Rithmomachia

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.