Quote:On your first point, somethings got to change.  Better?  Maybe.  Different?  Absolutely.  They will change because they must.  

 

On your second remark.  I did not say it is all racism, but it is certainly a factor. <a>http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304463789858002</a>.  Another interesting article from other cops: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/2...EV20141223.  I could post articles for days on this, but it is alive and well in the system.

 

Here is something that stood out from that 2nd article: Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. All but ONE said that, when off duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.  The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.

 

Some of the other things you state are certainly other reasons.  But you only see it from one side.  I think if you lived in a black man's shoes you would look at the world differently.  I guess my point is you only view it from one point of view,... yours and you don't consider that cops are part of the problem and racism is also part of the problem as well as the other things you mentioned.

 

I'm always for better training, but I don't know how / why that's the default go-to for people that don't know how / where to improve the training. It's like people say because they don't know how to improve training. If you don't know how to improve the training, then I don't know how you can say it needs to be improved.

 

As for your second comment, it's irrelevant to the point at hand. I've personally witnessed a black Sergeant violate policy and state / federal law, threatened to sue the county, and was then promoted into a position he didn't deserve. I've seen inferior minority candidates promoted over extremely qualified candidates for nothing more than threatening their supervision with lawsuits should they not be promoted. Three examples come to mind. In these examples, are the minority officers valid in their concerns? No. They have a misconceived nothing that they're being overlooked because of their race when it's actually their skillset. On the slip side, I'm not naive enough to think a bad white candidate wasn't promoted over a better black candidate. 

 

Having said all that, my point is that police officer or not, people aren't immune from making absurd claims of racism. I think what you're talking about goes more into the cultural problem. People don't want to be the problem. They can't admit that THEY did something wrong, so they excuse it by saying something no one can disprove--racism. I believe, however, that's a different conversation for another day.

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