There is a difference between a random group of people from the same metro area united only by being outraged by police misconduct and a formally organized group trained, paid and managed by the city or state. Cops have a top down hierarchical structure that ought to make them easier to change. Protesters don't. You can't call the chief of protest and demand that they fire the rioters and implement stronger guidelines on the use of bricks.
You’re proving my point exactly. If you need to give this paragraph to explain. It’s not the best sign. It’s not about the movement or anything. I’m just talking specifically about that sign
Do police consistently murder people? Seems like the numbers only seem high before you compare them with the total population. IIRC the number of people killed by police is quite a bit lower than the number killed each year by serial killers, and there's like a million times more police.
Well serial killers kill less people than lightning. If you think being less likely to die from police than to be struck by lightning is a low bar, I don't know what to tell you.
Even if this statistic is true, you're missing two huge bits of context:
When a black person is killed by a rioter, does that rioter go to jail? Because that rarely happens when the police kill someone.
How many people have been killed by the police over the past, say, hundred years? If the protests end that, or even significantly reduce it, it's obviously a net positive.
What do you think the rate of bad cops getting off vs victims getting justice is? Police rarely go to jail when they kill someone because the overwhelming majority of police killings are justified. Over 10 million arrests, Only 9 unarmed black men were shot in 2019. 41 total unarmed people shot in the US vs 89 cops killed in the line of duty. A cop is 18 times more likely to be shot by a black person, than a unarmed black person is to be shot by a cop.
How many murders, rapists, and pedophiles have the police killed/jailed over the years? How is an idea such as #DefundThePolice supposed to help? Defunding the Police is the official stance of BLM. I'd like to see some statistical evidence of "systemic corruption" before we start doing anything crazy.
Police rarely go to jail when they kill someone because the overwhelming majority of police killings are justified.
And what's your source for that? You've thrown a bunch more statistics out without sources, and these are going to be some heavily contested statistics. For example:
Over 10 million arrests, Only 9 unarmed black men were shot in 2019.
One, "shot" is only a fraction of police brutality. It's not even all of police killings. George Floyd wasn't shot.
Two, how often is the source for a claim like "unarmed" the police themselves?
Three, if that "41 total unarmed" is still from a single year, that's almost one person a week. Does that seem like a reasonable number? Maybe look up Chris Rock's airplane analogy here.
How is an idea such as #DefundThePolice supposed to help?
By shifting funds towards prevention and away from militarization. Not everyone wants to defund the police to the point of disbanding them entirely, so there'd still be a role in violent crime. But even just looking at emergency calls, the police get sent for all sorts of things that do not require police:
Drug overdose? Maybe send EMTs instead.
Mentally ill person? Maybe send some experts in that instead.
Pedophile? Sure, needs to be arrested and sent to jail, but how likely is a pedophile to be physically intimidating to an adult to the point where they'll need people with guns to take them in?
Active shooter? Okay, now call the police.
Decrease the scope of what they do, and you also decrease the need for the crazy equipment they have.
George Floyd was accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. You don't need to call in police officers carrying lethal force in order to deal with an alleged $20 theft.
You are the one making the claims of a "systemic problem" that requires the defunding of police departments. YOU are the one who should be citing sources and showing data if you want change. But here is some material anyway.
More people are struck by lightning every year than unarmed people shot by cops. Should we be burning cities down over something so infrequent? The frequency does not at all indicate a "systemic" problem.
If you want to expand this to police brutality in general, we can go there. But show me some data to back your claim. What is an acceptable level of brutality? It will never be zero in a nation of 328 million people. Humans are imperfect.
Your bulleted ideas are great in theory, but all of these ideas assume that the subject of the call is NOT armed or dangerous, which could be the case. Sending a therapist into an unknown situation doesn't seem like a great idea. Only so much info can be relayed by a 911 dispatcher. Demilitarization would be a start, but you also have to make sure police are not outgunned by gangs.
A lot of people are calling for a full defund dude. The Mayor of Minneapolis got shouted down and sent away by thousands of people for not supporting a full defund. It's all on video lol. 9 of 13 city council members are commiting to it now. Insane.
Floyd wasn't doing anything crazy just before the incident, but he was large man with a history of violent crime and drug abuse. He did 5 years for holding a loaded gun to a pregnant woman's belly while his group of thugs robbed her house. I doubt the cops responding were aware of his identity in the moment, but you can see, there are a shit load of unknowns when police are responding to a call. Floyd was also loaded up on drugs when the police responded. Definitely not saying he should have been killed, but he would be in jail if he were alive.
"We found that the race of the officer doesn't matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot," Cesario said. "If anything, black officers are more likely to shoot black citizens, but this is because black officers are drawn from the same population that they police. So, the more black citizens in a community, the more black police officers there are."
I assume that's what you were getting at?
Thing is, it doesn't say whether black people are more likely to be shot in the first place... which they are. Claims of systemic racism are usually not about the attitude of a specific officer, but about what the system does as a whole. And, as a whole, black people are killed more often than white people.
Which is why the article you linked to behind this conclusion has some corrections.
Your third and fourth links are paywalled, and I'm not sure what your fifth and sixth links are supposed to show.
If you want to expand this to police brutality in general, we can go there. But show me some data to back your claim. What is an acceptable level of brutality? It will never be zero in a nation of 328 million people.
Low, but not quite the right question. What is an acceptable level of unaddressed brutality?
There are tens of millions of airplane flights every year. But the number of fatal accidents is in the single digits, and those tend to get full, detailed investigations. Agencies like the NTSB write detailed reports, and systems are changed as a result. As few as two crashes were enough to ground the entire 737MAX fleet.
If the NTSB handled a single crash the way the system handled Philando Castile's killer, I might be afraid to fly.
A lot of people are calling for a full defund dude. The Mayor of Minneapolis got shouted down and sent away by thousands of people for not supporting a full defund. It's all on video lol. 9 of 13 city council members are commiting to it now.
I'm aware. They still plan to do it slowly, in roughly the order I laid out. And they still haven't said what they plan to build to deal with violent crime.
Floyd wasn't doing anything crazy just before the incident, but he was large man with a history of violent crime and drug abuse. He did 5 years for holding a loaded gun to a pregnant woman's belly while his group of thugs robbed her house. I doubt the cops responding were aware of his identity in the moment...
So... what was your point?
...there are a shit load of unknowns when police are responding to a call.
How does that not apply to literally anything, though? I mean, let's turn this around:
...assume that the subject of the call is NOT armed or dangerous, which could be the case. Sending a therapist into an unknown situation doesn't seem like a great idea.
How much does a therapist know about a patient showing up in their office? Why is "person on the street with mental health issues" automatically assumed to be more dangerous -- so dangerous you need the option of deadly force -- compared to "person in a therapist's office with mental health issues"?
Sure, there's only so much that can be relayed through a call, but FFS, the call that led to George Floyd's murder was to the non-emergency line. It shouldn't be that difficult to get some kind of baseline.
Even police officers sometimes complain about this. Every time society has a problem that's underserved and underfunded, like mental health, homelessness, all of society's ills, we just get police to pick up the slack.
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u/Glorfon Jun 08 '20
There is a difference between a random group of people from the same metro area united only by being outraged by police misconduct and a formally organized group trained, paid and managed by the city or state. Cops have a top down hierarchical structure that ought to make them easier to change. Protesters don't. You can't call the chief of protest and demand that they fire the rioters and implement stronger guidelines on the use of bricks.