Quote:I don't think you're baiting, Jags... And maybe my response to you was too cute by half. My point is, that I think your question is a rhetorical one... One which is used as a device by some to flip the blame from brutality on innocent people back on to them.
Philando Castile and the therapist in miami were doing all the right things and were still shot. So, there comes a time when no matter how much you comply, it appears that there is a subset of terrible cops that are just gonna shoot you, or pull you over, or give you a hard time, just for being black. And it's happening in every community all across the country. Not all of these encounters end in murder. Some of them just end with humiliation. But humiliation is still oppression and it's still brutality.
I'm not sure it is rhetorical. Am I flipping blame? I don't think so. I think it takes two to tango. I think it takes effort on both sides to better understand each other and both sides take action to try to eliminate it. I say try because it'll never completely go away. You'll have die hard racists scum on both sides. That is if we are just talking black and white to keep the debate simple.
As for the police shootings, I'll bite. From what little we know about the Miami incident it looks suspicious. It seems at first glance the officer is not fit for the job. Sometimes people can get all the training in the world yet, can't seem to get it right or handle it. Maybe recent news events were in his head at the time and was on edge or whatever. Idk. But before officially calling the office a complete screw up I would like to get the rest of the facts and hear what the department has to say about it.
I'm not saying police are above the law, I'm not saying there aren't racist cops. But I hit up my good friend Google to try to get a little more info on amount of arrests per year made by law enforcement, how many fatal shootings, and how many of the suspects were armed. I couldn't find recent years number of arrests. I didn't search forever, but I saw in 2012 there were almost 12.2 million arrests. I'd say it's safe to say in 2015 there were more than that. With 12.2 million arrest or more a year, that equates to almost 33,400 arrests made per day. Ok, so let's look at the shootings. I did find info for 2015. So apples/oranges, whatever, it's the best I could find in my brief search. In 2015 there were 965 fatalities by police, or 2.6 per day. Of those 965 or 2.6 per day only 90 of suspects were unarmed. Even in some of those cases I'm willing to bet a lot of those were justified. I don't bring this up to suggest the small amount of lives lost do not matter. Of course they matter. But what I am trying to get at, is that due to the vast number of arrests made there is an almost certainty that accidents, mistakes, and poor judgment will be made. And considering that 2.6 people were shot and killed per day we are only hearing about a case every few weeks and they all with black victims. So either A, all the others are justified, B, only black people get shot by cops, C the media isn't showing you the white or Hispanic fatalities, D the cop on black shootings isn't the huge epidemic as some are claiming or E a combination of the previous.
