From one of your links (I can't believe you are going to communists for support):
I agree 100%, but that has NOTHING to do with a racist criminal justice system. There is a system that is horribly broken. It is the welfare system and the politicians on both sides of the isle that refuse to fix it.
I cannot support the final conclusions of the authors of that article:
Really? A socialist society is the answer?
Regarding the article in the Atlantic, why is this never mentioned?
I'll tell you why, because it ruins the narrative that RACISM is the primary cause. I don't disagree that there are problems in law enforcement. I just disagree that racism is highest among them. I think a disconnect has grown between the police and the people they are hired to protect and serve. I think there are many causes of that:
1. Less community policing.
2. More proactive policing techniques (like stop and frisk, etc) leading to more interactions.
3. High crime rates in poor neighborhoods.
4. The near complete breakdown in families in poor communities and the resulting loss of discipline and respect for authority other than the authority of violence. Do you honestly think that it is only police officers that are not respected? What about teachers? Schools are a mess in poor communities. Are teachers committing brutalities on students too?
None of that is directly a matter of race, other than the fact that a disproportionate number of African Americans are poor. That is the thing that is largely ignored in these debates and goes on unsolved.
I appreciate the questions you're raising, and I'll do my best to respond tonight.
Later than expected, but I did want to address your points.
If a "White" system is creating environments that segregate and target black people, it does not matter what color the foot soldiers are. As I said before, police are scapegoats to a large extent. The marching orders come from higher, but police have proven, largely, to be willing participants and apologists for the war on drugs (which the police apologist you linked defends) and stop and frisks. That's my major beef with them. They also protect their own when they should not. Also, it's been proven that black people do the same or less drugs than white people (in one of the links in the above post) but are arrested for drugs at a much higher rate and prosecuted for similar crimes much more harshly. Again, not all of this is police, but they play a crucial role in this chain of injustice. I've posted many articles of police doing amazing things in communities. These people are godsends to their communities, and they address many of the points you raise. In poor communities that don't have the benefit of these excellent exceptions, we see families destroyed by harsh sentences for petty crime. We see job markets turn away people with records, and, at this point, we see people enter the trap. Corporate prisons make up a $4B industry - in the neighborhood of NCAA Football. Needless to say, they have lobbyists that affect general laws. This, of course, is also bad for taxpayers.
1. Agree with you here 100%.
2. Again, agree
3. Agree, but, as I note above, the police have a role in that
4. You have to ask why poor communities are such a mess. Is it the fault of the people? Do the lowest of the low sink to the bottom and live in ghettos together? Groups of people over large ranges will be similar, and their starting place and opportunities for social mobility will be the deciding factors (on a group level, I stress). There are good and bad people and smart and stupid people of every language, color, and class. Of industrialized nations, the USA rates among the worst in social mobility. Most people are average. It goes without saying, but people seem to miss this point. The way things are set up, and average person born rich will stay rich, and an average person born poor will stay poor. There can be debate about how fair this is, but if we settle on this model, shouldn't we at least make sure that the standard of living for poor people is much higher than it currently is? If you set up the game to make it so people have exceptionally difficult time climbing social rungs (even one), shouldn't we have a system that doesn't also steal from them (civil forfeiture - police steal more than burglars)? Shouldn't we have a system that doesn't enslave them? There's a reason people don't want to allow these groups to succeed. They're worth more to them as slaves than nice, middle class couples. It should be noted that despite this state violence against them, black fathers live with their children at a high rate. Again, police are not immune from critique here.
“An important but unreported indicator of Ferguson’s dilemma is that half of young African-American men are missing from the community. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, while there are 1,182 African-American women between the ages of 25 and 34 living in Ferguson, there are only 577 African-American men in this age group. In other words there are more than two young black women for each young black man in Ferguson.”
In April, The New York Times extended this line of reporting, pointing out that nationally, there are 1.5 million missing black men. As the paper put it: “Incarceration and early deaths are the overwhelming drivers of the gap. Of the 1.5 million missing black men from 25 to 54 — which demographers call the prime-age years — higher imprisonment rates account for almost 600,000. Almost one in 12 black men in this age group are behind bars, compared with one in 60 nonblack men in the age group, one in 200 black women and one in 500 nonblack women.” For context, there are about eight million African-American men in that age group overall.
I think you recognize many of the bigger issues that black people face, and I applaud you for that. We agree on many points, and with better work on your points 1 and 2, I think we can see some real change. I'm not going to find it now, but I also think police work way too much. I think they should make more and work fewer hours. While we have to hold people accountable for egregious mistakes, it's best to do everything possible to avoid those mistakes. I used to work as a night manager at a gas station, and some of the night shift cops would come in for a break, telling me that they're on their 14th hour of a double. This should not be legal - for their safety and for the safety of the people they deal with. It's an important job, and it needs to compensated as such. With that, though, we should expect better. We have official reports from Ferguson and Baltimore citing institutional racism within the force. This can't be allowed to continue. End corporate prisons and ticket and prison quotas. The police shouldn't be tax collectors. This pits the public against them, as it should - frankly. Policies that force police to **** with people (for lack of a better term) disproportionately impact poor communities; and within those poor communities, black people tend to get it the worst (there will be regional differences here).
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/o...lack-dads-are-doing-the-best-of-all.html?_r=0
