But...
I feel the complete opposite of “hopeful” when I see these riots, when I see people so angry they will destroy their own cities.
Because it accomplishes the exact opposite of they hope it will accomplish:
1. Those who side with heavy-handed police tactics feel vindicated for their prejudices.
2. The communities of those who feel unheard and left out are torn down even further.
3. Every civilian-police officer interaction post-riot will be even more contentious, thus making violence more likely.
Don’t get me wrong I believe there are corrupt officials and police officers. Obama is right about how to fix that on the local level.
About the actual problem being protested: One of the themes of the protests is to say the names[1] of those have been killed at the hands of the police. Just using common sense tells me that if you can name off the victims it means the problem isn’t widespread or systemic across the country.
Try naming the victims of rape or suicide or even murder.
Name the police officers killed in the line of duty in the last ten years. You can’t there’s way too many.
George Floyd should not have died. And the police officer(s) who contributed to his death should be held 100% accountable for their actions.
But there will always be unnecessary deaths in law enforcement situations. Rioting and burning down your own city will not make that fact go away.
So, I feel a loss of hope when I see these riots. To me, it means we are so far from working together to fix the problems that can be fixed. It creates a bigger divide in our society.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/865261916/a-decade-of-watchin...
true, but the counterpoint is the problem is not the volume of errors, its how the errors are handled. people know those names because the issues were never closed. Public servants like police officers should be open kimono; if someone dies, it should be a big deal. where's the brutally honest post-mortem? we expect this out of meaningless things like $SaaS, why in gods name not our police forces?
The goal is to bring that number as close to zero as possible.
I am confident that this reality check for people who are somewhat blindly supporting their ideologies will benefit everyone. Beginning with the wealthier people who supported these protests and are now seeing their gated communities burn and their "progressive" newspapers destroyed.
https://twitter.com/ChrisPalmerNBA/status/126741517304573542...
https://thepostmillennial.com/journalist-supported-protester...
"President Obama, who hoped to sow peace, instead led the nation in war"
I did however never fear ending up on death row.
> Name the police officers killed in the line of duty in the last ten years. You can’t there’s way too many.
First of all, the number of people killed by US police is an order of magnitude higher than the number of police officers killed in the line of duty. I have provided sources about this here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23373468
Of course, not every death caused by police is unjustifiable. But let's keep the whole picture in mind.
Second, I don't think any reasonable person is arguing that police officers nonchalantly murdering random black citizens is the systemic issue. What is systemic is police misconduct and brutality, as well as bias towards minorities especially black people. In extreme circumstances, this can result in loss of life; but most of the time, it won't.
You may have heard of Heinrich's law. If you have not, please take a look at the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_triangle
The gist of Heinrich's law is that for each accident causing serious serious injury or death, tens of accidents had occurred previously causing minor injury. For each accident causing minor injury, there had been tens of accidents causing no injury. For each accident causing no injury, there had been tens of unsafe acts. To give an example, a drunk driver killing someone had probably driven drunk hundreds of time before. He had scraped the paint on his car a couple of times, and the rest, he had driven without any accident of any sort.
For every death on that list, how many people have suffered life altering injuries and permanent disabilities at the hands of the police, e.g. blindness [1] or paralysis [2]? For every person suffering life altering injuries, how many have suffered serious yet healable injuries, e.g. broken ribs, ruptured spleen, etc.? For every person suffering serious yet healable injuries, how many have suffered minor injuries, e.g. broken nose, broken teeth, bruises, cuts, etc.? For every person suffering minor injuries, how many have been harassed, targeted, unjustifiably arrested or carded?
This is the systemic issue people are protesting against.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-protests-p...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/assault-charges-d...
I don't disagree that there is a likely (especially in some places) a systemic police brutality or at least heavy-handed approach. I don't know how widespread. Probably a small minority of cops create a large majority of the problems.
And that needs to be rectified at the local level. Just like Mr. Obama said in his article.
I also believe that there a small minority of police officers who either already are prejudiced or have developed an unhealthy prejudice as a result of doing their jobs.
Because let's face it, if you get a job policing an inner city predominantly African-American community and you are not African-American, you are going to have many opportunities to develop prejudice. The obvious reason is that you are going to deal with the worst people from the community on a regular basis. It would work the same if a black police officer was assigned to work a rural, low-income white neighborhood. It's natural to start building a stereotype in your mind. In fact, it might be a self-preservation tactic.
I think one path to a solution (which once again has to be developed at the local level) is that the police need to do more in the communities than just enforce the law. If there was some community involvement it would create a trust between the police and the community. This would cause the interactions between officers and law breakers to maybe not start out with such animosity. If you knew the officer's first name and he knew yours because you had been in the community you'd be a lot less likely to have negative interaction during a traffic stop.