(05-30-2020, 11:25 AM)JagJohn Wrote:

(05-30-2020, 10:49 AM)Last42min Wrote: 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.

You are clearly the type of person who thinks the world can be understood through numbers, and you bombard every post with so many statistics and hypothetical equations that they start to become meaningless. JJ does a similar thing. This is just an observation, not necessarily an attack. It speaks to the different ways people process the world around them, and why people on either side of an issue assume the other to have some mental imbalance.

I am not that kind of person. I believe numbers are useful, particularly when evaluating highly emotional topics. However, numbers are also easily manipulated, so I try to only use them when they are clearly demonstrative. I will admit I am less emotional than most people, but I don't think emotions are useless. They are great indicators of well-being of an individual or society. They often point to underlying issues. In this instance, I think the underlying issues go far beyond police brutality.

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