That’s nice.
Unfortunately condemning, apologizing, putting on administrative leave, and even firing aren’t enough. LEOs who illegally shoot black men need to be prosecuted. Only when we start seeing a consistent string of convictions will the culture slowly start to change in some of these PDs.
^I absolutely agree.
I should have explained myself more clearly. Frequently on these threads posters try to explain and excuse police actions. (recent example: The officer was trying to shoot the patient, not the health care worker.) In this case, “the police” have already said there aren’t excuses.
I agree with arresting and prosecuting police who assault and murder. And actually convicting them of these crimes.
If you’re referring to my post #213, I was not trying to explain or excuse police actions. I was merely noting the latest information that was reported in the Miami Herald article. Perhaps it was the North Miami Police Department that was trying to explain or excuse the police actions.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
ALH, I agree with you that in addition to lynchings, there were a great many cases of straight-out extra-judicial executions of black people by local sheriffs and cops, with impunity, in certain parts of the South, which have never been counted in the lynching statistics. If you read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” about the Great Migration, there are several accounts of that sort of thing – for which, of course, justice was never rendered. I doubt that anyone has yet gone through all the old newspapers and other primary sources back to the Civil War to try to quantify killings of black people by law enforcement.
In “Blood Done Sign My Name” Timothy Tyson, a white man around my age, writes about the murder of Henry Marrow, a black man. This murder occurred in Oxford, NC during Tyson’s childhood.
When he went back to Oxford, while writing the book, to use the newspapers from that time, they no longer existed. If I remember correctly, all written records of the murder had disappeared from the library. That passage in the book really got my attention. At least in some cases, primary sources no longer even exist.
I recommend this book.
eta: the reason to point this out is to emphasis there really aren’t any good & valid statistics, now or in earlier times.
emphasize: my spelling is bad, but not that bad. And I really was trying to put it all in one post.
And there won’t be reliable stats on cop-on-black crime ever. We can’t wait until there are.
“Frequently on these threads posters try to explain and excuse police actions. (recent example: The officer was trying to shoot the patient, not the health care worker.)”
The problem with this officers story is he put the handcuffs on the victim after the shooting. Thank god he was a bad shot.
@alh, who on this thread tried to “excuse” the police actions to which you refer?
alh didn’t say it happened on this thread. He or she said that it frequently happens on “these threads,” i.e., threads on this general subject, which is a true statement.
@Grainraiser thats what really gets me, he handcuffed the guy he was trying to “protect”.
@DonnaL, huh? @alh, referred to an specific incident that was discussed on THIS thread, though.
So, regarding excusing police actions, specifically"the officer was trying to shoot the patient, not the health care worker," WHO specifically was “excusing police actions” in that event?
I am accusing no one on this thread of excusing police actions. That was a very bad example to use. No one on this thread suggested the officer’s claim of shooting to protect the health care worker was a valid claim.
I won’t attempt to explain my comments any further. I will just apologize to partyof5 for derailing her thread.
Considering the swings in subject matter, imprecision in phrasing isn’t much of a derailment…
(Not that I’d want to be found guilty of derailing, LasMa, but would you mind answering #216? Ordinarily, I wouldn’t insist but I feel you spoke around me and I’m wondering why.)
If a police officer wants to pull a particular motorist over, for whatever reason, he can come up with a plausible justification for it, even if the “official” one is not the actual reason for his actions. My sister told me a story a few years back about a conversation she’d had with an acquaintance who happened to be a Baltimore City police officer (a black man). He told her with a rather unsettling air of gloating pride, that they (the police) can always come up with a reason to pull someone over if they want to stop a motorist. She said this officer’s cavalier admission actually gave her chills because of what it said about his attitude concerning his own authority.
We in society endow law enforcement with a great deal of power, including that of life and death. Of course, we need them to have broad reaching authority to protect public safety and civility, and most of us are damned glad they have it when they carry out their jobs with soberness of mind and humility of heart. I think most police officers try to good public servants, but when it comes to encounters with LEO, a person’s “mileage may vary” depending upon the societal demographic one occupies, the location and circumstances of one’s encounter with police, and the judgement of law enforcement about the significance of those junctures. When lives may hang in the balance, it’s absolutely critical that LEO make good judgements. More and more, however, we are being presented with video evidence that an unacceptable number of them do not.
The attitudes expressed by the officers who assaulted the 2nd grade school teacher during their encounter with her, and the way they justified her treatment by blaming the entire demographic they believe she represents, angered me. But sadly, it did not surprise me. The transparently lame excuse later proffered on behalf of the officer who shot the behavioral therapist (who obviously did everything right during his encounter with LEO) was just another clumsy attempt at CYA when the rote “I feared for my life”/ I thought he had a gun" avenue was so obviously negated by the video evidence. The panicked variation of “I feared for his life”/ “I thought the other guy had a gun” would be laughable were it not so pathetically unimaginative. That apparently many people were instantly willing to suspend logic in order to embrace that excuse, even in the face of whom it was who was handcuffed? Not surprising, either.
@catahoula I was responding to this part of your post #210. You seem to dismiss the concerns of BLM and the NAACP. Calling cop-on-black crime a “meme” trivializes it. The implication (to me) is that trivialities aren’t something we as a society really need to concern ourselves with fixing.
What is it that makes some cops want to harass people? Is it purely racism? Is it for some reason the cops are being infiltrated with narcissistic “gonna show you who’s boss” type of guys? Is it errors in training bringing in the “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude?
Maybe parts of all of those things, depending on the cop. To those I would add: huge amounts of stress and feeling under pressure, constantly, because of it. I figure increased mental health screening (pre-employment) and better mental health treatment for cops would be helpful. And if those resources are already available, then they should try to develop a culture that encourages cops to seek help, as opposed to a culture that labels them negatively if they do seek help.
Last week, 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson murdered five police officers in Dallas. This abhorrent act of political extremism cannot be divorced from American history—recent or old. In black communities, the police departments have only enjoyed a kind of quasi-legitimacy. That is because wanton discrimination is definitional to the black experience, and very often it is law enforcement which implements that discrimination with violence. A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.
To understand the lack of police legitimacy in black communities, consider the contempt in which most white Americans hold O.J. Simpson. Consider their feelings toward the judge and jury in the case. And then consider that this is approximately how black people have felt every few months for generations. It’s not just that the belief that Officer Timothy Loehmann got away with murdering a 12-year-old Tamir Rice, it is the reality that police officers have been getting away with murdering black people since the advent of American policing. The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.
I don’t see Black Lives Matter as inciting violence, except that speaking the truth about violence may inevitably incite further violence. It doesn’t seem to me ignoring these truths is helpful in the long run. There have been decades to correct these problems without threat of violence and nothing seems to have changed.
One of the themes in, Blood Done Sign My Name is how violence and threat of violence does sometimes force positive change. In that case, it was the destruction of white owned businesses. I am NOT condoning violence. I am making observations. For several years now, Coates has been writing about the destruction of the Black body throughout American history. He demonstrates it is ongoing.
I find his arguments extremely compelling.