists from the 60s also raising their children to keep those beliefs as well etc). I don't think police as a whole are actively racist. I just think racism is baked into our society so deep that we sometimes can't even detect it.

I went to college UC which was right above Over the Rhine, a historically poor, black neighborhood with one of the highest crime rates in the city, if not the entire state. We went there during a time in which OTR was being renovated and gentrified to have a lot of trendy restaurants and fancy condominiums, so a lot of poor, majority black people were being "pushed" (for lack of a better term) out of their neighborhood and up into the Clifton area, where UC is. This happened to be occurring at the same time that there was a significant spike in muggings around the campus. We got an email about every single reported mugging/rape/violent crime in the UC area and they came in basically every day and several over each weekend. The suspects were majority black. This led to a general leeriness among students of black people late at night.

I had a friend who I'd like to believe was not racist. We were studying late at night on campus and we were getting ready to go home and he said, "I'm going to take a taxi home. I know it's not far but I just don't want to risk encountering any black  --  I mean muggers on the way home."

Now, maybe that was just a slip of the tongue. Maybe he was thinking of the most recent email and it just popped out of his mouth without him thinking. But he had subconsciously linked crime and black people because of these emails we were receiving.

I don't think its unreasonable that the same thing is happening to police. When the majority of the people you deal with happen to be black (because, as we mentioned, the high intersection of poverty with black people and the high intersection of poverty with crime), I don't think it's unreasonable that cops may start to associate black people with crime and, subconsciously or otherwise, treat them differently to white people.

That doesn't make those cops racist, but it does affect their ability to interact with black people in a fair and measured way, as we witnessed here with the 2nd cop. Was his behavior due to the man's race? I have no idea.

But I don't blame onlookers for thinking it may have something to do with it. Expand that out across the entire country and I think you'll realize why people tend to fear that police may be institutionally racist.