It’s about social class. I’ve known lots of white guys who have gotten thrown a pretty real beating by the cops.
It’s probably less because legally a white dude is a little bit less helpless I guess. But they get pretty damned aggro when they know nothing bad is going to happen to them.
Also I can’t stress this enough: brutality isn’t just about getting physically beaten. There’s getting stopped for no reason and interrogated by someone who is looking for a way to ruin your life. There’s getting put in jail because you don’t have enough money for bail. They segregate you in jail so I’ve spent some time in a room full of white guys who were in there for long term holding… and I’ll tell you they weren’t having a wonderful time in the penal system. They were also almost all extremely poor.
The poor white police experience is absolutely awful. If everyone was treated the same by the justice system in this country by race it would still be a scandal.
But seriously if I had a hundred bucks for every time I heard someone in law enforcement/ authority say ‘I’m not racist I hate you all equally’ or some equivalent growing up I’d have a low four figure sum. Now as an adult I know that was bullshit, but that’s definitely what’s stored in their brain as the right answer to ‘am I a racist’.
Ok. So is the second paragraph in your post suggesting cops themselves are colour blind in being unnecessarily brutal and in fact the courts system etc are the real racists?
I’m not in any way shape or form saying the cops are being color blind. What percentage of the total population is black? What percentage of the total population is white? Imagine if you were screwing over those two groups at identical levels in terms of numbers from your perspective.
Your filter for what constitutes a violation would have to be massively massively massively lower for the second group than the first group wouldn’t it?
Yeah if anyone thought I was trying to say, in any way, that the black experience isn’t way worse than the white experience with police, that’s not what was intended. I’m pointing out that the poor white experience is awful and would be a massive national scandal even if there were no black people in the US. It only seems like they have it any kind of easy because the blacks are getting fucked up even harder.
It’s like that tweet that simp posted. The guy rigorously focuses on only what brings the police shooting rate down. As though if we just stop the cops from shooting people with total impunity it’ll all go back to normal and be totally fine. No. That’s just the tip of the spear. The whole system is rotten all the way through.
Yes exactly. Now imagine you were fucking up exactly the same number of them as you were white people. Still fits under that umbrella of ‘I don’t see color I hate you all equally’. You just generally look at the black people you encounter really carefully searching for an excuse to ruin their day/week/month/life.
I strongly suspect the cop scorecard is entirely based on generating the maximum number of incidents and closing them successfully. Poor people have more incidents on average because of desperation/despair AND have no meaningful defense after the arrest vs the legal system. If you want to maximize the scorecard it sure sounds like you should go after the obvious poor (the homeless being probably close to the absolute best targets), minorities, and random citizens who fucked up and don’t know how to defend themselves.
What you wouldn’t waste any time on at all is chasing professional criminals who are genuinely slippery and playing the game back.
Like this is why racism is institutional. It’s why black cops aren’t that much better about this (if at all) than white cops. It’s why law enforcement nation wide is a nasty combination of tyrannical and worthless. Professional criminals do most of the successful crime. The cops only catch them if they screw up in some major way basically. Meanwhile the cops are busy farming the rest of the population for achievement points.
Welp, I just committed what is probably a faux pas, but I just posted the following on Facebook in the direction of an old Boomer dad of a friend from high school after a pretty slight back-and-forth where he was just woefully misinformed:
“You live in a fictional world with information gleaned from make-believe sources and your ideology stinks and makes the world a worse place. Plymouth is sure a nice place though, what’s a few dead black folks for a nice life. Screw your comfort. If you want personal responsibility, take some for the garbage in your head. It’s there by choice and the library is down the streets. It would sure make Thanksgiving more comfortable for your kids.”
I dunno, it made me feel better. But I won’t suffer any real consequences from it.
The cops exist to protect property first and foremost. And the circle of ‘people who own meaningful property’ and therefore count as people is shrinking as capitalism eats itself. By my estimation the thin blue line has retreated to here. It was one rung out before covid. But that retreat can only continue inevitably inwards, eventually the noose will tighten all the way.
Just wanted to post my anecdote that I posted way earlier but I grew up super poor two drug addict parents and cops legit treated me like royalty. They were way, way worse to my minority homies especially the black ones.
I spent my late teens early 20’s in San Antonio, TX during the early 00’s. It’s really important to note that the time/place on this stuff is really important. One of the reasons the criminal justice system is such a complicated problem is that each locality is unique and operates under slightly different incentives.
I had a couple of bad experiences with the KY cops as well in my mid-late 20’s, which would have been from '06-'15.
I’ll throw mine in. I grew up somewhat but not horribly poor, but my parents moved us to the one poor multifamily neighborhood in a city that shared it’s school district with a really wealthy city.
My best friend is the son of Nigerian immigrants who lived in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the wealthy city. His family had some crazy stuff happen, but until the time we were 30 or so he was absolutely loaded. Dude had all the privilege money can buy. But he had the wrong color skin.
Kids, it isn’t even close. Money is privilege sure, but my friend spent a couple months in the clink for some pot. He had guns drawn on him twice at traffic stops after following orders to put his hands out the window. I got pulled over at an absurd rate when he was in the car. We almost got arrested for nothing because we drove literally one block from my college house to Taco Bell.
This guy hasn’t even had it that rough. He was rich. He might still be in jail if he were poor. This country is insane.
