I don’t necessarily disagree, but it’s not really quite so simple either… and this is something that’s been bugging me of late.
I spent some time with the WaPo 2015 Police Shootings data set along with some digestions of it. While the facts don’t discount race as a mitigating factor, it does blur the lines on it being as clear cut as we may expect/like.
Ex: non-white LEO’s are roughly 3x more likely than white LEO’s to fire their service weapon.
From which I infer that, at least in this solemn context, race is a contributing factor as a byproduct of it’s impact on society (where they patrol, economic realities of their beat, etc) than who (necessarily) is doing the patrolling (and ultimately the shooting). In these cases, it is clearly a lack of de-escalation techniques and “us v them” training mentalities. Protect & Serve seems to have been lost by the wayside.
Further, while race will always be a contributing factor, militarization will always trump it (no pun intended) when it comes to use of force. The military is not a police force, ex: you point Marines at something you want destroyed. If your police force is racist, yet unable to use near instantaneous deadly force as a means of control/engagement, their ability to resort to such is strongly mitigated - even if they are racist scum bags.
Differences between forces with lethal force vs those without are surprising as those without receive more training which kinda hurts the melon when you spend even a second thinking about it. Take a look at this UK engagement between ~30 LEO’s and a guy with a mechate and count the # of times he would have been shot if this happened anywhere in the US, regardless of the race of either the assailant or the LEO’s…
I had a convo the other day where I had to “enlighten” someone that “resisting arrest” is learned behavior, taught day in, day out by both LEO’s and society as a whole. Same goes for “use of force”, they find that stomping you to the curb is easier than talking to you, you will be stomped to the curb - and when there are practically zero repercussions for them doing so, well, why not?
