Originally Posted by
Mark Rippetoe
This is a silly article, because it completely ignores the individual personalities involved, and it assumes that all Policemen are just empty vessels waiting to be filled with the latest LE Psychology wisdom emitting from some bullshit Criminal Justice professor operating under a federal grant. Here's the actual deal: if you look at the totality of police relations with the public, you will see that the most dangerous situation a law-abiding citizen will ever find himself in is a Law Enforcement Contact. Doesn't matter if the cop is white or black, or the contact is white or black (Australian women get murdered too), the issue is what we call Cop Shit. Not Racism.
If cops pull over black people disproportionately, it can be more logically explained by the fact that young black men commit a higher percentage of crime than young white men in urban areas than it can be by Racism, and this is just the fact, sorry. The reason for that fact is largely cultural, i.e. a bunch of young assholes start hanging around together and encouraging criminal behavior. Like MS13 -- remember them? Not black, just vicious animals from a different culture. Different cultures generate different forms of behavior, and you know this to be true even if you have a political agenda that prevents you from agreeing with the observation. The Swiss behave differently than the Kosovars. This is merely Pattern Recognition, and is learned by everybody, cop or not, if they're paying any attention while they grow up.
Yet law enforcement as a whole has millions of productive contacts with taxpayers every year, because most of the cops are not prone to Cop Shit. Cop Shit is what happens when the wrong individuals become LEOs. Training is not the issue. If the kids we all went to school with -- the one who got beat up in gym class, and his buddy, the one who beat him up in gym class -- decide that they are going to get even by beating other people up, or that they really like beating people up, and they figure out that being on the Police Department is a perfect way to indulge themselves at very little personal risk, then that Police Department has a problem than cannot be solved after the guy is hired. They now have a Bad Cop. We all know them, we've all watched them operate: power mad and thirsty for blood, perfectly willing to shove people around who don't need shoving, the guy who writes you for 6 over, and the guy who beats your ass into the back seat of the car after you're already handcuffed. And they're not particularly concerned about your race.
That guy puts all the rest of the people in the department in a terribly shitty position, like the 3 guys who stood around watching Chauvin with his knee on the neck of a face-down handcuffed man for 8 minutes, doing nothing about an obvious problem. These guys may well have thought, "Fuck, Derek, do you need to do this to the guy??? We're on video, you know!" But they stood there anyway. They should have intervened, and that is a very bad problem, but Chauvin is the real problem. And he can't be trained out of that.
He should have been screened out. He wasn't. Screening procedures are flawed. He should have been fired after about the 5th complaint several years ago, but he wasn't. Personnel retention procedures are flawed. His fellow officers should have sorted him out with HR or the Chief of Police, ("He's gonna fuck us up, Chief. He's gonna kill somebody who doesn't need killing. The man is out of control. You gotta fire him!") but they didn't. Peer review procedures are flawed. In essence, the Bureaucracy under which Police Departments operate is the problem, because Bureaucracies are carefully designed to prevent accountability for bureaucrats.
But make no mistake: Cop Shit is the problem in this particular situation, and Racism gets the blame, because Racism is more useful across a much bigger political spectrum. Noah is right when he says that Racism is not just a Southern thing, but the United States is the least racist place on earth, and if you don't believe that you have not traveled and you don't know Asians, Blacks, Mexicans, or anybody different from you. You may have noticed that people like to be around people who are like them -- this isn't "Racism," the problem, it is human nature, the fact.
Now, imagine being a small business owner in a city where you were locked down for a couple of months, you lost your means of making a living because of your local government, your employees are suffering, your landlord is breathing down your neck. And now, Cop Shit in one fucked up metropolitan area triggers the frustrations of millions of people in a similar situation to yours, local government fails to control a riot (arguably one of the very few legitimate uses of force from government, and certainly more legitimate than measuring 6-foot spacing between people standing in line to pay for what little toilet paper they can find), even though they were perfectly willing to arrest a barber for cutting fucking hair, and what remains of your business is burned to the ground. Frustration is a woefully-ass inadequate term here.