zlacker

You're misidentifying what the core problem is with police brutality: it's not just about relative frequency, it's about how the justice system responds to it.

As a society we give police a monopoly on civilian violence, it is only reasonable to expect the holders of that power to be held to the highest possible standards.

But the justice system signals the exact opposite, by systematially protecting even the worst cops from the consequences of their actions. This, I believe, lies at the core of the people's rage. I for one think that rage is justified.

>>ookdat+(OP)
I agree that the situation should continue to be improved. I doubt that websites like this will help. Riots will definitely not help. The cause of righteousness has been set back a generation in a few days.

>>downer+l2
Don't put words in my mouth. I never implied in any way that I think the situation is improving. I'm not sure what part of my post you're actually agreeing with.

I cannot see any downsides to systematically documenting instances of police brutality and demanding justice for each instance. It seems entirely just to me.

>>ookdat+G3
My bad. I think the situation should continue to be improved, as it surely has in the last couple of generations. You're welcome to think otherwise, of course.

>>downer+l2
It seems likely that many people who were not previously racist have become racist after witnessing these riots. I keep asking people the question -- if all racism was cured, if it no longer existed, and all police behaved 100% innocently, except 1 white cop who kills 1 black man -- what is the proper response? Burning down cities? Concluding systemic racism?

>>downer+0c
I've looked around a little bit and I simply cannot find any evidence that police violence is on the decline. A cursory look at a graph of police killings over the last few years shows, if anything, a slight increase (https://www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/4-charts-anger-police... - first graph).

I can only speculate about what your exact argument is: I'm guessing that what you're saying is that, surely, today's police are behaving better than the police in, say, the civil rights movement era (I couldn't find any data on that but I'm willing to accept that much for the sake of argument). And I think you infer from that that police violence is downward trending and that therefore, we should just let matters run their course: any upset to the delicate improvement might plunge us in the other direction.

But your inference is incorrect. You're looking at a function over time, see that this function was (probably) higher at some point in the past than it is now, and conclude from that that the function is still trending downwards. Essentially your argument seems to be based on the entirely unjustified assumption that the function has to be monotonically decreasing.

But if you don't assume monotonicity (and you really shouldn't), then function values in the far past don't give you any information about the derivative of the function at t=now. And the derivative at t=now seems to be (ever so slightly) positive, not negative as you imply. In which case, evidently, things are not improving on their own.

>>emerge+Ns
Your question boils down to "in a hypothetical world where there is no systemic racism, would you complain about systemic racism?" The obvious answer is "no", but I'm not sure what information you hope to get from asking the question.

You make the question uninteresting by its assumptions. You pose a hypothetical situation - a white cop killing a black man - which might be interpreted as a case of systemic racism, depending on the context of the killing. But then you impose the axiom that the hypothetical world in which the situation takes place is not racist. So the situation could not have been a symptom of systemic racism, by your definition, and any query about whether it was racist has only one answer, which directly follows from your given axiom.

So I'm left confused at why you pose the question.

>>emerge+Ns
If somebody takes a life for an unjust reason they should be punished however the law defines the punishment. Whether you're police or not, nobody is above the law.