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Friday, July 08, 2016

Identity politics and law enforcement

1. We have a vicious cycle. On the one hand, white cops sometimes justifiably shoot blacks (and other races). When that happens, they are sometimes indicted by Kangaroo grand juries as SJW scapegoats. 

On the other hand, cops sometimes unjustifiably shoot blacks (and other races).

When that happens, some prosecutors manipulate the grand jury system to make sure they will never be held accountable.

The media ignores shootings of white suspects.

The media ignores the fact that many cops aren't white. 

The liberal establishment treats Muslims as a protected class, so they aren't held to the same standard.

The ruling class exempts itself from the laws it imposes on the governed. Hillary Clinton is currently Exhibit A. 

Identity politics and cronyism are destroying law enforcement. 

2. That said, I find black pundits stereotyping whites. They overgeneralize about whites. 

i) There are old guard white conservatives who automatically side with the police. 

ii) But there are younger white conservatives who distrust government, and evaluate police shootings on a case-by-case basis. For instance, most white conservatives sided with the police in the Michael Brown shooting. However, many white conservatives were very critical of the police in the Eric Garner situation. It's not monolithic. 

iii) I keep reading blacks telling whites that whites don't know what it's like to be black. 

That's a truism. By definition, it's true.

Problem is, the assumption that only blacks experience police harassment. But just as whites don't know what it's like to be black, blacks don't know what it's like to be white.

It doesn't seem to occur to many black pundits that whites experience police harassment as well, viz. random checkpoints, stop-and-frisk, no-knock raids, Stingray surveillance, John Doe investigations, civil forfeiture. 

That's in addition to the fact that cops shoot white suspects, too. That's habitually underreported. 

My problem is not with acknowledging that some blacks face police harassment and police brutality. My problem is with the failure of black pundits to acknowledge that this isn't confined to the black community.

iv) In addition, many cops aren't white. To constantly recast the issue as a black/white narrative when many cops are Asian, Latin, black, &c., is a distortion of reality. 

v) Finally, the police are, to a great extent, pawns of the liberal establishment. That puts police in an increasingly difficult situation. Take police who are required to enforce transgender policies on public restrooms, locker rooms, and speech codes (i.e. mandated transgender pronouns). Or police who are required to crack down on Christian bakers, florists, and photographers who refuse to cater homosexual weddings. Or police who may soon be required to crack down on climate change "deniers". 

3 comments:

  1. Ok. Here is a thought...

    At the div school that I went to - the black students routinely would be pulled over by police for one reason or another (e.g. speeding, missing a stop sign). These students claimed that they did not do such. In addition, one of our deans, a black person from Africa - he was followed something like ~ 15+ miles as he made his way home from the seminary. Why? He did not break a single law.

    ~ Now were white students pulled over? I am sure they were also to some extent. One of my friends was pulled over on account of speeding.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Here is the thing though... lets suppose that at a given seminary, the black student population is of size 10, and the white student population is ~ 1,000. Now lets us suppose that during the semester, about 15 white students are pulled over on account of some traffic violation or other and ALL the 10 black students are pulled over or followed or something, you cannot help but wonder if something else is up. And this especially so if many of the black students deny having committed any traffic violations and take it up with a lawyer.

    Sure black people experience harassment and sure white people do also. However its likely that blacks experience it on account of racism.

    ~ Raj

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    Replies
    1. Given what you describe, the pattern is definitely very suspicious. Seems to be a police dept. policy.

      One question is how police would know by tailing a car that the driver is black. The driver's face isn't easily recognizable from the rear of the car, especially if there's a headrest.

      A police unit could get the driver's race from the license plate, but that would require them to initially tail ever student car, then drop out after they discover the student is non-white (unless they are parked where they can see the front or back license plate as the student pulls out of the campus parking lots).

      Although this isn't specific to the racial profiling angle, there is the problem of ticket quotas.

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  2. Good question. Never thought of that.

    I think these guys were on smaller side roads that perpendicular to a busier road. They might have been in empty parking lots of corps and hotels. And they were not too to far from the entrance to the sem. They could catch a face or two as the car went by and I think the speed limit was 35mph so were were slow enough.

    Now - I don't have stats or numbers but for a brief season it was the talk on campus when I was there, teds btw. It might have even been just one cop who did this and we thought all of them were like that. All is takes is one ...

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