http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36721584



JOB WELL DONE .
BURGERBOYS.

In case you need a video, here's one:

http://www.aamulehti.fi/maailma/poliisi-ampui-mustan-miehen-teloitustyyliin-yhdysvalloissa-kaikki-tallentui-videolle/

Because, after all, most Americans support impromptu public executions.

Holy **** that video was ****ing disgusting to watch.

I honestly don't know what steps Americans could take to stop rampant racism and violence in police departments, I suppose elect better leaders and pressure the system more.

Education. And I don't mean get better attendance in schools and universities. I mean actually educate people. Reward educators for the difficult job that it is. Teaching shouldn't be a fall back because nothing else panned out in life.

Things that are still taught in schools:
Intelligent Design as actual scientific theory
Abstinence-only Sex-Ed
Red, Green, and Blue are primary colors
Cursive writing
etc.

Better education breeds better understanding breeds better people.

Of course this is with the caveat that some people use a better understanding to rig the system, which is in part why we are where we are today.

You'll never fix the problem that way. These situations happen for a confluence of reasons, all of which need to be addressed.

If you really want to focus on education as the problem, you'd be most effective starting here:

Every time you call the police to 'move along' some poor, there's a significant chance that you're gonna watch an execution. So you should probably save 911 for when it's an actual emergency.

Stop watching our sensational media. This kind of thing happens all the time, regardless of race. From what I'd read, the police were told the suspect was armed.

A good first step would be to repeal the Second Amendment and get handguns out of the slums. Then we can start to talk about disarming cops, which is probably the only way to stop them from using deadly force. In the meantime, I would advise suspects to not to resist arrest. Perhaps BLM can take up this cause.

That all said, I'm not sure he was resisting arrest just by watching that video. I guess we'll find out later why the cop tackled him, but if previous cases trumped up by the media are any clue, I'm guessing the suspect wasn't totally blameless in this situation.

If it comes out that the cops were just looking for an excuse to execute a black guy and get away with it, then yeah, **** `em. There are enough crooked cops out there to warrant body cameras on all of them.

Oh look, an "All Lives Matter" post. How delightful.

One problem here is that black people are policed more than white people, which means they find more black criminals, which means they police black people even more. It's an entirely well-meaning but deeply rotten institutional racism that results in black people being disproportionately affected by police violence even when accounting for all other variables.

Which, I hope, hints the complexity of the failure here. Are some of the victims known to police? Sure. Are some of them resisting arrest? Maybe. But if it were a white person in a white neighborhood, it still probably wouldn't have gone down the same way.

By the way, a bunch of overpaid Stanford PhDs built a computer that accidentally calls black people "gorillas". Another bunch built a fintech model that accidentally redlines because they didn't account for sample bias. These are highly educated people building racism into their products because they don't understand that it is a real problem that exists. And you think you can fix it by teaching police officers the one part of color theory you know about? Get ****ed.

You can call it institutional racism, but it's hardly the root of the problem here.

There is no "the" root of "the" problem. There are lots of problems here, and each of them has lots of root causes. There is no such thing as a simple failure.

But, yes, one of those problems is institutional racism.

Jettisoning our country's cultural obsession with guns would go a long way toward actually de-escalating conflicts involving young black males (most of which, mind you, don't involve the police).

There's a reason why polls show blacks to be more supportive of gun control than whites.

Rigging the system is the American way, as is manipulating institutions to work in a bias towards certain people. America is actually an uncorrupt society, it's just the system is purposefully set up to benefit certain people.

Also education is a tricky subject, the other American way is spending billions of dollars to "educate" Americans on various topics.

And Jon is right, it's not as simple as education.

I don't think it's purposeful. There's a kernel of a good idea in pretty much all of it, but the officials are too stupid and out-of-touch to understand the problems.

Like, prison is stupid expensive. In most states, criminal suspects pay for their court day, for the cost of assembling a jury, for their public defender, they're often even charged a fee for their own arrest warrant. 41 states bill prisoners for room and board. And once they're inside, all of their outside contact is through a private, paid-use phone service. These are all terrible things, and they all measurably contribute to recidivism. But governments are under so much public pressure to cut both expenses and revenue, what else are they supposed to do?

And then there's the Philando Castile case, which seems to be somewhat simpler.

Yep:

[quote=the victim's girlfriend]
He let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm
[/quote]

In a sane society, neither party would be armed. **** me.

Does anybody really expect armed police to consistently refrain from acting on their primal instincts the moment they feel threatened? Training and cultural changes could potentially go a long way. Would it really, though? Can we admit the possibility that many police officers are no more than your typical, mediocre individuals, who have developed habits and perceptions based on daily exposure to dangerous, unsavory, and (depending on the city) predominantly black people?

If you look at crime victimization rates, there is substantially more crime in black communities. Some of this probably comes from population density of poor black vs, poor whites. It's arguable that racist prison sentencing polices (eg, much higher penalties for crack, vs power cocaine) has contributed to high rates of single parents among blacks. I think there's also a problem in which perceived problem get exaggerated by confirmation bias to the point where a lot of blacks don't feel that it's worth trying to pursue paths that are associated with financial well being.

People want to point to racism, as if ending black poverty is as simple as getting the "man" to stop being a racist *******. The truth is, several centuries of oppression leave lasting generational scars that cause cultural dysfunction and distrust of mechanisms for upward mobility. A LOT of money and time needs to be invested in fixing the problem, but right now everyone is content to be judgmental and throw out cheap accusations of racism. The fact is, black people are just people, and they are acting like anyone else would in their circumstances. When a narrative gets constructed to justify a simple moral dichotomy, it's simplifies the situation beyond all meaning or usefulness.




It really isn't an issue if you have proper respect for firearms. If you choose to carry, you give up a lot of leniency and benefit of a doubt. People who do so legally, generally understand this and are very careful to respect the fact that you have to be extremely careful when you encounter a police officer. That means declare you are armed, and do not make movements unless instructed. If you don't like that, don't carry.

Quoted for when you watch the news.

Spoken like a privileged white person.

Black communities may show, statistically, higher amounts of crime, but why are so many poor black people congregating in one neighborhood? They can't afford to live anywhere else. There are poor white neighborhoods too; they're called trailer parks. Why isn't there as much "crime"? Because they're white. Sure, they may be cooking meth, but at least they aren't like those po' negros pollutin' society with their rap music and crack-cocaine.

Spoken like someone who thinks that lazily marginalizing an argument on the basis of a person's identity is valid or meaningful.



Aaand your obvious inability to even finish reading my post just further proves how utterly vapid you are. I can't even call your opinions stupid. I don't think a thought that generic can even be considered an opinion.

Hey, speaking of people who are lazy and don't read:



Philando Castile was shot because he did both of those things!

Your opinions are super duper shallow and you might want to reconsider calling other people vapid. Thanks.

Oh no! You've caught me in an act of careless hypocrisy! Here I am criticizing someone for not reading, when I made remarks about a specific event that show I didn't bother to read about that event!

Except I didn't say anything about Philando Castile, but was instead making statements about objective statistics instead of drawing conclusions on broad social trends from a crappy video of a single incident. I have no idea whether the police acted appropriately or not toward him, so I am expressing no opinion on the matter.

You can call my opinions vapid all you want, but I made actual points, and don't make generic attempts to dismiss what people say with some vague reference to their race. And then imply they are racist for having an attitude toward crack cocaine which they specifically identified as being racist and a major driver of inequality.

Vague?

Vague in the sense that you merely referenced it as a way to dismiss what I was saying without interacting it in any way at all.

Blue Lives Matter.

> Be American
> Get shot

"Blue Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter" aren't contentious statements. Nobody thinks police lives are worthless. Nobody disregards all human life. The only time one of these ideas is contentious is when someone says black lives matter without also honoring whites and the police. That's the whole point of Black Lives Matter, that's why it needs to exist and why "Blue" and "All" are horribly racist things to say in this context.

By the way, extra special **** you to anybody who unironically says Blue Lives Matter. People choose to do that job, knowing the risks, and they get paid to take those risks. If they can't take it, they can always quit. Black people can't quit being black.

Police work's not even that dangerous on average. Know what's a really dangerous job? Logging. Just think about all of the loggers who have died to bring you toilet paper, a staple of western hygiene. I guarantee that loggers do a better job staving off anarchy with toilet paper than the police do with guns.

Plaid Lives Matter.

Jon, I don't normally use the phrase, but I think it's appropriate enough to say now that 11 police officers were just shot by snipers at a protest of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

That's a damn shame. But surely y'all knew this was gonna happen eventually, right?

Is this what you're talking about?

In regards to systemic racism against blacks, no, it's not intentional.

whoa this thread became a ****storm

Yup this is exactly the point. If someone says "black lives matter", the response should be "yes, they do". Not a redirection into something else.

Yes, but I don't see why you need a tweet to illustrate the fact that threatening someone with violence will eventually incite it.

Forget the thread, Reid, if you want a ****storm, just turn on the news.

I don't have a television, what's going on?

I think the NRA needs to go back to its roots, when they supported gun control in response to open-carrying Black Panthers.

**** the second amendment.

Two black guys in Dallas are walking around with rifles and shooting cops at a protest against the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile; killed 4 police officers so far, wounding 7 others.