But Seriously...

They're protesting another shooting, this time in Knoxville, TN. Two nights of protesting demanding justice for a 17 year old black kid who was shot by the police. He was in an occupied high school with a gun, which went off when police tried to arrest him and he was shot and killed.

Between this and the Ohio shooting I've become convinced of something I always suspected: BLM doesn't give a blue fuck about black lives, all they care about is advancing their narrative and creating chaos. Within a couple of days they've protested a cop preventing a stabbing and a kid with an loaded illegal firearm in fucking school full of students.

Meanwhile there have been numerous black children shot and killed in gang violence and road rage incidents that BLM could care less about. No protests, no tweets about how fed up the person is with those things happening. Nope, they get mad about someone trying to murder someone and a kid with a loaded handgun in school being shot. And much of the media cheers and encourages them on. There's something incredibly fucked up going on here.

 

that second shot that his his buddy in the leg... like why would you even think of taking that shot? Okay, so the officer isn't charged for defending himself. But no one is gonna wanna be near him because dude is trying to thread the needle with a 9 mm round. Except that needle is comprised of his fellow officers.

 

I've never said cops are infallible and/or smart, but at least he didn't mag dump. The point still stands that BLM is protesting a kid carrying an illegal firearm in a school being shot and killed when his gun went off while he was resisting. What were the cops supposed to do?

 

yeah I'm not completely disagreeing with you. Not sure how much of the BLM stuff is consciously pushing a narrative, as opposed to just a bunch of people wanting to feel a sense of belonging so they get wrapped in a message and cause and don't understand the nuance to it. Saying "all cops are bad" is like saying "all white people are racist" to me. It's a spectrum. There's bad people in every profession, and racist people in every race. It's just that right now, there are certain messages that are extremely common, and it's really easy for people who long for a sense of belonging to join these groups and increase the volume. Not to compare the two directly, but in a sense it is like how the taliban and ISIS recruit, even though those guys are a lot more conscious and strategic about it -- they get young people who want a group to belong to and badge to wear to be able to say "this is me." Trump recruited in a similar way, imo. You have your core crazies who genuinely believe that ideology, but then you have all these tangentials who flock to you because they see their aspirational selves in the image your project.

 

There's always going to be some level of protest or dissatisfaction, but I'm not seeing enough to say "BLM" as a whole is considering the Ohio shooting a bad shoot. Even on "Black Twitter" there's a lot of pushback against people aggressively blaming the cop, with the general theme being "our policing system is super fucked up in general, but this one ain't it."

 

You're not wrong, it's basic psychology. Most people want to belong to something and are afraid of being ostracized from the group and they will follow the most insane, stupid ideals without question to make sure they're in good standing with the group think.

Have you noticed that we haven't heard from the girl in pink that was about to be stabbed? I'm guessing we never will because she probably doesn't want to be targeted by "The community" for going against their narrative. Mob rule is slowly and surely taking over our country.

 

I could post links to a bunch of tweets that argue otherwise, but why bother? Social media isn't real life. Real life is the thousands of people marching and screeching about justice for an attempted murderer.

 

They gave him every opportunity to surrender and he didn’t take it. I’d have shot the guy too.

 

Good. That means logic still has the potential to be a widespread thing.

 

"And the Academy Award for Best Film Editing goes to... the fatal shooting of a South Side Chicago resident."

 

“Police activity” is a great YouTube follow

 

This. It's easy to cherrypick tweets or whatever and say "BLM just wants to sow chaos" as if one person speaks for an entire movement without centralized leadership. The problem that people have with cops is that they have shown themselves to be more than capable of bringing in heavily armed white people alive, but they can't bring in a black teenage girl with a knife? Is there something I'm missing that makes a black teenage girl with a knife inherently more dangerous than a white man with a gun?

Smells like systemic bullshit to me.

 

if someone was actively trying to stab me, I would pray to any god I could think of that the fucker gets shot rather than continue.

there are plenty of good examples for your argument, but that isn’t one of them

 

At this point, it feels like anytime police shoot a black person, regardless of circumstance and in stark ignorance of how often black people commit acts of violence, this kind of outrage will be a result.

I think the argument that "everyone has a bad day at work, and police make life & death decisions as part of their job, when they make a bad one, people die" is losing traction when it's so widespread, consistent and when any and all efforts towards reform result in a sort of head-in-the-sand response. I maintain that the millions paid in settlements to these families, over and over again, are a drain on municipal budgets, and there's no small amount of political capital eroding here. How can a politician endorse a sherriff when this kind of violence happens, the city erupts, and the community is a nationwide example of this nightmare? Y'all see anyone running on a "law and order" platform in Baltimore or Ferguson getting any traction?

I watched "Lovecraft Country" last night (stay with people), and it reminded me of stories I heard from my grandparents about how black folks were treated back in the 40's and 50's. My grandfather's construction company was explicitly told whether or not they could have black construction workers onsite, and in which roles. The mills didn't functionally desegregate until the late 1970's (ie, they were "diverse", but blacks worked only the night shift or one end of the line and the whites worked the others). My mom was the first in my family to graduate from a desegregated high school, and I'm sure her opinion of it at the time was somewhere between angry and terrified. Whites got deferential treatment, and black communities functionally had no access to justice. Cops wouldn't respond, or wouldn't care, or if they did were more likely to haul anyone off to jail that annoyed them. Any unsolved crimes that could be pinned on a random black person unlucky enough to get stopped often were. In some circumstances, it became clear that attacking members of the black community was consequence-free from a legal standpoint (thus the "sundown town" concept). It was even encouraged, as business owners didn't want black folks anywhere near their establishments. The "stay over there with your own kind" and "why can't y'all just take care of your own" were the gentlest notions some people could expect. Police could just about loot and exploit a black community as much as they wanted, because who was going to stop them and with what authority? A burning cross in a yard today is front page news (I hope), but between 30-50 years ago it was a very real threat that implied no help was coming from the law.

So, when the term "systemic" racism comes into play, I'm reminded much more of this sort of thing than "the form specifies 'African-American'". What the police did then made their way into laws like "stop and frisk", asset forfeiture, etc. and made overtly legal....and never undone, curtailed or even really discouraged. The federal laws may have shifted, but the locals were all too happy to listen to their local sherriffs about how to solve crime in the community, because "the fedrul gubmint just don't undersand". This is 75+ years of culture caked into the culture, laws and institutions, one bloody, unjust brick laid on top of another. It seems like this is just stepping to the forefront because all of these interactions are suddenly being recorded over the past few years (thanks, smartphones!) and they are fucking outrageous.

I say all that to emphasize: there is no easy way to fix this. It's partially laws that no one is in a hurry to undo (because they are just as handy against other brown people like latino drug dealers and terrorists!), it's partially a police culture that think it has itself to blame for the drop in crime, it's partially a gap between empowering communities and leaders to fix this themselves and the white guilt outrage cycle we're seeing (you can't fix things without some risk and change, and likely some money too...and it's far easier to clutch your pearls a million times), and it's partially a self-fulfilling prophecy: some of these stereotypes are grounded in reality, some communities harbor more crime and violence and when there is no municipal justice, communties will police their own with a variety of methods from the pulpit (why do you think the black churches were so prevalent and effective back in the day?), to the pistol. The police might disproportionately spend a lot of time in black communities, but it's fasle to assume 100% of that is racially motivated.

However, the cost of doing nothing, in human, financial, and social terms is simply too great.

 

Well, I was adding onto a post replying to someone talking about BLM, so it made sense to me that I'd address racism. Also, the whole point of BLM was to protest exactly what you said:

Cops have been using excessive force on black people so often that they literally have to talk to their kids about what to do and what to say in the hope that they leave the encounter alive. Even if they do everything right, they still could be killed while the cop goes on a 6 month paid vacation and goes right back out on patrol afterwards.

If you were on the receiving end of decades of seeing seeing cops who killed someone you knew from your community, hassling your neighbors over bullshit, after yet another consequence free police shooting, would it be reasonable for your first thought to be "let's take a step back and judge this on its merit."? If that doesn't reasonable to you, then it should make total sense why some people would immediately jump to the conclusion that whatever a cop did was excessive. People that don't share that mindset haven't had that experience with police.

Dismissing someone else's experience as merely playing the race card allows cops to continue to use excessive force, not only against people of color, but everybody of any color. It makes excessive police force as the baseline. It also gives cops an excuse, and in some states, the legal right to shoot people without any sort of consequence. It gets a lot harder to hold cops accountable when people who defend a cop's actions ignore the victim's side of the story or justifies the cop's behavior based on the victim's past criminal history. You said it yourself. We should judge each of these incidents on it's own merits, which is why it shouldn't matter what the person who was killed by police did before the incident.