If you believe that police simply cruise the streets looking
for black men to shoot, just stop reading. There's nothing for you here.
The PROBLEM isn't that we have too many cops shooting black
men; that's the RESULT.
The problem is that there are too many angry, anxiety-laden
confrontations between young black men and police. That many confrontations,
with that much fear on both sides, a sizable percentage WILL end in violence.
Such violence will generally logically end in the shooting/harming of the young black
man because he's likely less well equipped, less trained, and likely
outnumbered.
(Let me immediately dispense with the "skin color"
thing; this isn't about skin color, it's about urban poverty which is
altogether too easy to conflate with skin color. But that's not causal,
obviously. We are basically talking about young black men, but it's not BECAUSE
they're black.)
So there's two elements there: the confrontations, and the
tension.
Let's be frank: the confrontations aren't because these
young men are selling too many girl scout cookies, or mowing too many lawns.
The anxiety in these situations is twofold: the young men
feel that the cops won't treat them fairly, and police are (justifiably) afraid
that the confrontation will escalate into violence.
This comes from serious poverty. When young men
(particularly) are really poor, there's a big thing about pride and
"respect". It is a coping mechanism - if you have NOTHING else, and
you recognize that you have little/no education, criminal record, maybe a kid
or two, no stable home, you're aware your life is crap. They see the difference between their lives and what
life "should be"*. It's human nature to rationalize by
overcompensating your own self-image.
*I believe, tangentially, that our media culture hits them
particularly hard in two ways. First, the gap for them between 'where they are'
and 'where they should be according to the conventional wisdom' is nearly
insurmountable. Worse (and this is probably the only place where skin-color
does play a role), the lead figures they naturally identify with are celebrated
(by white-owned media companies, let's not forget) as thugs, gangstas, and
hoodlums. If you aren't the 0.01% with pro-caliber athletic talent, the ONLY
other route to success (again, as presented is criminalism.
The problem is when this inflated sense of self-worth,
bravado, machismo, whatever you want to call it, collides with the real-world
situation of a police officer who HAS TO BE always conscious that his/her life
is at risk. The tools that the urban youth uses to function in his environment
with his peers - intimidation, fearlessness, aggression, posturing - are the
only tools he's got (particularly when stressed). When deployed in a
confrontation that's NOT the usually-fake-posturing that takes place between
peers, these make everything worse.
So you can't tell the urban youth "don't act that
way" - it's his ONLY TOOLBOX for his daily functioning. Likewise, we can't
tell cops "don't care that much about your safety". How is a cop -
particularly when we're talking about split seconds - supposed to distinguish
'empty brashness' from an actual threat? To Monday-morning quarterback those
sorts of moments are, frankly, bull****.
An impasse of facts.
What we can say is this: poor, urban youth are living in an
Hobbesian state of nature. The only way they're not going to do that is if we
radically address that condition:
Either implement policies that truly encourage poor families
to stay together & disincentivize fathers who abandon their children to an
almost draconian degree, OR remove children from that environment. To the
tangential point above about media companies, there needs to be a concerted,
genuine effort by image-leaders to get out of the gutter. The gangsta-face
makeup has done more durable, lasting, generational damage to young black men
than blackface makup ever did.
NONE of these issues will be solved by throwing money at it.
Frankly, I don't believe that activists for the left have the courage to face
the catastrophic failure of foundational concepts behind their Great Society
programs, and seriously work to fix them. Nor do I believe the right is willing
to spend the money and time it's going to take (a generation or more) to tease
out and address the root causes.
In that last context I think the militarization of the
police is a part of the problem. As Democrats like to simply throw money at
problems, in this case, it's more a GOP thing. If you have a rash of fires in
your home, you're not going to try to solve it by giving the firemen more
trucks and bigger hoses, would you? That would be absurd. Those things might
help them put out the fires more capably but that's treating the result, not
the cause.
