It doesn't matter whether they're violent criminals. Our country has a court system. The role of judge, jury and executioner does not belong to police officers.
That's delusional. When a criminal reaches for a gun, or aims it at a person, or even tackles an armed cop, cops absolutely have the right and the obligation to shoot. And when BLM lies about criminals in the act of threatening cops, they endanger both cops and the very communities which they pretend to save.
I was just speaking to the part about being a "violent criminal living in a violent neighborhood" -- that doesn't justify shooting someone.
Typically in these cases the victim wasn't threatening the police officer's life in any way. Walter Scott was shot while running away. Freddie Gray was already safely in police custody. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes, not attacking anyone. Tamir Rice was a 12 year old playing with a toy gun.
What does it take to get people like you to acknowledge the existence of racial bias in policing? Here's a case form near where I live. The guy was shot, but note how police had been called out on two previous occasions when the guy was shooting at his neighbor's cars (one of which was occupied at the time) and they didn't arrest him.
The guy in Portland who murdered two people and injured a third a week or two back was taken into custody peacefully despite being armed with a large knife or a machete, I forget which right now. Dylann Roof murdered 8 or 9 people in a church last year but he was apprehended without incident when the police showed up. Conversely, some months ago in Florida a black caregiver who was trying to get an autistic mental patient out of a busy street and back to the assisted living facility lay down on the ground with his hands in the air when he saw a police car appear, preparing to explain the situation to the officer. The cop got out of his car shot him in the leg anyway. When he asked the officer why he had shot him, the officer replied 'I don't know.'
These are anecdotal examples rather than statistical proof, but you're divorced from reality if you don't think police treat suspects very very differently based on skin color. I'm afraid that I think it is you who are delusional.
I don't think people are disputing that there is racial bias in policing. What's being disputed are the cause(s) of the racial bias. Do the police have this bias because they are bad people who were raised to be racist or do they have this bias because some demographics exhibit statistically different patterns when it comes to violent crimes?
Hanlon's razor states that you shouldn't ascribed to malice what can better be explained by ignorance/incompetence/etc.
When even those officers belonging to the demographic experiencing the bias are guilty of being biased that suggests that Hanlon's razor is applicable and that the root cause of the police bias might be something else. Looking at the statistics for violent crime by race, shows why this bias and predisposition to being more aggressive with a certain might be explainable psychologically. It's human nature to form preconceptions based on experience.
Now that said, Hanlon's razor should also be applied in favor of the demographic responsible for violent crimes at rates several times higher than they exist in society. I have no reason to believe that anything about being black leads black men to be responsible for more crime then men of a different race, yet the statistics show this is the case. With this in mind, can we find some potential causes that might result in this. The two hypotheses that I think are reasonable to explore are lead poisoning and the lack of male role models due to incarceration. These are two causes that can impact one another. Higher lead levels could lead to greater violence that leads to greater arrests of black males which reduces male role models, and so forth.
When there is such a stark effect of lead poisoning on violence committed later in life, it's important that we give this serious consideration as one of the factors that might be really hurting the black community and its reasonable to infer the potential for causality of lead poisoning leading to violence that leads to bias against the lead poisoned group as being more violent.
It's fucking ridiculous that we can't have a reasonable academic discussion of this hypothesis without it and those considering it being branded as racist. It is anything but. No one here has suggested that a persons race is the cause of being more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. The hypothesis being proposed is that their race merely correlates and that lead poisoning may be a significant cause and that lead poisoning could have impacted anyone from any race, but it impacts black people more for unfortunate historical reasons. No one is trying to blame black people or men. We're merely trying to have an honest discussion of unfortunate environmental factor (lead poisoning) that maybe should be getting a lot more attention than it does in the discussion of why the racial bias against black people, especially black men exist. I wish that the problem of racial bias be solved as much as anyone else. The difference is that I'm not going to shut out any possible explanation just because its inconvenient to the politicized narrative being furthered by a group that violates Hanlon's Razor.
