But Seriously...

As inexcusable as that is, I can kind of sympathize with the police. They have to be so sick of BLM's bullshit at this point. That doesn't excuse it of course, but after this has been going for years, it seems like some push back is inevitable.

Should the cops be held to higher standards? Definitely, but I'm not sure that means ordinary people and protesters should be held to zero standards.

 

I'm glad that the clergy and elected officials are trying to calm the situation in St Louis:

“Until Black people in this city get justice. Until we get a seat at the table. There will be no peace in this city.Everywhere you look, black people are being shot down by police, cops get off, get a pay raise, and nothing happens.” ~ Alderman John Collins-Muhammad

"Let me be clear: I don't give a damn about your broken windows. Because, clearly, you don't give a damn about our babies' bullet-riddled bodies. I will replace your window. You replace your killer cops ... and we still won't be even." ~ Rev. Traci D. Blackmon, senior pastor at Christ The King United Church of Christ

Police are shooting babies now? That's just unacceptable.

As far as "Everywhere you look, black people are being shot down by police"....apparently he hasn't looked at the St. Louis murder statistics for 2017:

 

Jesus. Even Baltimore isn't that mad.

 

I've just lost all sympathy for them at this point. My reaction to BLM was yeah, I want to hear you out, I'd like to help in whatever small capacity I can, but if you're just going to screech crazy shit you can go fuck yourself.

And yes, it's not always appropriate to bring up other issues when discussing something specific like police shootings, but when you're 500x or 1000x more likely or whatever statistic people want to come up to be killed by another black male than some renegade shoot em up cop for no reason, it's kind of hard not to notice after awhile that the energy and give a fuck goes in a complete reverse correlation.

 

Criminal acts (murder) and injustice (police shooting people without just cause) are very different things and elicit very different responses from a community. I bet they'd love some help dealing with the former, but can't due to the latter.

 

They are, and they should be looked at differently, but still, it's kind of hard not to take the statistical differences into account when all they want to do is scream about those white murderers. I probably disagree with on the percentage of blame that falls on the cops with regards to the murder rate, but where ever it falls, I'm pretty sure you would have to agree that the cultures in those areas, the gangs, the snitches get stitches mentality, and the communities bear some of that responsibility as well.

Moreover, do you actually think that even if it were possible - and I'm not sure that it is - for the cops to clean those areas up that there is any way it could be done that would satisfy these people? I'm going to say no. In fact, I think it's more likely all we'd hear about is how the cops are only out to get the black people, and how now it's even more racist.

There really isn't a method or solution that's going to make them happy.

 

Again, you are comparing crimes that should, in no uncertain terms, not happen, to sanctioned, legal uses of force by police officers with full weight of law. That is a very dangerous line of thinking, because of what it does to victims and their incentives to work with (or against) police. Stats are great, but I don't see the value of comparing the stats of criminals that need to be stopped, to stats of police who are doing the job of preventing and investigating crime, with fully sanctioned uses of force to those objectives.

That line of thinking is similar to: well more people die of cancer than AIDS, so what are all the AIDS people bitching about? Well, yeah, but one of those is almost universally preventable and has larger ramifications for a population.

 

I guess we just see it differently. To me it's more like 10,000 people die of cancer, 1,000 die of syphillis, and 6 die of aids, and people irrationally act like the only real problem is aids, that really everyone only dies of aids, and while you're stated purpose is to stop people from dying you actually only give a shit if they die from aids.

Of course I want to see cops punished when there is a wrongful shooting. Absolutely, but I don't think they care whether it was wrongful or not. Or they just always think it's wrongful, even if it obviously wasn't.

And going back to this ridiculous analogy we're going with - if 1,000x more people are dying of cancer shouldn't you put a few dollars into curing cancer? It doesn't mean you should ignore aids, but blaming everything on aids or acting like aids is ubiquitous isn't going to cure cancer.

Really though, if you take a situation, and let's just make it hypothetical for a moment, where there is no evidence to convict the cop and people are rioting and protesting and demanding justice --- then what is the correct course of action that makes the protesters happy?

 

It's not about making the protesters happy, I think at this stage, that would be mob justice. And granted, it's a weak analogy.

It is about distinguishing between preventable deaths that have criminal responsibility and deaths that are state-sanctioned acts of justice by a police force. The deaths are not the same, is the answer. One is murder and one is ostensibly justified force.

People are acting rationally if they feel more strongly about rare injustice than commonplace murder. Because justice (ostensibly in the form of police) is the tool they must rely on to prevent, investigate and deter murder.

 

Sure, it's perfectly rational to be angry about a wrongful use of force, especially if it is lethal. What isn't rational is acting like it occurs at a far, far greater frequency than it actually does, or demanding it be 100% proportional with total disregard to who commits what proportion of violent crimes. It's not rational to demand people go to prison indefinitely when there isn't evidence to convict. It isn't rational to burn a bunch of shit down and then say you don't care about what got burned down when even your reasons for rioting in the first place are based on a false premise. It's not rational to run around screaming crazy shit about how cops are shooting babies left and right. It's just what it looks like - crazy shit.

If it was simply a matter of condemning unjustified use of force when it occurs I doubt I would disagree with them, but it's clearly not.

 

That's the point I was trying to make. There is absolutely nothing you can do to make them happy. You can't throw cops in prison every time they have to use their weapon. I don't think it's right either to say "Well, sometimes cops do do awful shit so everything BLM does is fine." Even if that is someone's stance, there's still no answer whatsoever that satisfies them because it's all about losing your shit whenever a cop uses force on a black citizen, circumstances be damned.

 

I may be off base here, but it seems to me if the protesters spent as much time declaring that the streets are theirs and that Black Lives Matter in the drug and gang infested neighborhoods as they do deriding law enforcement, something positive might actually come from it. I'm sure the police would be more then happy to help and it would garner their cause much more sympathy and support then randomly destroying businesses and public property. Right now this whole protest has probably cost well into 8 figures and it's not helping the city or it's citizens in any way, shape, or form.

St Louis was one of the cities putting in a bid for Amazon's HQ2 and it's 50,000 jobs. They already had a hard sell, what with being the most violent city in the country and all, now throw in all the recent civil unrest and they can pretty well just forget about it.

 

I didn't say it would be easy or peaceful, but the gangs can't murder everyone if they all got involved.