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Obama Holder Justice dept investigated and published damning reports on abuse and bias in Ferguson and Baltimore PD and were racing to finish their Chicago PD report before Trump was sworn in. Not saying he was all in but it was more than just “addressing it”
but i just thought of soemthing. as much as i believe what i believe and you believe what you believe, neither is objectively right.
on a visceral level i'm sure i'm correct but like, does that invalidate what you think? or a pro cop person? it's all just opinion.
Baltimore entered into a consent decree with the DOJ because of the DOJ report (
https://consentdecree.baltimorecity.gov/). It isn't everything it needs to be, but hopefully acts as a start. Hopefully, it moves things in the right direction. Broken windows, zero tolerance policing, the war on drugs fucked a lot of things up and it is going to take a lot of work on the police's side to regain the (black) public's trust. Especially, when we consider how often this form of policing affected and continues to affect black lives (
https://www.theroot.com/high-school-antwon-rose-attended-faces-brutal-allegatio-1827207545), not to mention the problems that black communities have been burdened with because of redlining, Jim Crowe, etc., especially in places like Baltimore.
Also, just to a few other comments in the thread (some of the posters are obviously just trying to provoke a reaction and I don't want to directly respond to them)
The odds of winning Powerball are 1 in 292 million.
However, the odds that a black man will be shot by the police in any given year in the US = 1 in 60,000
and the odds the that a white man will be shot by the police in any given year in the US = 1 in 200,000.
The police kill three people each day in the US (
https://www.c-span.org/video/?325595-6/washington-journal-peter-moskos-police-shootings-us).
Second, here is a good source on policing in America:
http://www.copinthehood.com . The blog is run by an associate professor at John Jay (arguably the best criminal justice program in the country). There are tons of books, academic articles, etc., but this is probably a good place to start for most of us.
Third, it can be argued (and convincingly) that the rightful outrage over the killings of black men helps reduce police brutality, because it seems many non-black people automatically give the police the benefit of the doubt and assume the person who they shot must be evil, bad, or deserved it. Quoting our professor here, "I think most white people simply don't care when police kill people. Period. Or, to be more slightly more nuanced: whites are more likely to give police the benefit of doubt in questionable shootings and forgive even egregious (criminal) errors. Police are good, they say; sometimes they mess up; it's the price we pay to have police in a violent society. I call it the Al Sharpton Effect. If there's no pushback when police use lethal force, police have no incentive to use lethal force only as a last resort. I think it's incontrovertible that Sharpton -- no matter what one thinks of his methods, moral, and motivations -- is partly responsible for helping make the NYPD the least-shooting large police department in the country. Every shooting in NYC gets analyzed and bad shootings get hammered. That makes for better use of force guidelines and a better police department."
Law enforcement is the only branch of the government that we allow to use physical force on citizens. With this much power, it only makes sense that we should scrutinize their actions and not just assume everything they do is right.
Finally, I can't express enough sympathy for a young skater who got shot in the back because he ran from the police. I can't even count the number of times I ran from the police and never even got a ticket.
https://youtu.be/84JpXmJRU40?t=22m1s
Topic: Local Pittsburgh Skater killed by Police (Read 33913 times)