Ljink96 said:
palou said:
In most cases, armed police officers that use their gun without provocation do so because they are nervous, which means poorly trained, but also most definately scared. Scared, because they find themselves in areas with extremely high criminality, areas which are sadly overwhelmingly black (poor areas).
I think you will find that these cases ar much, much less frequent for the african american individuals in richer, protected areas.
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How do you even explain people who are killed, while unarmed, while pinned to the ground. 2 blacks weren't killed by a gunshot buy by shear police brutality and even cutting off people's air supplies. If the best we have is "we're scared" the police force should be ashamed of themselves. I lived in white neighborhoods my entire life. I went to white schools my entire life, there were classes where I'd be the only black kid but I didn't mind. I wasn't scared, I just saw them as people.
Of course, bring crime into the equation and yes I'd be uneasy. But you never see black cops killing unarmed white civillians. I am under the notion that a considerable portion of the police force in the US were born in families that were associated or shared beliefs with white supremecists. And when they act outside the line of judgement, they feel that because they are in the force, that covers them from judgement. And so far, it has worked. And then more and more and more cases came in. These recent killings aren't new. It's just that we can share and capture information much easier than we could 16 years ago.
We can't blame the situation on shooting innocent people. Your job first and foremost is to protect the people. Not shoot somebody when you ask them for their license, or choke somebody to death who has asthma, or shoot a kid in a hoodie walking funny. This is insane. If an unarmed white kid was shot by a black officer do you know how fast he'd be thrown in jail. Almost immediately. I hate to sound this way but after being in a news internship at a local news station I see how people think. It's sick.
You signed up to protect people. If you're "nervous", you have no right to be in the police force. And unless you know they have a gun you have no right to shoot, you have the right to have a taser, not shoot somebody to death.
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I most definately believe that police officers involved in such cases should be severely punished, even if the victim is resisting (personally against both citizens and police officers carrying guns in the first place). But I still believe it to be more incompetence than pure racism. Sure, outliers exist, but as much as people would like it to be, the number of cases where unarmed individuals are killed while being colpacent, is not significant.
The biggest problem is, people don't understand big numbers. Even a hundred such cases per year (two every week, I don't think it's higher than that) would make it statistically insignificant in a country of 300 000 000.
People don't understand statistics, and probabilities. For reasons clearly stated above, cops are much more active in certain majoritarily african american regions, and much jumpier there as well. Only 12% of cops are african american in the US, against 75% white. It becomes only expected that he number of white on black offenses to be much more frequent than black on white. Notice also that white on black cases, related to current issues, will be more prominant in the media, as it keeps interest. A 10 - 1 ratio really should not come as a surprise. (By the way, in recent years, cops killed more caucasian whites than african americans - despite there being far more violent crime, which could justify the use of force, among the second group.)
Saying that police officers generally tend to be white supremicists because of the events recenly covered by media is about as informed an opinion as saying that black people generally tend to be violent and agressive based on the murder statistics. It fails to look at the bigger situation.
