For many many years, I have had an abiding interest in the brutality and lethality of law enforcement. I have a number of experiences...
Today the subject is 'unarmed black men'. There is nothing more that needs to be done because it's not a significant pattern, there is no significant risk. You say 'unarmed black men' as if 'unarmed black men' were a special group at risk, but 20 million unarmed black men are not at risk. If I said 400 unarmed black men were killed by lightning strikes last year, would you consider it necessary to setup a national awareness campaign and change policy? Of course not. Because the number is so small, you cannot extrapolate a pattern.
This is precisely exactly demonstrably the problem with racialist thinking. You take something that happens to an insignificant number of people in reality, and then you apply it to a race of millions. Then you do everything possible to make everybody conscious of your little racial theory. You add racial consciousness by establishing a false causal relationship and substitute prejudicial associations instead of real logic. You turn 'who happen to be' into 'because they are'. Wrong.
Police shootings need vigilance and they get vigilance. Cops don't walk away from fatal shootings without administrative review, and those administrative reviews are under local control. That local control is all that is necessary - anything else takes power away from the people, and subjects local matters to millions of prejudiced eyeballs (through the lens of national media). But your town is not like my town. Every incident requires a case by case examination, in the context of exactly what happened, not according to some racial theory.
So I know this because
A) my profession is business intelligence. I'm the guy who builds these kinds of databases for a living.
B) my brother is LAPD and I know the kind of paperwork he had to fill out under a similar consent decree.
When you mandate this kind of system it gets real expensive real fast for officers and departments who are not part of the problem. If you've decided that you can't trust the departments, the prosecuting attorneys and the whole system, having an accurate number won't help.
I'm curious to see who is going to pay to hire new FBI agents for this job and how much cooperation they expect to get. They have about 55 field offices, so that means (on average) > 200 departments per field office. Plus the cost of the new system. Heh. That's a contract I'd like to get.
But seriously, for what? If in 2 years we say exactly 1223 deaths, after we've spent a couple million for the new system, and taken the hit off the federal payroll to either dilute the FBI's manpower or increase it with new hires, what is going to restore the public trust when 99.9% is not good enough? Nothing.
What's needed here is a fabulously produced high-tech lynching with wall to wall media coverage in HD and some cops name that becomes as unforgettable as 'OJ Simpson'. So that everybody who doesn't trust the 99.9% can repeat that name for the next 20 years, and justify all their theories.
Why? Because when the Guardian UK put up their site, the facts became too boring to talk about.
(The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 – interactive) And nobody is talking about Oklahoma and New Mexico, where these statistics are telling us the most shootings per capita are taking place.
People who have volunteered there emotions into this circus will not be satisfied until somebody in uniform is burned at the stake and then beheaded. I expect to see lynching return in my lifetime, but I will have the comfort of knowing that the silent majority will be larger than it ever was. Will that be too small a comfort? Hard to say.
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