The number of unarmed black men shot by police across the entire US in 2019 was 14. [0] How does such a small number spark this level of fear and protest?
Also, do people actually think the police generally and on average does more harm than good as to request abolishing it?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
I've lived in neighborhoods in Denver where people didn't call the police. Not because they feared retribution from others, but because over and over the police have hurt them, their family, or their friends. And examples of them helping in those neighborhoods are much harder to come by( I can't think of a single time? ). The general feeling is that the police are not there to help you, they are there to watch you and keep you in line.
An encounter with the police is actually 3 times more dangerous for citizens than it is for the police. And that's for an unarmed person.
If we concede that the police "have a dangerous job", then interacting with them, (which again, is three times more dangerous) should reasonably be pretty terrifying.
People are protesting because the same factors present in wrongful deaths are also present in lower-level harassment by police. Black people have lots of personal stories about police encounters which will never be widely shared because there's no video and you have to trust the storyteller that the police acted wrongly. From the article:
> A recent CCRB report focused on police abuse against Black and Latino boys: “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”
The report doesn't focus on police shootings, it focuses on police abuse. Protestors are using uncommon events to highlight common events.
1. Most people who dislike or distrust the police don't actually trust those numbers. There are decades worth of documented evidence of police lying about people carrying weapons, and sometimes even carrying weapons to plant on people they kill. So from the start, a lot of us think that number is an undercount, possibly by a dramatic degree.
2. Even among the people who are armed who are shot by police, there are people who weren't doing anything wrong who were still shot. The most recent high profile version of this was Philando Castile. Technically, he was armed when he was shot, but when he was killed, he had already informed the police about his licensed, legal firearm and was moving slowly towards the glove compartment, as instructed by an officer, to retrieve his registration. So it's not just shootings of unarmed people.
3. Police don't just shoot people to death. George Floyd was not shot; Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for just under nine minutes. Eric Garner was not shot; Daniel Panteleo choked him to death with an illegal chokehold. Adam Trammell was not shot; he was hit with a Taser, 18 times, while in the shower and experiencing mental issues, and it caused his heart to stop. Sandra Bland was not shot; she supposedly hung herself with a plastic grocery bag in her cell after being arrested as a result of a pretextual traffic stop. This list could go much, much longer. Only looking at shooting deaths artificially constrains the number of people police kill in a very deceptive way.
4. There are so very many other ways that police can make your life absolutely miserable without shooting or killing you. I am not Black, and so I have been spared many of these experiences, but of my Black friends and family, I can tell you this: every single one of them has had police harass them for absurdly minor issues, or sometimes no issue at all. A number of them have had a police officer point a gun at them. Almost all of them have been at some point unofficially detained for some length of time. Some of them have been arrested and then eventually released without charges. All of them who drive get pulled over at least a few times per year, without fail. These are mostly middle- or upper-middle-class professionals. They live all over the United States, in cities and towns, in places with large Black populations and small Black populations, and yet their experiences all share a commonality that is terrifying when you pull back even a little bit and look at them as a pattern.
5. But maybe this should have been #1...what do you think is a reasonable number of shootings of unarmed people? Personally, I think that number is zero, so even "just 14" is absolutely grounds for extreme anger, even if you want to ignore my first four points. I don't think the police, people who are given special dispensation and training to use violence in the name of the state, should ever shoot and kill an unarmed person. I actually think any number of deaths caused by police is too many deaths. In every situation, they are the people with the most training. They are (ultimately) the best-armed. I recognize that, in a country with as many guns as the US, maybe the police will have to kill some small number of people per year, but I think every time they do, that shooting should be heavily scrutinized. We give them these weapons and powers so they can protect people, even people who commit crimes, and if they have to kill someone, they have failed to protect that person.
I hope those points answer your first question, and start to explain the answer to your second question. In response to that, though, I would first ask what you've read about police abolition so far.
'defund the police' as I think of it isn't about defunding completely, but recognising that we are way off on the 'too many police per capita' side of the scale, possibly because poor neighborhoods are getting a police presence closer to the 'sweet spot' of rich neighborhoods.
Because the police routinely treat people who aren't police or aren't visibly well to do (which being white goes a long way toward) like crap.
People will tolerate that or they'll tolerate some deaths but they won't tolerate both.
Because it's on the news, while the 51 unarmed whites killed by police in 2019 [1] aren't.
That's not a small number, though. Do you think that any number is acceptable? Any number above 0 deserves the kind of protest response we see in America today.
Your post is invalidating to the centuries of oppression faced by Blacks in America and to their struggles today.
I humbly suggest that if you give this some thought, you'll see that isn't a very good answer. Any complex system, especially one that involves humans, will have errors. There's no way around that. So the only way to eliminate errors completely is to eliminate the system entirely. This understanding is perhaps what fuels the call for police abolition: No amount of reform and training will get the error rate to zero, so the only way to get zero police accidents is to not have any police.
To illustrate my point further, consider medical malpractice. How many deaths caused by doctor error is acceptable? If the answer is zero, one needs to abolish medicine. How many automobile accidents are acceptable? If zero, we must abolish all motorized transport. I think for the most part people accept the unfortunate fact that accidents are an inevitable part of any system, and should be accepted if we consider the system to do more good than harm.
It doesn't. The protests aren't limited to all of the extreme cases you mention.
The way I see it, the protests are joined in by a large number of cohorts who wouldn't care about that smaller very specific demographic, but lots of people have found some reason to be empathetic to victims of police or otherwise critical of the legal/incarceration system.
Some people want more police accountability (via either employment contracts, civil law, or criminal law). Some people want to reduce or eliminate no-knock warrants/raids. Some people want to decriminalize lots of recreational drug use. Some people just want to be able to walk/drive without getting pulled over because some cop thinks they "fit a description". Some are tired of the legal system abusing/harassing them so they can see a friend / family member in jail.
Add up the list of people who have some grievances with police and I doubt you get too far from a majority of the country. There are still a ton of people who "support the police", even if they also have a grievance with "the system".
It's vaguely like optimizing a funnel in e-commerce. The point is to reduce friction at all points to optimize for the best ratio of people who are exposed to your system who then complete the desired action (purchase and have a positive experience). Police have almost no incentive to fix any of these interactions. Their fitness function as an industry has more to do with pumping stats and clearance rates and little to do with making sure your interaction with the police was pleasant. That is... unless you are a family member with police (I do so I see it).