Black males seem to disproportionately die at the hands of police. But BLM is about much more than just death. Death is just a catalyst that makes people notice.
Lots of Black people deal with disrespect and abuse from police on a regular basis. A lot of the seemingly flippant behavior from Black people towards police that we sometimes see during recorded interactions is well earned by years of subtle, and not so subtle harassment by some police officers.
Look up some of Amber Ruffin's videos on her interactions with police growing up in NYC. It's pretty eye opening and all of my Black friends have echoed similar stories.
Another example that comes to mind is the story of the Black women and children that were made to get out of their car and lay handcuffed, face down on the asphalt in the arizona sun while the cops slowly discovered that the car they were driving was not actually stolen and that they had read the plate wrong. Supposedly, the cops tried to handcuff the little 7 year old girl but even fully tightened her wrists were too small.
I have been unable to find a comparable story of an innocent white family of women and children made to lay handcuffed face down like that. I suspect very strongly those same cops would not have treated a white family like that.
Excess deaths at the hands of cops is just a serious symptom of a much larger underlying problem of disrespect and abuse.
> Black males seem to disproportionately die at the hands of police.
There are lots of ways to measure this, which one are you talking about? There are lots of variables to control for: # of police encounters. Person being confronted while in the middle of (or just after) a committing a crime. Person being armed or not.
Talking just about deaths I feel like distracts from the issue that really warrants discussion in American society, which is number of interactions with police and how many of those turn into physical altercations. Then we need to look into the reasons for those and what the possible solutions are. We also need to admit that this likely isn't just a policing issue, but a societal and cultural issue that needs to be addressed.
It's definitely not just a policing issue. But it's also definitely partially a policing issue. And fewer things can make a people feel more powerless than authority figures with guns that can literally get away with murdering you. As a police officer, when you are representing an institution that was originally created to hunt down and return your enslaved ancestors to their masters, you have to really put out a strong effort to build trust. And I am just not seeing a lot of that effort, even today.
A great example of this was played out by the nypd when they came banging on the door of a blm organizer claiming to have a warrant for his arrest. They apparently did not. He didn't open his door when they refused to show him the warrant. That quickly escalated to dozens of cops and vehicles outside and pounding on his door and getting battering rams ready. What was his accused crime? Shouting in a cop's ear with a megaphone.
You get enough bs like that going on, and statistically, people are going to get killed.
Seems irrelevant. Of course police see women as less threatening. Most police are men. Though I'm sure Black women are killed by police at higher rates than white women.
Seems like just trying to redirect the narrative. Kind of like when you bring up the studies where identical resumes were sent out half with white sounding names and half with Black sounding names and the white sounding names get way more callbacks.
The response is usually something like, that probably has more to do with class/wealth, not race. As if the two are not strongly linked.
It's more complex than that because not every black person is equally likely to have an encounter with the police. There are studies that suggest that if you control for encounters with the police, blacks are just as likely as whites to be killed by the police. Half of violent crimes in the US are also committed by blacks. This is definitely one of the consequences of the history of slavery and segregation. Nevertheless, given that blacks commit 50% of violent crimes, it should be expected that the percentage of people killed by the police who are black, will be higher than their rate of representation in the general population.
There ARE also videos of whites getting killed in conditions just as tragic as e.g. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, etc. But they go largely unreported in comparison.
https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1371481061620781061
Blacks are not only more likely to be killed by the police but also are more likely to be unarmed. Blacks are likely not committing 50% of violent crimes, but are rather convicted for 48% of the crimes which if you've looked into studies on community targeting seem to have to do more with police officer bias.
Lots of Black people deal with disrespect and abuse from police on a regular basis. A lot of the seemingly flippant behavior from Black people towards police that we sometimes see during recorded interactions is well earned by years of subtle, and not so subtle harassment by some police officers.
Look up some of Amber Ruffin's videos on her interactions with police growing up in NYC. It's pretty eye opening and all of my Black friends have echoed similar stories.
Another example that comes to mind is the story of the Black women and children that were made to get out of their car and lay handcuffed, face down on the asphalt in the arizona sun while the cops slowly discovered that the car they were driving was not actually stolen and that they had read the plate wrong. Supposedly, the cops tried to handcuff the little 7 year old girl but even fully tightened her wrists were too small.
I have been unable to find a comparable story of an innocent white family of women and children made to lay handcuffed face down like that. I suspect very strongly those same cops would not have treated a white family like that.
Excess deaths at the hands of cops is just a serious symptom of a much larger underlying problem of disrespect and abuse.