<p>No, I am saying that some freaked out members of the former majority will react in the way some Islamic extremists are now behaving. These will constitute A very small minority of whites— just as a relatively small minority of the global Muslim population subscribes to and participates in violent jihad. I base my conjecture on the outsized fear I see displayed by some NRA backed gun nuts over the perceived threat that “the gov’ment is fixin’ to take away their guns” with militant displays of their open carry arsenals, daring any gov’ment agency to pry those weapons out of their cold dead hands. I see it in paranoid survivalist groups who are even now stockpiling provisions and weapons, certain of the “coming race war.” These are the people who will panic enough over their loss of Alpha status to get violent. The same type of mindset facilitated the rise of violent groups intent on maintaining the status quo over former slaves who showed unmitigated gall in believing they deserved equal citizenship in the years immediately following the civil war. These groups, the most notable being the KKK, shut down Reconstruction faster than you could say Robert E. Lee, and wielded Jim Crow with such an iron fist as to insure its grip for over a hundred years. This type of mindset has nothing, if not passion and anger born out of abject fear. </p>
<p>Spare us your sick fantasies about jihad by caucasians. Some caucasian groups have already been minorities (i.e., ethnic minorities) and have suffered the usual indignities that go along with that without resorting to ‘jihad’.</p>
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Possibly… or possibly not. One of the big issues is that no one is really sure what the numbers are - there is no national database, even the CDC database relies on spotty self-reporting. It is all but certain that deaths are being under-reported, and it is supposed by many that the under-reported numbers are largely comprised of dead black men. One of the first good steps would be to make such reporting a legal requirement.</p>
<p>In any given year, in a country this size, the police will kill a certain number of people. Some of them will be Truly Bad People killed under standards acceptable to all but pacifists. It is certain that at least some fall into the category of either criminal negligence or deliberate homicide. The proportion between these, and particularly the motivations of the latter group, are the subject of debate.</p>
<p>I have certainly heard of white guys being killed by the police. But I would be astonished if analysis of the racial divide in questionable shootings by police really did not show an increased probability of black men killed by white police. And that is the real issue. A lot of people feel that this is happening, and the media (however biased) are the closest thing to a real source and they seem to back things up.</p>
<p>That having been said, there does appear to be systematic problems with policing in many areas, problems that lead police to use excessive violence across races. That will be a hard factor to deconvolve from the racial issue.</p>
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<p>Well, I certainly do agree that the behavior would be sick. Just as sick as that of some current day Muslim extremists. What? Does white skin somehow preclude the ability of individuals to commit atrocities, or engage in violent rebellion? Have no such things occurred on this Continent over the course of its history? I think a cursory survey of said history would quickly belie any such notion. It certainly seems to me there is still no shortage of white conviction that blacks are predisposed to all sorts of social ills, and that such convictions have even been alluded to by some individuals in this very thread to account for not only Michael Brown’s behavior, but that of all the rioters in Ferguson (I gather, apparently, that it’s endemic to our “inferior culture”). I’ve overheard cocktail party talk concerning all the reasons for why we “just can’t seem to get our **** in one sock”, everything from inherently inferior IQ to racially endemic, broad-scale moral degradation. Where do you think the Nazis found inspiration for their notions of a pure super-race, if not the American Eugenics Movement? 8-| </p>
<p>And for the record, I don’t believe any human racial or ethnic group is immune from the willingness to perform horrible atrocities in the service of an iron-clad certitude of correctness, given just the right conjunction of variables. I was merely speculating on the possible results of a particular conjunction of variables upon a very small subset of the former majority population, and in no way did I paint such a scenario using a broad brush—certainly not as broad as the ones with which I’m routinely painted in order to subsume my individuality to “blackness” and all it’s attendant ills.</p>
<p>And as far as Caucasian groups having already suffered the “usual indignities” that go along with been ethnic minorities without resorting to jihad, if we are still speaking of this country, I feel it incumbent to point out that such ethnic whites (Irish, Italians, Jews, etc.) weren’t granted the privilege of being deemed “white” by the largely WASP majority in this country until relatively recently in our history. Nevertheless, I rather doubt they would resubmit themselves to the indignities of minority group dehumanization again without a vigorous fight, perhaps even something similar to Jihad.</p>
<p>The white guys who I usually hear of gunned down by police seem to fall into 3 categories. It is possible that my own bias keeps me from noticing other cases, I will be happy to admit if that turns out to be true. Theses are just the ones that I notice in the news:</p>
<p>The mentally ill who we HAVE brought into the discussion. Families of mentally ill people are afraid to call for help for fear that their loved one will be killed. </p>
<p>People who are, in that moment, wanting to be shot in a “death by cop” suicide situation and know that they have a good chance of success with certain behaviors.</p>
<p>Men who are holed up in a domestic violence type hostage standoff situation</p>
<p>It has been brought up that in all cases officers should have better training and protocol about how to work with the mentally ill. They should also have better training about de-escalation and goals. I heard what I thought was a very good point last night from a tv guest (former cop) about shifts away from the idea of pursuit and engagement at all costs. He said that a good parallel is the car chase. He said that it used to be that “we” would chase a car across 5 counties as high speed to apprehend a person for a relatively minor infraction (compared to the risk) just because of the feeling that the person HAD to be brought in at that moment. Chases were putting the general public at risk. I would have to go back and try to find it but my recollection is that in my area several collateral damage type of car accidents forced departments to create new car chase policy. Some jurisdictions have created new policy on dealing with the mentally ill to prevent deadly escalation. </p>
<p>Ugh! I just did a quick google and it appears that the car chase thing is still an issue around the country. People have often said that criminals play too many video games and I am tempted to say that police officers must have watched too many cop dramas with police cars jumping obstacles at high speed. Here are some more recent example . . .</p>
<p><a href=“14-year-old pedestrian killed in high speed chase near San Leandro - ABC7 San Francisco”>Page Not Found | abc7news.com - ABC7 San Francisco;
<p><a href=“FOX 4 News Dallas-Fort Worth”>FOX 4 News Dallas-Fort Worth;
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<p>Exactly. No one knows how many people are killed by policemen every year, because there are no reliable data. Why not? We have statistics about everything else…</p>
<p>An article about the dearth of data: <a href=“Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year | FiveThirtyEight”>http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-police-kill-each-year/</a></p>
<p>I’m not so much interested in counting how many people of each race are killed by law enforcement than in the specifics of each case and whether or not it was a justified shooting whatever the race of the cop or the suspect, but I lose. I realize that.</p>
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<p>OK, so who are you talking about exactly then–you are saying the WASPs are going to go on a Jihad?.</p>
<p>Civil unrest is one thing, but jihad as seen today required religion to fuel it. It’s not about skin color.</p>
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<p>There’s a situation in the news right now which doesn’t fit any of your three categories.<br>
<a href=“http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/3/justice-dillon-taylor-after-white-utah-man-fatally/”>http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/3/justice-dillon-taylor-after-white-utah-man-fatally/</a></p>
<p>A very sober opinion regarding the Brown and Garner cases, from columnist Charles Blow. I agree with him;</p>
<p>“The argument is that this is not a perfect case, because Brown — and, one would assume, now Garner — isn’t a perfect victim and the protesters haven’t all been perfectly civil, so therefore any movement to counter black oppression that flows from the case is inherently flawed. But this is ridiculous and reductive, because it fails to acknowledge that the whole system is imperfect and rife with flaws. We don’t need to identify angels and demons to understand that inequity is hell.”</p>
<p>Also, I am lately thinking about two past incidents when sets of white victims were shot by authorities; the Kent State University incident in 1970, and the Greensboro Massacre a few years later. Neither the national guardsmen at KSU nor the covert KKK member police officers in Greensboro were convicted. In both cases the victims were from unpopular political minorities; protesting students and perceived socialists/communists.</p>
<p>I’d like to believe that in today’s world that neither Guardsmen nor police would start shooting first before assessing the gravity of the situation at hand. Given the Garner decision, I don’t think that Black folks have the luxury of believing the same. </p>
<p>I’ve seen some conflicting statistics cited on this thread. Any statistics cited on police shooting needs to normalize to numbers in the population and socioeconomic levels. The homicide rate in a subpopulation also may be an indication of how many violent criminals the police are encountering, unless you think there are a significant number of blacks blamed for homicides that were actually perpetrated by other races. It may also make sense to limit oneself to a certain age bracket, since different subpopulations may have different numbers of young people. My recollection is that caucasians have an older population than minorities.</p>
<p>Normalizing for these factors would give you a better indication if there is a pattern of unfairly targeting minorities.</p>
<p>That’s a depressing world that you live in, poetsheart. This country is becoming more racially mixed up every day. People may love to hate us, but this is a far better place to live for most people than most countries. Sure, we still have some racial issues to deal with, but I seriously doubt the people you fear will ever suffer, “minority group dehumanization”. And if there are a small number of crazies, I doubt they will ever get away with wholesale brutality and murder on a massive scale as has been happening in the Middle East. Those groups you fear are interested in staying away from others and protecting themselves, not massacring people. Quite a different concept than a religious duty to kill infidels and being rewarded by going to heaven for it. But I 'd be alarmed if there was any group that believed if you murdered others because of the color of their skin, you would go to heaven. Haven’t heard of any group like that.</p>
<p>But you might even agree with some of the concerns of those fearful groups. Some of those “freedom fighters” are concerned about government overreach, too much power by the police, and fear of a police state…not fear of becoming a minority group. Pretty much the same concerns that people are discussing in these threads.</p>
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I (and, I think, most people) are also interested in whether or not any given shooting was justified, but checking for trends in the results is a way of checking that same process. “Justified” is not an perfect statement, it is an evaluation of a single case by ordinary flawed human beings, and the question is whether or not that evaluation is impartial. If, for example, blacks are more like to die in “justified” shootings, after accounting for socioeconomic and other factors, then it would imply either that blacks are just more prone to crime or that “justified” is not being applied in a manner blind to race.</p>
<p>To give a comparison, if an analysis of car crashes showed that of every 100 “driver error” car crashes, 70 were Toyota’s… wouldn’t you wonder if the process of establishing “driver error” was flawed, and that perhaps there is something going on with Toyota’s?</p>
<p>In light of someone bringing up some kind of “white jihad”, it was Louis Farakkan proposed black violence against whites recently. “when we die and they die, then soon we’re going to sit at a table and talk about it!” sounds a bit like Jihad- dying for a cause to me. </p>
<p>But I don’t want to invoke a religion here either. Violence would inevitably result in more violence, and that would be horrible. </p>
<p>Although this isn’t said to be related, someone ran over four policeman who were protecting people during a peaceful protest in Denver Colorado. They were on bicycles. Apparently the car dragged one of them and it was quite gory, with blood everywhere. </p>
<p>As far as I can tell, black people and white people are all bleeding the same shade of red. Have we not had enough bloodshed already? </p>
<p>That is a sad story, @collegium314 - I had not heard of it. Here is a better article></p>
<p><a href=“DA says Dillon Taylor officer-involved killing was justified - The Salt Lake Tribune”>DA says Dillon Taylor officer-involved killing was justified - The Salt Lake Tribune;
<p>It is interesting in that a 911 caller described them as “gangbangers with a gun” I have no idea what their background was but they were all unarmed it sounds like. It also reads as if there was plenty of back up. It does sound like, in Salt Lake City, someone who looks like this young man is seen as an outsider. There are some comment on the article about the white Mormons not rioting over this and while I don’t know I am speculating that they aren’t feeling a particular kinship with this young man and his buddies. He obviously went against the grain. I don’t have time right now to watch the frame by frame explanation that is embedded in in the article - I will later.</p>
<p>The problem with “justified” as I see it is that fear can be used as a justification. If someone has an irrational fear of imminent danger that is based on bias they can still get off on having felt afraid for their safety when they acted. They acted without malice but out of extreme bias.</p>
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<p>You may add the Waco disaster to your list. </p>
<p>The sad reality is that it is not hard to find examples of abuses and gross ineptitude by uniformed men. Was it that long that the Boston bombers arrest was handled by cops who would have made the Keystone cops look like Jason Bourne. Did not stop the morons-in-charge to congratulate themselves ad nauseam for a job well done! </p>
<p>However, it will not help address the problems associated with the police abuses by focusing on the wrong cases – such as the Ferguson one. </p>
<p>just as the military seems to be having difficulty recruiting enough quality troops, ( & training them well) so do the police forces.
Perhaps communities that are concerned about that, should think about encouraging their young people to change the organizations from within.
When/where I was growing up, police were respected and had a good rapport with the community.
We still certainly need a police force, so I think we should look for a way to improve how that need is filled.</p>
<p>I’m back and the thing that I have to add is that yes . . . everyone should be concerned when people’s civil rights are violated. It is a civil rights issue with white people, black people, Hispanic people, women, the mentally ill, you name it. We have been seeing this with voting rights as well. People often thing that it must be “illegals” or felons or impersonators who are the problem until the proof documents impact them directly and they are also disenfranchised. There were a lot of “who knew it could happen to me?” stories from senior citizens who don’t drive or people whose birth certificate was lost in a fire or had some long ago irregularity. </p>
<p>" We have been seeing this with voting rights as well. People often thing that it must be “illegals” or felons or impersonators who are the problem until the proof documents impact them directly and they are also disenfranchised. There were a lot of “who knew it could happen to me?” stories from senior citizens who don’t drive or people whose birth certificate was lost in a fire or had some long ago irregularity"</p>
<p>Except in states such as Washington, there is no excuse to not vote. You don’t need a drivers license, you don’t need a birth certificate. There are all sorts of ways to register with different types of ID, and after you get your registration you can get your absentee ballot sent to your address, and never have to show ID.</p>
<p>You have to show some sort of ID to get a beer. If you ever travel in an airplane, you need an ID. If you want to cash a check, and often to use your credit card, you need some form of ID. They make it awfully easy to get a photo ID. It is virtually impossible to function without any form of ID. Seems like if you have to have ID merely to get a beer, perhaps voting should hold the same priority. You shouldn’t be able to say, hey here I am, yeah I’m a citizen and local to this state, entitled to vote right here. Trust me.</p>
<p>Some elections are won and lost by a tiny number of votes. People need to have trust in the system.</p>