Pissed at how crazy the world has gotten lately.

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Depends on what you mean by a "problem".

Do I think police should be better trained and have better abilities to subdue suspects? Sure, but I am not in their shoes and really have no idea what kinds of hurdles they have surmount in order to accomplish something like that.

Do I think police are systematically racist and target minorities for shooting? No.

Do I think police are systematically racist and target minorities for brutality? No. Though there is evidence (at the same link above) that minorities are more likely to experience some type of nonlethal force in interactions with police.

But what I think really doesn't matter. What matters is people are free to peacefully protest any injustices they believe exist, but they are not free to break the law while protesting and they are certainly not free to riot and loot and burn down cities and tear down statues. And if "protesters" are using some nice-sounding slogan to hide their nefarious intentions people (including Trump) are free to point it out. And I support the demonization of BLM specifically.

 

Errr . . . Jacob Blake is Black. Are you referring to Kyle Rittenhouse?

 

Shot by whom? The police? The police were nowhere near when Kyle was attacked and he didn't pull the trigger of his weapon anywhere near the police.

 

*ahem* This forum is for serious discussions...

 

I reread this part of your post, and I'm not sure I understand what you were trying to say...

I have admitted from the beginning of this thread that I believe BLM should be vilified; did something I said later surprise you?

And I think it's great that you know people who want to abolish racism through peace and education, but what does that have to do with the topic? Did I misunderstand something?

 

Ah, if that is the definition you are using, then no, I do not agree I am vilifying BLM. I have given you facts about why they are an organization that should not be supported by anyone who is not a Marxist. I do not refuse to acknowledge any good message it represents; I am saying that regardless of any good messages it represents, nobody that is not a Marxist should support BLM, they should rather support some other group that does not share their ideology, or create their own group.

I do not blindly support the President; I don't know where you got such an idea. I don't even like Trump on a personal level, though I do like many of the things he has accomplished during his term in office. I have given logical arguments that I don't believe you have refuted. To my mind you vilify (using your definition of the word) the President, ascribing to him things he did not do. He is definitely not a racist. He is definitely not a misogynist in the sense that he hates women, but he was certainly a womanizer in his younger days (and maybe still is, but I think he's too old for that now). I don't think in general he treats women any worse than men, though I don't really follow what he says very closely (as I said elsewhere I can't listen to politicians and their BS) so I could be persuaded otherwise; it seems to me he just attacks anyone or anything that says anything bad about him. I don't think I would call him a sociopath, though I'm not very familiar with the medical definition and all it means; as above he does certainly verbally attack people who say anything bad about him.

 

I couldn't find the kind of statistics for Canada that the FBI and others maintain for the United States, so it's hard to tell from the numbers.

I could only find homicide rates that separated out the indigenous people from the other races and they show that indigenous people are accused at 9 times the rate and are the victims at 5 times the rate of the other races, as well as the fact that most homicides are by people who know each other (which implies indigenous people are killing each other). So that implies that the indigenous people are committing violent crimes at a higher rate than the other races... do you know if that's true or not?

I also saw an anecdotal video showing that indigenous chief arrest that seems to be a big deal in Canada recently (I couldn't find any others; I guess not everybody in Canada is ready with a cell phone video like in the US ). Is it typical for the indigenous people to be belligerent with the police like the chief was?

How do you know the motivation for the cases of brutality against indigenous people is racism? Not that if it's something other than racism the brutality is then justified.

I don't really know anything about racism in Canada...

 

OK, let's tone down the name-calling. This subject is obviously one that @Beren could have a lot to say about if he wanted to join the discussion.

 

Ok, I'll weigh in a bit here.

If you live as a member of either an Indigenous, Latino or Black community, everyone in the community has an expectation that they'll be subject to greater police scrutiny in comparison to everybody else. And no, community members day to day don't care about things like quantifiable stats. It's a vibe they feel. There's a movie called The Hate That You Get that gets into what I'm talking about.

We actually do have our own versions of Floyd George here. JJ Harper and Donald Marshall are two examples where the racism was blatant. As for the Alan Adams case, I get what BTA was saying. But there's another side to the coin. A license plate check is often deal with a warning and not much more. There is a perception that the police response was out of proportion, including aggression towards Adams' wife when he felt the need to come to her defense.

As for missing and murdered Indigenous women, a lot of those have been verified to have occurred precisely because of a toxic mix of both misogyny and racism towards Indigenous women. There's plenty of cases there too, Helen Betty Osborne and Pamela George being but two examples. We actually had a serial killer here named John Martin Crawford, who targeted Indigenous women exclusively on the assumption that police racism would increase his chances of going undetected.

So I can verify that a LOT of Indigenous peoples here on this side of the border feel that they receive inordinate increased scrutiny as suspects of crime, but are less valued and prioritized as victims of crime. And it's not unreasonable for us to feel that way.

I can't speak for Blacks in the USA, even though I've kept up with the headlines and can see the parallels. But I don't doubt that the dynamics are similar yet different in detail.

Lastly, I know not all police officers are racists. I've known plenty who believe in protect and serve with all their hearts. If anything, one of the many unfortunate downsides of all this is that if scrutiny on the police gets kicked into high gear, does it leave the honest and well-intentioned officers feeling like they can't do their jobs without stepping on eggshells?

 

Hey Beren, glad you could contribute

And that's why I feel it is negligent and dangerous for the media (in the United States at least) to forward and support the narrative that it is racism that is driving the killing of black people in the United States when there is no factual basis for it and studies of the stats do not support that narrative (though such statistical analyses are not easy or definitive). A quote from the Harvard study of US stats I linked above:

So based on their analyses, there is no apparent racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings in the US, yet given the media coverage you'd think blacks were being hunted down and killed by the police.