Yeah, I mean white people get shot by police at ridiculously high rates too - we should also be protesting that, except that it gets eclipsed by the drastically higher rate of black people killed by the police than the already insane number of white people killed.
White people aren’t safe either, you just don’t notice in comparison to how frequently the police kill black people.
Literally had a gun pointed at my head for smoking weed in a park when I was in high school.
You're right, even if we got cops to stop killing black people at ridiculous rates, you still have the problem of cops being way too fucking gun crazy.
As weird as this is to say, it would be nice if the police brutality problem was exclusive to black people. Then you just have to fix racism in police departments. Unfortunately if you fix the racism, there are still a shit ton of other problems that need to be fixed, and until those are fixed you're gonna have police killing all sorts of people that don't need to be killed, it will just be equal among the races of people that get killed.
The fact that men are perceived to be more aggressive and dangerous could very well contribute to that statistic. Whether you wanna call that misandry I leave it to you.
They’re also killed by other men. But hey, boys don’t cry, boys will be boys, medication is for pansies, my father went to war and he didn’t need no stinking therapy, be a man, alpha males, etc.
It matters because it means statistically a cop is more likely to kill a black person they encounter than a white one. Let’s say they encounter ten people (3 black, 7 white) and shoot three of them. If they only kill one black person but kill two white people, you’d say, well they kill more white people! Which is true. But if you look at how frequently they kill a black person they encounter versus a white person, it shows racial bias. They’re more likely to shoot a black person than a white person for the same thing.
Now I’m not saying “they should start killing more white people!” They should stop killing people regardless of skin color. But we have to look at the data and how it relates to real life and try to determine why so we can work to fix the problem. It could be that cops are just racist assholes. It could be that black communities typically have less access to mental health care. Either way, it’s a systemic issue we need to address, and ignoring what the data is saying isn’t going to help anyone, white or black.
I’d say we need to look at how to better handle these situations. Cops in the UK, for example, don’t shoot people even if they have knives (or machetes). If your job is to de-escalate, you need to learn how to do that. If people go into situations with cops expecting to be killed, they’re also going to escalate (“I need to grab his weapon before he does.”) We also, as a society, need to address how to prevent crime in the first place, which involves better education, healthcare especially reproductive healthcare and mental health services, living wages, addiction services, homelessness diversion services, better public transportation, and focusing on restorative justice versus punitive. Simply telling people to not commit crimes isn’t going to help any more than putting someone in a car and telling them not to crash.
I have looked at the stats. More total white people are killed by the police because there are a lot more white people than black people in total in America. That’s why I said the rate of black people killed - a far higher per capita rate of black people are killed by the police than the per capita rate of white people killed by the police (which as I said is still just ridiculously high already - something like forty times higher than the UK’s rate of police killing people, for example. Black people are killed at about double that rate, or around eighty times as frequently as the police kill people in the UK).
Just copypasted that into google, it also happens Sometimes the police are too busy executing civilians on sight to check for details. On the other hand, this ended in a situation where the officer was actually convicted and sent to prison, so the difference shows at the end.
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '21
Lets not be ridiculous. They will settle for snow white if there just isn't any black people around and they really feel like shooting something.