I've started a new thread because my question has a narrow focus.
Rather than argue about police intent, whether the police or those they kill are to blame in specific incidents (or in general), and so on, let's just stipulate that Black protests have police reform as their primary goal, and examine how that can best be accomplished.
Specific reforms mentioned by Black protesters include:
(1) Changing the racial make-up of police departments so that the percentage of Black officers reflects the demographics of local communities, instead of police departments like that of Ferguson, with a mostly White department in a majority Black town;
(2) Making police accountable to the community they are supposed to serve, so that they can be held responsible for their actions.
One thing that puzzles me about Black Lives Matter is the way they target White presidential candidates, as if the desired reforms can be accomplished by federal executive order, or that appeals to a national public audience can achieve their goals in the absence of concrete steps to achieve them.
Police hiring practices and departmental standards for behavior are determined by the chief of police of a specific department. The police chief is usually chosen by the city council. The city council also has the power to regulate the police department by means of a community police review board, whose membership is also determined by the city council; and the city council may confer real powers on that review board, such as the power to subpoena all police records for examination, and the power to compel police officers and administrators to testify before the board under oath, and under penalty of perjury.
In a town like Ferguson where the city council is elected through citywide vote, and the majority of voting age residents are Black, the solution seems straightforward: register Black residents to vote; put local candidates on the ballot; organize voter education and get-out-the-vote campaigns; take control of the city council thereby; and enact their agenda, replacing the police chief with an applicant selected from a local, statewide, or national pool, who is willing to implement the city council's policies and whose public record as a police professional is consistent with his promises.
A police chief's powers over a unionized police force are not absolute, but he does have enormous influence and, given time, can change the composition of the police department through new hires. Between his disciplinary and hiring powers and the powers of a truly empowered citizen review board, even a recalcitrant department can be transformed.
Race shouldn't matter. When race becomes part of the hiring equation, it becomes racist. None of us should ever be hired or not hired because of our race, because that is genuinely racist. Instead of perpetuating racism in hiring policies why not hire people who demonstrate more racially integrated thinking. Hire people not for their skin tone, but for who they are as a person.
Under racially equitable circumstances, your 'any racial consideration is racist' theory would have more strength; however, there is an overwhelming inequity across the board in the US, so moves need to be made to address these gaps.
My opinion, anyway.
0 Replies
Miller
1
Sat 10 Dec, 2016 12:29 pm
@silverymoons62,
silverymoons62 wrote:
Hire people not for their skin tone, but for who they are as a person.
Hire people who know something. Nothing else matters in the real world.
0 Replies
Krumple
1
Sat 10 Dec, 2016 01:43 pm
@puzzledperson,
Part of the issue that no one really wants to discuss because it seems racist is that the reality is the majority (not all) but majority of bad people will ultimately place officers into positions that are life threatening.
Now with that said police officers have been protected by the law when they have done horrible things and lied about them. We're they all racially motivated or is there another aspect of not caring about a person who would kill you if they get a chance to.
Much of this current situation is the result of less than adaquit training. Where the officer has no respect for human life outside the uniform. Carelessness and an over inflated demand for respect leaves them trigger happy. They would rather execute than take the time to resolve the situation in a less violent way.
It takes effort to care about a person who may have the intent to kill you. To not get upset with this requires a very rare mentality. A huge majority of people simply don't have the necessary skills and temperament required for the job.
No matter what solutions we take this problem will persist because we lack the right individuals who would do the job the right way.
0 Replies
reasoning logic
1
Tue 13 Dec, 2016 06:27 pm
Do black lives really matter?
0 Replies
Lash
0
Fri 6 Oct, 2017 04:57 am
When Bernie began voicing his support for Black Lives Matter, bringing Erica Garner's complaints and comments about her dad's death to the MSM, Clinton's sex tyrant friend, Weinstein, helped her shut down BLM progress by blaming Bernie for Sandy Hook.
When you want to see the disgusting underbelly of how politics works, and why progress is rarely made by decent people, and how you are suckered into supporting the most vile politicians, you need look no further than this.
Yeah, get your specs and look at it. It’s a fact. Something you avoid very carefully.
You should see one occasionally.
0 Replies
Lash
1
Fri 6 Oct, 2017 06:20 pm
@Lash,
Lash wrote:
When Bernie began voicing his support for Black Lives Matter, bringing Erica Garner's complaints and comments about her dad's death to the MSM, Clinton's sex tyrant friend, Weinstein, helped her shut down BLM progress by blaming Bernie for Sandy Hook.
When you want to see the disgusting underbelly of how politics works, and why progress is rarely made by decent people, and how you are suckered into supporting the most vile politicians, you need look no further than this.
0 Replies
Setanta
0
Sat 7 Oct, 2017 05:05 am
@Setanta,
Two can play that childish game, Sofia . . .
Setanta wrote:
Why look at that, a twofer . . . self-righteous indignation and a slander of Clinton. Ya gotta love that!
0 Replies
Matt23791
1
Sat 7 Oct, 2017 06:01 am
@puzzledperson,
Race should not be a variable that determines someone's experience and life in any country!!!
0 Replies
hightor
1
Sat 7 Oct, 2017 06:30 am
@Lash,
Quote:
...by blaming Bernie for Sandy Hook.
That might be a bit misleading, Lash.
Quote:
Throughout the primary, Clinton repeatedly assailed Sanders for his vote to limit legal liability for gun manufacturers, specifically claiming that vote was preventing the families of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre from successfully suing the industry.
So, do you believe that gun manufacturers should be held accountable for the deadly products they market and sell? It's commonly brought up by progressives. I don't fault Sanders for his position — he represents Vermont, an outlier state with large firearms ownership but low rates of violent crime — but using his opposition to the measure against him in a primary is typical behavior in hard fought political campaigns. And while Weinstein may be despicable, suggesting a way to counter Sanders's rising appeal in the black and hispanic communities by pointing to a potential weak point in his anti-corporate image is not unfair. No more than it was "unfair" of Sanders to incessantly bring up Clinton's Wall Street speeches or anything else in her record. I also doubt that anything Clinton said about Sanders's reluctance to support lawsuits against the gun industry derailed "BLM progress" in any way. How would you even measure the "progress" of such a diverse and largely unorganized movement?
Quote:
When you want to see the disgusting underbelly of how politics works...
What? It's called campaigning — it basically works by trying to portray your opponent in the worst possible light, exaggerating your own strengths, and hoping you can convince people to go the the polls and vote for you. It may be discouraging but I don't think it's really disgusting...well, maybe a little bit disgusting, but not for the reasons you point out. It's the huge amount of money, much of it dark, that really disgusts me.
0 Replies
hightor
1
Sat 7 Oct, 2017 07:07 am
How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power
By Thomas Chatterton Williams, Oct 6, 2017
Quote:
(...)
Given the genuine severity of the Trump threat, some readers of this essay may wonder, why devote energy to picking over the virtue and solidarity signaling of the left? Quite simply because getting this kind of thinking wrong exacerbates the very inequality it seeks to counteract. In the most memorable sentence in “The First White President,” Mr. Coates declares, “Whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”
I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.
This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a “talisman,” an “amulet” of “eldritch energies” that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a “meta-biological force,” a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring.
This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. “This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,” he told me gleefully. “This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.”
When Bernie began voicing his support for Black Lives Matter, bringing Erica Garner's complaints and comments about her dad's death to the MSM, Clinton's sex tyrant friend, Weinstein, helped her shut down BLM progress by blaming Bernie for Sandy Hook.
When you want to see the disgusting underbelly of how politics works, and why progress is rarely made by decent people, and how you are suckered into supporting the most vile politicians, you need look no further than this.
Erica Garner died recently, but before she did, she truth-told on how Weinstein actually told Podesta that BLM needed to be shut down, while referencing a NY protest led by Erica.
Erica’s own tweets told about how Obama, Clinton, Lynch, and Holder lied to her and betrayed her as she sought justice for her dad’s murder.
0 Replies
Lash
3
Mon 16 Apr, 2018 08:32 am
Starbucks ‘Black problem’.
Why did they ask the black dudes to leave, while white patrons sat there as well? Did the white patrons use the bathroom without purchasing as well?
Is there any arguable reason behind this incident?
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