yes, I took a criminal justice class in college. It's eye opening. My cousin was a police officer in Dallas and then San Jose, before burning out and teaching criminal justice at Chadron St. and then UNL. The biggest reason he burnt out on the job was "bad" cops.
first - there aren't enough blacks in my county for law enforcement to pick on, so law enforcement hassles white people.
second - if I'm a black person and I think law enforcement might treat me poorly because of my race, that's the best reason to say, "yes sir" and comply with every request.
Sure, but it's also the reason that a black person's fight or flight instinct is very likely tuned much differently from yours or mine.
My daughter's god father is a cop, and I spent just enough time in the District Attorney's office to get to see how much great work police do--and to see that there are some--probably not many as a percentage of the population--dirty cops, too.
One of the things that sucks about systemic racism is the way it infects organizations in subtle and difficult to diagnose ways. Police departments are a good example of that. Many of the negative outcomes specifically borne by the black community don't stem from a cop who one would ever diagnose as racist in the sense of attending Klan rallies, or using racial epithets in daily conversation. They come from the history of societal outcomes cast by race that are highlighted by the arm of the government tasked with enforcing laws at the ground level.
That's why this country needs to own up to what has led us here so we can begin to try to address it. Banning choke holds doesn't fix it, and throwing up our hands and not enforcing the law can't be the right answer, either.
Like any good self-help program, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Part of that admission is recognizing why so many people are so angry, instead of dismissing or villainizing them.
Much more will be learned about what happened to Jacob Blake, but it's awfully hard to watch either of those videos without wondering why on earth the police felt that situation called for lethal violence. If he said he was grabbing a gun from his car, sure, that would explain a lot, but excuse the skepticism when culpable police have often used that to explain their behavior when there was no video (or other) evidence to refute it. And if so, why wouldn't they have acted sooner to prevent him from getting to his car?
Many--if not most--police departments have given up on the high speed chase in most circumstances because the risk it poses is too great relative to the reward. This feels to me like that kind of situation--again, short of Blake saying he was going for a gun--the use of lethal force in that situation doesn't feel like its worth the reward.
And was this specific event driven by race? Who knows, but it's easy for me to believe the answer is no. But in the bigger picture, the situation--that black people are on the receiving end of more of these situations than white people, is absolutely a function of race in America. That's what needs to be owned up to so that we can begin to make serious efforts to address it.
