Authorities have released shocking video that shows a white police officer in Illinois shooting a Black woman – who called police in fear of a home intruder – in the face, killing her.
Authorities have released shocking video that shows a white police officer in Illinois shooting a Black woman – who called police in fear of a home intruder – in the face, killing her.
To solve the problems in this country, you need to be able to see what’s going on clearly.
Back before about 2015, there was clearly a systemic problem of police violence against minorities in this country, and it wasn’t taken seriously or identified as a problem by the media. There was a lot of white society that was waking up to it as a real thing that existed, but a lot that were not, and government and media were slow to even realize it existed. I think at the point, regardless of what the scope of the problem quantitatively was, most of what you were saying was accurate just because it was so important to get people to even recognize the problem.
Now, I think it’s swung the other way. I think the stereotype that every single cop is the enemy is creating a lot more problems than it solves.
I have zero indication that meaningful change has occurred aside from your assurance that it has and a handful of anecdotal headlines about cops being prosecuted.
Yeah, and that was why I was asking – do you have any idea quantitatively? I have to say, I do not; probably my impression is based on a sort of anecdotal impression same as yours is. It would be good to look at something like, how many use-of-force complaints have there been, how many was bodycam footage made available for and what did things look like when reviewing the footage? Things like that.
Just basing things on a general anecdotal impression isn’t a good thing to do on either side, I don’t think.
Fair, but I remain unconvinced there has been meaningful change even as I acknowledge your point. We KNOW what the starting point was. If I’m to be convinced it has changed, I think the burden is on those (not necessarily/specifically you) who are telling me it has.
This and this are probably the best overviews I could find about what has and hasn’t changed. It’s a little frustrating though – it’s hard to find something substantial about “okay yes but what has the result been.”
And, the things I could find about the result sometimes used very weird metrics (like lumping together all police shootings without making any effort to distinguish justified shootings from unjustified or attempting to determine what percentage were unjustified in order to point to whether that number is going down or not).
Those do look like good articles though, thanks!
I’m going to really frustrate you anyway because although I acknowledge that some shootings are justified, I also don’t trust how they are categorized since (to my knowledge) this categorization is determined by the content of the police reports themselves, and so would require me to believe that every false report was caught out and none slipped through.
Hm, that wasn’t what I was talking about wanting to see. To me, what would be good to see would be a breakdown of, starting from the total number of shootings or use-of-force incidents in any given year:
That’s a fuck of a lot of work, which is presumably why we don’t see it. But that to me would be a good way to analyze whether things are actually working.
I agree, and to put my cynical hat on again, I think would be the job for the oversight teams that (to my knowledge) cops throw a tantrum about whenever they come up, and which I don’t think are widely implemented, or not effectively implemented in many cases.