(05-30-2020, 09:32 AM)NYC4jags Wrote: LOL

"I had an encounter with police and didn't get killed while begging for my life, so everything's OK, herp-derp."

You guys are [BLEEP] hilarious.

The problem is that we can't go 5 weeks in this country right now without an arrest somewhere going horribly wrong and finding its way to the national spotlight.

This ^  has resulted in a very serious fracture between a very large section of the citizens of our great nation and the largely brave and honorable men and women of our police forces. And when I say "largely" I mean a very high percentage. I'm not anti-police in the slightest. I am anti-wrongful death. 

You can stick your head in the sand and say "racism isn't a problem anymore" or "this cop was a bad actor and not racist" or any response that serves to lessen what's being perceived all you want. But it does nothing to address a very real and growing issue that isn't going away by digging up police statistics or citing one's own personal experience with police and/or racial bias. 

How you feel about race doesn't matter right now. 
How millions of disaffected people of color are feeling right now does matter, whether you like it or not. 
It doesn't matter if you think it's only a problem because of the way media and internet function in our current society. 

Ignoring this problem or sweeping it under the rug won't fix it. 

Police forces can readily adopt efforts to sow good will by ramping up their vetting procedures and augmenting training to avoid racial bias (or even the perception of it) and begin to make some difference in the rift that has occured. 

As I've said before - this may lead to some redundancies for some officers in training - but who cares? 
Too much of a good thing is OK right now.

There are 350 MILLION people in this country. Does anyone even try to wrap their brain around that number? If everything is filmed and scrutinized, it's a statistical likelihood that we would uncover terrible acts of negligence in any sector. Did you know a person dies from a semi crash every 15 minutes? 500,000 a year, resulting in 5000 deaths. 87% of those were caused due to truck driver negligence (which is an insane number). If we had dashcams in every vehicle, and the news decided to cover trucking accidents due to negligent truck drivers, there would be SO many people afraid to pass semi's on the road. There would be more accidents as people irrationally tried to avoid tractor-trailers. The odds of dying from a tractor-trailer accident as a black man are almost the exact same as being unarmed and shot by a police officer (0.0000009 vs 0.0000002). Why aren't they afraid of that? Because no one can profit from it. There is no narrative that can be attached to it.

The race issue sells. It gets viewers. It gets people in power. It also creates division, propagates fear, and builds resentment. There are faulty cops the same way there are faulty truck drivers. If you think this is a poor example, explain why. They both cause death. They both are due to negligence. They both happen frequently enough to be observed and filmed. The difference is the narrative (also, I think dying to vehicle accident feels less personal). If you believe cops are racist and want people dead, you will attribute intention to the (relatively) few deaths that occur this year. However, it's a belief. And it's a reinforced belief. There is no evidence that most of these officers are racist, and especially no evidence that the entirety of the police system is built on racist ideology. So, why do people repeat these talking points?

Switching gears, I ask again: How do you expect a human to do this job flawlessly? Vetting and reform are just words. How do you change the vetting process? Police departments already do this. How do you create reform? What specifically do you do? Double the training videos? That's probably the least effective way to reinforce an idea. How do you make it effective? At least with trucks, we have the hope of self-driving vehicles. Policing the public has no AI alternative. It is a seriously stressful job with a high risk factor, compounded by human error. A person has to regularly make choices that I would not want to make. That most of us would not want to make. I know from my own military training how hard it is not to become desensitized when working in a hostile environment. No matter how good your vetting and reform plans are (again just words), you are not going to remove human error and bad actors 100%.

So what if we reduce the number by half over the next 5 years, so only 50 unarmed black men are shot by police each year. Does that stop the narrative? If there's only 5 that are controversial enough to put on TV, spaced out every other month, does that stop the narrative? What if we reduce it again by half over the next 5 years, and only 25 unarmed black men are shot by police and only 3 are controversial enough to put on TV, spaced out every 6 months? It's that going to stop the narrative. Is anyone going to care that there were only 2 put on TV this year as opposed to 5 a few years back? Or does the LIE continue. Blacks will feel this way as long there are race peddlers and smear merchants willing to profit from it. That's a problem that is every bit as real as the police shootings, but who is addressing it? Why is that not important?

I like that Will Smith quote that was mentioned, "Racism is not getting worse. It's just getting filmed." I just like it for different reasons.

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