“I’m so dumb I did a racism by mistake”
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To your immediate examples, w/ regards to social spotlight. George Floyd, we know what the reaction was to that. Pepper Sprayed, I’ve a friend got sprayed (cop caught + documented) got huge settlement.
Militarised Police, those images went around the world. Starting w/ the documented Portland abduction thing. Upshot, national concern over an out of control Homeland Defence Dept. With majors calling for removal. Am I saying having a camera out is the magic sword of Justice. No, but its got them worried. .
A1 Audit : Pigs under pressure
…and your argument is that an adult behaving aggressively towards a 6 year old ISN’T stupid?
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Our brains try to suss out whether bad situations happened by accident/error or through malice. That’s an important thing for us to do. There are people who will take advantage of us and hurt us and it’s important to detect those people.
We want to successfully detect malice in other people. We want to make as few mistakes in that regard as possible. If I am a very privileged person (say a white male who has enough money in the bank to float some minor catastrophes, but obviously there are lots more categories of privilege) there is a very good chance that I ought to be more accepting of false negatives than I am in order to generate fewer false positives. Thinking other people are malicious when they aren’t makes our lives worse and probably means acting like an asshole.
If I am a visibly gender-non-conforming black person I have a lot less lee-way to accept those false negatives. In that case if I live in a major city and ride transit, it’s likely the case that every single day a person sees me who would physically assault me for being who I am if they had the chance. Noticing those people has a higher priority.
So when I watch Katherine Ryan’s standup and Ryan says that men are like dolphins, “Fun to enjoy on vacation, but why would you let one in your house?” I can have a laugh knowing that even if Katherine Ryan saw me as a man, Ryan wouldn’t kill me and that no one watching that routine would be inspired to kill me by it.
But when a Black person interacts with police they have to decide whether they are more likely to die if they run away than if they stay put and behave politely. They have to try to guess whether these are cops who are making a mistake or cops who want to kill a Black person to watch them die today, like the cop who killed George Floyd. Telling them that they need to adjust their malice detectors to allow more false negatives isn’t fair, and applying a more lenient malice-detector isn’t helpful.
Hanlon’s razor is some good advice for significant number of people, and it might be a great tool for you to live a better life. But it’s basically advice to turn a dial down, and you can’t give that advice when you don’t know where other people’s dials are set or why.
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Stupid alone doesn’t make an adult act that way toward a 6-year-old. Malice does.
Trying to use “stupid” to explain violent, racist police misconduct makes it sound like the root of the problem is “too many dumb-dumbs in uniform.” That doesn’t even begin to address the widespread, structural problems in American law enforcement.
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Yeah. It’s a whole lot of things, but it isn’t stupid.
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Actually, it does. Adress means to fix. How do you fix it if you don’t know what is wrong. Yes, the behavior is irredeemably reprehensible. In no way, shape or for am I attempting to argue it has any possibility of being correct.
BUT in in the name of intelligence did it get that way? How do we make sure it doesn’t keep happening?
We know, absolutely, “just say no”/just don’t do that" isn’t an answer. We don’t even giggle at that kind of idiocy anymore.
So… How DID dumb, vicious idiots get into that kind of position… And ya can’t just say “it’s that earlier generation”. Been too many of those gone past for that to be anywhere near to the answer… And if it is, how did those “young” people become “those old people”?
I do not for one second believe their excuse that they are so dumb they can’t tell the difference between a minivan and a motorcycle. They did this out of racism not out of stupidity. The computer that matches plates is a tool - it isn’t an infallible God and everyone including they know that. They saw an excuse to terrorize black people and ran with it because they are racist pigs.
These cops involved in the stop all need to be fired and charged with a appropriate crimes: Unlawful detainment or kidnapping, brandishing firearms, assault, and civil rights violation.
The police chief needs to be fired.
The department’s budget needs to be cut at least in half.
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If you stick to the premise “the cops who do this stuff are simply acting out of stupidity” then I suspect you will never correctly identify what is truly wrong with American law enforcement.
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Except for all the cops who got off DESPITE there being footage.
The only way to bring justice is to end systemic racism.
It’s accepted and encouraged by our society. School resource officers regularly treat young Black children this way.
Right? It’s not the problem. It’s like studiously ignoring all the blatant racism of the north and just pointing to “hicks” in the south, as if they are the only racists in America.
The problem is NOT stupidity, it’s ingrained, structrual, system racism that built this country. Saying it’s just “stupidity or ignorance” covers up that historical reality and lets white people off the hook to make positive change.
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In the same way there is no difference between a toy gun and a real gun in the Wal-Mart toy aisle, there is no difference between a Van and a Motorcycle.
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I’m glad for your friend. But there are dozens, probably hundreds, of people getting sprayed in the posts in that thread. How many will get settlements? Even if all of them did, who would be paying them? (Not the police.)
Apart from the ones from Portland (which to be fair is a good chunk of them), most of those incidents involve local rather than federal law enforcement. And the Portland police were doing just fine on the brutality front before the Imperial Guard showed up, and picked up where they left off once they were gone.
Well, you kind of did:
And that’s simply not true. Sure, there will be some settlements. Some officers may be disciplined, or even fired. A few may even be prosecuted. But hardly any of these incidents will make national news. Many won’t even make local news, and most of those that do will be forgotten again in a week or two.
Yes, there will be some accounting, but it will be mostly local, low-key, mealy-mouthed, and only for the most serious and heavily publicised cases.
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There’s a cynical take that Trump’s response to the George Floyd protests and BLM is guided by performative authoritoriansim– in other words, a trump voter wants to see the old social order brutally imposed on “liberals”, on “marxists”, on “antifa” and on people who aren’t white.
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Or pretending that an intelligent person isn’t capable of racism or violence.
Frankly, it would take a pretty stupid cop to spend years on the force WITHOUT getting clued in to how “aggressively policing individuals and communities of color” is a key part of how the system works.
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Right? It’s just another means of avoiding the issue at hand, which is…
This!
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Perhaps people are conflating the capacity for self reflection with intelligence.
“Mistakenly” because their intention was to shoot them right in the spot instead. ACAB.
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“Am I racisming hard enough? How can I improve my racism?”
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Are we the baddies?
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At lunch today I heard two old and one white young man complaining about the idea of defending the police from liberals.
“You know what’ll happen if they do that!” the oldest said.
I stood there seething with rage because these idiots have never been harassed by the police and I have.
And I’m fucking white!
Then I come home and see this.
I want to take every police officer in this country and throw them into a volcano. I am so sick of this shit!
THIS is why people are screaming “defund the police” you absolute fucking morons, who put down their masks when they speak to me otherwise.
I hate this country
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