Dear police officers: I know you have a hard job, and a lot on your mind. So it’s easy for you to forget things that you learned a long time ago, like in kindergarten. So, once again, one of your fellow officers managed to forget these lessons, so let’s repeat them again:
That is a wallet. It is not a gun.
This is a toy truck. It is not a gun. Really, guys, it isn’t!
And now, for the latest:
You thought this was a gun? Bzzzzt. WRONG! It is a book. I promise you, the only danger posed by this thing is to ignorance. There’s no reason to shoot a black man for holding a book. Really. There isn’t. Even if it’s a black book, like this one, books are not the same as guns. And if you doubt me, ask any kindergarten teacher. She’ll tell you the same.
So what can we think about the killing of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina? The cop who shot him, who I won’t name in order to protect the guilty, is black. So surely it’s not racism that led to Mr. Scott’s death, right?
Hold on now. There’s a difference between personal racism and institutional racism, people. I’m quite sure that the cop who shot Mr. Scott was not personally racist against black people. Heck, he is one. But that does not mean that the institution of policing is not biased against black people. When cops are trained, they’re trained with targets and scenarios largely depicting black people. When they’re told to harass people on street corners, they’re sent where black people live. When they’re sent to arrest people, the people they’re sent to arrest, in cities like Charlotte, are largely black people, and largely for the crime of possessing drugs where white people would get a pass. It doesn’t matter whether an individual cop is racist or not. The institution of policing, the training that cops receive, the orders that they get from their superiors, the mindset of black people are scary and will kill me if I don’t kill them first… all of that is institutional racism, part of the institution of policing, not part of the individual psyche of cops. (Well, there are racist cops, but we’ll not go there at the moment).
In short, cops are trained that when they put their uniform on they must consider black people to be threats, not human beings. No individual cop makes this decision. It is part of the entire institution that they’re part of, much the same way as librarians saying “shhhhh!” when loud kids come into the library is part of the institution of libraries. When it is drilled into you, day after day, that this is your job, that you must do this job in this specific way, and that if you don’t do this job in this specific way that you will die, then you tend to do that job that specific way without really thinking about whether what you’re doing is participating in institutional racism. And black cops are no more immune to that than white cops.
That’s why it’s always never a surprise for me to hear cops who are involved in these shootings say, “I am not a racist!”, even if they reacted in a way that was totally different from how they would have reacted to a white guy doing the same thing. What they did is what they were trained to do, drilled to do, told they had to do or else they’d die on the street killed by some black gang-banger. And then they’re upset that people call a clearly racist act racist even though they themselves aren’t personally racist… well, that’s just how it is when racist things happen. Institutional racism results in dead black men just as easily as personal racism, after all, and most people don’t stop to realize the difference unless they see a disparity like a black cop doing one of these racist shootings. Then they don’t know what to think… but me, I’m not surprised. Because institutional racism has nothing to do with the color of the cop doing the shooting, and everything to do with how the entire profession of policing is organized in many towns and cities.
– Badtux the Policing Penguin
Just wondering the odds that little miss Tulsa cop argues that the “big, bad dude” made a furtive movement with his hand…without mentioning he’d just been Tasered. We all KNOW that people who have been Tasered remain in control and don’t make sudden moves.
Also, why is it her panicked voice we hear, ” shots fired, shots fired”, and not one of her co-workers? Were they too shocked to react?
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They’re just following orders. SStop me if you’ve heard that one before…
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He was tasered? Christ.
I kept seeing her defenders saying the same things yesterday: “Welp… you obey orders or it’s your fault!” and “He was ordered to stop moving!” But I saw and heard no evidence for that. One commenter even said he shouldn’t have RUN for his car like that. The myth-making sausages being made right out in the open…
Rampaging looks different these days.
That slow, slow walk to his car door with his hands up looks exactly like following orders to me. The three officers abreast backing away from the crime, plus this morning’s report of PCP in the car reeks of cover-up of a known crime.
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Seems like to me it is time that we should start doing to the police unions what the Republicans have done to teacher unions.
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Yeah, you’d think the unions were there to protect their rights to commit crimes freely, and without annoying investigations. Also, their right to be free from any kind of criticism at all.
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[…] such trials do indeed exist in real life, they clearly do not work and there are certainly no […]
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