@zinhead You often start threads just posting stories, often seemingly inflammatory, with little to no commentary from you on what angle or agenda you are exploring. “This incident took place in downtown Chicago about a block west of Trump Tower. This is an entertainment area of River North frequently visited by tourists and locals alike. The video is shocking.” The second response you got questioned where you were going with your post.
That aside, you are still deflecting away from the discussion at hand which is about the shooting of Castile, the verdict, and a discussion of the risks Black people face when interacting with law enforcement.
The discussion had nothing to do with white/black relationships, but with civilian society forced to accept (and for some, to justify and encourage) the level of violence with which our police are trained to conduct their jobs. Multiple studies have shown that minority officers will adopt the institutional biases and reject their own experiences.
I’ve brought it up before - I used to hang out with a social group that contained a number of prison guards and state and local police. Much of their normal banter was how they “had to” loosen up some of their charges, trading tips on how best to push the envelope without getting in trouble.
There are four things at play here:
People in high-stress situations will make all sorts of bad decisions. The best trained police are the ones who can best control their stress response, not the ones who can shoot the straightest or follow the rules. Notice that only one of the two officers shot Tamir Rice.
Police are now taught to approach every situation as if it were life-and-death, we are all potential criminals with weapons hidden about to get them, escalating the stress levels.
They are trained how to lie to insure there will be no repercussions, the whole “I was totally in control and following my training but I thought he was going for a gun and I feared for my life” reason used repeatedly to near universal success. This extends to being trained how to phrase things to get convictions without evidence
The Blue Lives Matter crowd will discuss this endlessly, vilifying Philando Castile and Diamond Reynolds, searching for character flaws to justify his killing, excusing the police, finding justice in what is essentially an execution.
I hate to admit it, but I have had the talk with my youngest, lily-white honors student but runs with a mixed crowd, telling him to never talk to the police for any reason without a lawyer present. Once we accept that our police can be disingenuous, trained to twist words to get the appearance of guilt where there is none, and that our police can operate without repercussion, silence is the only good option we have left.
I don’t agree with everything you say, Magnetron, but on this point I’m in complete agreement. In the Philando Castile case, the officer can be clearly heard on the audio recording immediately after the shooting saying, “I didn’t know where the gun was.” By the next day, he changed that to, “I thought I saw a gun.” By the time of the trial, he changed it again to, “I saw a gun” and Philando had “pulled it out,” thus leaving the officer no choice but to shoot first to defend his own life. No matter that other officers who arrived on the scene said they found the gun buried deep in Philando’s pants pocket. No matter that Diamond Phillips, sitting right next to Philando in the passenger seat, testified that Philando had not pulled the gun out, nor had he attempted to do so. No matter that no gun was visible in the video Diamond recorded in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. No matter that the gun wasn’t loaded, so that Philando would have had no reason to pull it out, unless his objective was suicide. The cop clearly lied. Or at least, his stories are so inconsistent, and the story he told on the stand so incompatible with the other evidence, that it should completely destroy his credibility. I don’t know whether he was specifically coached to lie in preparation for this trial, but he clearly was sufficiently well trained to know what he had to say to get himself off the hook.
The thing that really got to me about this case was the child in the car. I would like to think a police officer, even if in legitimate fear for his or her life, would never fire into a car containing a child. I would like to believe officers would be willing to risk their own lives to protect a child .
Short of that, I have zero faith in our system. A few years ago, we couldn’t even get a conviction after a sleeping (Black) child was killed by a cop here in Detroit:
I’d say the system was broken… except that I now believe it works just fine: for white people with money. For people of color, it’s the same old travesty it’s always been…
And another:
Also noted in the article, “. **As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.” **
Also, the link to the Trevor Noah clip that tries to conflate the shooting with the NRA being white and racist.
And this post:
All of the white men out there who chose to carry a legal firearm, do you think he would have shot YOU?? You know damn well he would have given YOU those seconds. Why isn’t the NRA rushing to the defense of this innocent gun owner? Why the silence?
Sorry, WISdad21, I don’t see any of that as “white-hating,” and i’m a white guy. Since when is it “white-hating” to point out that there are racial disparities? Was it “white-hating” for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP to point out to the Supreme Court that “separate but equal” courts were separate but not equal—or for the Court to agree?
@doschicos - In that thread, I responded Pizzagirl’s question with “There is no point to be made. I have walked by this corner hundreds of times and find the whole episode very sad, and unfortunately emblematic of the senseless violence in the city I call home.” When I post threads, I typically post a link and a quote and let it go from there. There frequently is no agenda to the threads, just an interesting or well written article relating to colleges and universities.
Regarding the Castille incident, the vast, vast majority of policemen and women are honest, hardworking people who put their lives on the line to protect the public, and the number of inappropriate police shootings that happen each year are relatively small in number. The wholesale accusations of rampant police racism in the media are harmful, and they have lead to the unnecessary deaths of police offices and people they serve.
I am not really concerned about your race, but perhaps that is why I see things differently.
The jury did not acquit the guy of racism. They acquitted him of the charges. But white people and the NRA are not the culpable characters in this situation. If you think they are, you might as well blame the Russians too.
Yanez WAS NOT pulling over every black driver or even every black male driver. Based on the interview with investigators, Castile appeared to be the third vehicle Yanez pulled over during his shift, and we don’t know whether the first two vehicles had any black occupants.
This is a simplification, if not outright distortion. I’m sure the instructor’s complete advice would have been close to what I suggested in #21, which Castile did not follow.
@Magnetron , I worked in law enforcement in my younger days, and I see truth in what you say. And I live in a mostly white working class neighborhood, with several law enforcement officers, and they have made many comments over the years that support your statements.
I’m white. I’m far from a white-hater. I am also not willfully blind.
A friend of mine who lived in Fair Lawn NJ told me that her husband’s cop friends referred to cars with black people in them as “shoppers”–ie, thieves–and routinely pulled them over for no reason or any manufacturer reason they could think of.
@Zinhead , it seems to me that there were two pages of substantive discussion on the thread you started—and that was NOT originally about gun violence. When you took it in the direction of gangs and aldermen, I don’t think anyone else really knew anything about it and thus had little to say.
The Washington Post has also published stats that men are shot and killed by police about 23 times more often than women. Do you think that mean police are far too harsh on men relative to women? Or are they too lenient on women, endangering their own lives in the process.
Many women who are shot and killed by cops had been in a relationship with them. So, can we assume that all the men they shoot had also been in relationships with them? Seriously…
@Consolation - Regarding “shoppers”, there is a name for that behavior because that behavior is rather common. Last summer, the shooting of Paul O’Neil gained significant notoriety due to the dramatic nature of the video.
It turns out that the car O’Neil was driving was stolen, and he stole it during a “shopping” run in the suburbs in which three other cars were also stolen.
In fact, I would wager than the term was developed by the gang members themselves, not with the police in a suburban district.
As for violence in Chicago, there were more than 4,000 people shot here in 2016. It is hard to have a thread about “Death in Chicago” without discussing gun violence.
@Zinhead, I do seem to recall that some criminals used the term “getting paid,” so you may possibly be correct about the origin of the use of “shoppers.” I don’t know. I did not have that impression at the time, which was about 30 years ago.
On the other hand, there is the problem of assuming that almost every black person, especially men, one sees is a “shopper” or out “getting paid.”
That is what leads to instances of people like Philando Castile being pulled over 50 TIMES over the course of a few years. (Apparently the area where the fatal stop occurred was notorious, and many black people avoided it, especially after dark.) That is what leads to black people being accosted by police for attempting to enter their own homes. A poster here, a middle class black mother, told about how her son was stopped and followed by the police taking a walk in their own neighborhood, after some idiot called them and said their was a suspicious black man walking down the street.
You misunderstood. If an excess number of women were getting shot by cops due to having a relationship with them, that would suggest a smaller ratio, not larger.
But I love seeing the mental gymnastics people on this thread go through. Justifying a 23x difference by sex is apparently no problem, but a difference one tenth of that according to race is prima facie evidence of racially motivated shooting. And besides ignoring my rationale for why the numbers might not be out of line with what is expected, everyone here is equally willing to ignore the study by famed economist Roland Fryer. Instead everyone is ready to buy into anecdotal information over the data.
^^ You’re right. It’s totally our imagination that driving while black, or getting shot by a cop while black are a “thing,” alternate facts (or “mental gymnastics”) perpetuated by self hating whites and people of color who have nothing better to do than to vilify police who selflessly protect and serve. We stand corrected by hebegebe.
I think there are racially motivated shootings by police officers. But there are also nonracially motivated shootings, and when the police officers are charged but not convicted, I’m equally distressed.