The police in the United States often act like an occupying force.
Libertarian Conservative: Damn Right
The Police show little respect for the citizens, treating them like ‘little people.’
Libertarian Conservative; That’s so true.
The Police often ignore the law and run roughshod over the rights of the citizens.
Libertarian Conservative: They need to answer to the law.
The Police get away with too much, killing citizens when there is no need for it.
Libertarian Conservative: Ain’t that the truth.
The Police do all this will a racial bias, principally against minorities.
Libertarian Conservative: That’s an outlandish accusation!
That last turn always boggles me.
Cue the Libertarian conservative to tell me how wrong I am.
A principle factor, I think that is well supported by the studies. There are studies here, here and here. Those are on shootings, when we talk about who gets stopped by the police, there’s ample evidence that there is a racial bias there too, here, here, and here are more studies. When we talk about non-leathal force again there are studies here, here, and here that support the conclusion that there is a racial bias. You would think being a police officer would ground someone in the kind of behavior that would lessen the chance of being shot, but when off duty officers are shot, well there’s a study showing racial bias there as well. And look there are even a couple of studies that undercut the argument, here and here. However the vast majority of the studies done on the matter conclude that the police often act with racial bias. That is not to say all shootings are racially motivated, or that being white is a deflector shield. (really that is a strawman because that’s not the argument. If as one study concludes an unarmed black man is 3.49 time more likely to be shot than a white man, that one white dude is still getting shot for every 3.49 black dudes.)
One video of a white dude getting killed by the police does not negate rigorous studies. And the guardian article says that they may be a ‘Ferguson Effect’ or they may be other factors at play. That’s very much up in the air.
I did not come to the conclusion because I am drinking the flavor-aide but rather because time and time again this is what the data points to. Now the root cause of the matter is police abusing their power. If police never ever abused their power and always treated citizens with respect for their rights it wouldn’t matter if there were a racial bias, for there would be no illegal actions or stops or searches, to be biased. But that is the the case. They abuse their positions and more often than not, but not solely, that falls on minorities.
One thing I find perplexing is the great overlap between supporters of the “Black Lives Matter” group and the supporters of stricter gun-control laws.
So, Police are bad; and, only Police should have guns? Huh?
That makes for a particularly strange coalition of interest groups!
“The Police do all this will [sic] a racial bias, principally against minorities.
Libertarian Conservative: That’s an outlandish accusation!
That last turn always boggles me.
Cue the Libertarian conservative to tell me how wrong I am.”
It boggles you? Okay, you’re wrong.
The accusation that abusive acts by police today is primarily because of, or a symptom of, “white supremacy” or “institutional racism” is plainly false. And the evidence clearly indicates that is so. The police departments of 2017 are not the police departments of 1967. The city governments of 2017 are not the city governments of 1967.
There is no “white privilege” deflector shield against police bullets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp0de7N-V8o
But racialist accusations have powered popular delusions about people like Trayvon Marton and Michael Brown. Hands up, don’t shoot?
And ironically, the attempt by racialists to hijack the issue to their own racialist purposes, has probably set back practical efforts to fix the problem of illegal police violence. And also contributed to more deaths of black people, because of the ‘Ferguson Effect’.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/15/ferguson-effect-homicide-rates-us-crime-study