To Serve And Protect

I don't think anyone I here is anti-police as a whole. Only the corrupt ones, the cover-ups, the innocent people killed, the innocent people jailed. I watched the documentary The Thin Blue Line the other day, and it's a perfect example of both sides. You can understand why cops are on extreme alert when you can pull over a car for having their headlights off, walk up to it, and get shot 6 times before you fully approach the window and be killed. You can also understand the mistrust of police when they lock onto an innocent man for that crime and try to bully him into signing a confession because they have no evidence. That innocent man would have been killed on death row if not maybe for that documentary. And that was a white man, think of all the stories like that of black (and other "minorities") men we don't even hear or know about, arrested, or even eventually executed, because they fit the "description".

Nobody is attacking police for being on alert to protect themselves here. But there's a lot of videos in here showing what I feel is discrimination and unnecessary force. The teenagers at the pool and the old man standing on the corner with a golf club are just a couple of the smaller examples.

 

Criminals don't snitch.

Cops don't snitch.

That mentality needs to stop.

It's legal for the police to lie to us. It's illegal for us to lie to the police.

I'm pro-police and anti-criminal, but their are flaws in the system.

 

Really?

 

WTF? What difference does it make what this guy's wrap sheet is? What difference does it make if he was arrested for gun charges before? This isn't about if he is a good guy. Cops don't have a right to kick someone in the face when they aren't presenting a threat to the officer or other people. You don't get to hurt people on a whim regardless of what you might think of them. You don't. There is no defense of what this cop did there.

And it's not nitpicking, its an example. Cops don't get consequences like everyone else.

 

In that 10 second video the guy is getting down as the officer kicks him in the face while saying "get down". He was in fact following the officers orders as he got kicked in the face and told to follow the same orders. You don't get to kick someone in the face because in the past they did XYZ. Maybe the cops had to chase him and they were mad about that, or maybe he said something to them, who knows. In that moment, at that time, the guy was doing exactly what the cop told him to do, so you don't get to hurt him just because you think he's scum.

And you keep talking about the guy being scum. A cop's judgement that someone is scum, or a saint should never be an excuse for attacking someone if they weren't a threat. If a normal citizen kicked someone that wasn't attacking them in the head and then told you the person they kicked was scum, would that ever be an excuse that got them out of trouble? No, so why would a cop using that excuse be valid?

 

I've posted at least 20 videos of officers attacking or killing unarmed, and/or non-agressive black people (not even posting half of the videos I see) and you still deny that it's racially connected to any large extent. So how would posting more videos of cops not getting consequences for their actions convince you here? You wouldn't be able to find half as many unarmed white people being attacked or killed in similar circumstances. I've challenged you and anyone else to find it and it doesn't exist.

Regarding data, I've provided data in this thread multiple times. I've provided examples of whole departments that have been shut down specifically because of all of the civil liberty lawsuits brought against them for racial discrimination. Provided data about how the statistic percentages of blacks being attacked or killed by the police don't align with the percentage of crime committed when compared to whites. I'm at work, otherwise I would just compile it here for you.

As I've said, not all cops, and not even a lot of cops, but still enough incidents for it to be a real problem, and it's racially related. I've asked this question before, but what would it take to convince you that there's a pattern of racist actions against blacks?

 

Well said.

What I never understood is why people willingly admit that there are bad cops, some cops that do terrible things, but these same people just refuse to consider that racism is just another manifestation of being a bad cop.

It exists to a large enough extent that BLM exists. And it doesn't take that many instances of the same bad cop, to have repeated racially motivated interactions because cops often times don't get punished for it.

 

I don't think you're hostile, and I appreciate that we can still talk civilly while having such divergent views.

I'll pull some of it together tonight and post it here.

 

@davriver209 I still haven't forgotten. I'll try to get to compiling everything tonight or tomorrow night

 

I just watched this video. It's trying to change the topic from why are the police killing so many blacks to why are so many blacks committing crimes, which is a serious deflection of the topic, but I'll bite...

That video is wrong in the same way the topic of black crime is always addressed today. As if the mechanisms that helped create and perpetually continue poverty in the black community are a thing of the past and that element was fixed after MLK marched. The narrator makes the same mistake I find most people in this country make when trying to understand this subject, so let me connect the dots along with giving you the data I spoke of earlier @davriver209 .

"Why are black communities all around the world having problems with crime?"

The narrator describes cultural problems in black communities and fails to understand the root, and more importantly fails to understand how close we are chronologically to it. I'm going to have to make some generalizations and skip some things here as we're talking about a huge topic, so please follow along:

Black culture in the US and to a lesser extent, in many places around the world is the product of survival tactics. In the US, our culture that was developed over centuries of tradition in Africa was ripped away from us and replaced with just attempting to stay alive. Children born into slavery were taken away from their parents, People didn't know anything about their parents, where they came from, or history, there were largely no such thing as black communities, no set of values born of normal cultural highs and lows, good times and bad times that shape most other cultures. Black people were lynched, murdered, raped, beaten to an inch of their lives, and treated as less than human as the norm. Growing up in that, all you know is the bad, all you can think about is trying to survive, especially if you don't have the perspective and dignity of knowing your people's history and the pride of knowing the great things your ancestors did. Once slavery ended in 1865, it didn't really end. Jim Crow laws starting in 1877 kept blacks segregated and poor in the south. But that was just one element most people know about. What a lot of people don't know is that slavery continued for another 75 or so years in what is called "Neo-Slavery". The 13th Amendment language specifically states that Slavery is abolished except in the punishment of a crime, and that was used in the South, where most blacks resided, as a means to continue slavery.

Watch this:



You can watch the whole documentary here if you're interested:

That continued until 1939 when at the beginning of WW2 Franklin D Rosevelt signed a law that punished whites for continuing to incarcerate blacks as slave labor..... (My mother was born in 1939.... That should give you an idea of how little time has passed since slavery really ended). WW2 ended in 1945, Black soldiers came back to the US and were still treated less than human and that's when the civil rights moment started in 1950, and the Jim Crow laws were outlawed in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled on Brown Vs. Department of Education. At no time from the "end " of slavery in 1865 to the end of the Civil Rights movement in 1954, that's 89 years, did blacks largely have any equality, opportunity for a happy and successful life in which they were the masters of their own destiny. Most blacks couldn't get a comparable education to a white person, or get a job that was nearly as lucrative, so generational poverty was the norm.

It's been 62 years since the Civil Rights movement victory in Brown Vs. The Board of Education, affording blacks THE BEGINNING of an attempt at equal opportunity, which sounds like a long time, until you actually look at the generational legacy and the s*** they had to dig themselves out of in the aftermath of, Slavery, Jim Crow, and Neo-Slavery. There have only been on average, about 2-3 generations of blacks that have gown up in the post civil rights era, and they did so largely in ghettos that were designed by racist zoning laws, not allowing blacks to live where they pleased, and generational cycles of incarceration that don't get fixed because the justice system, by and large is racially biased.

Here are some facts that prove it:

"1. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates - according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses - according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.

2. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.

3. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.
African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites - according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.

4. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.

5. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded "All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring...The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US."

6. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.

7. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial - the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, "Who wouldn't rather do three years for a crime they didn't commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn't do?"

8. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.

9. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.

10. As a result, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Marc Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.

11. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.

12. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.

13. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.

14. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-quigley/fourteen-examples-of-raci_b_658947.html

There's a ton more, but it's late, so that's all for now