Quote:
Originally Posted by nol
*and if the key witness for the prosecution is dead
What the people on the pro-cop side don't realize is that everyone else is granting all of these assumptions about what might have happened up to the moment that Michael Brown is a significant distance away from Darren Wilson after getting into a physical confrontation and then trying to make a run for it.
This is the point at which claims of racism come in. Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown and now gets to hide behind the continuum of lawful force, and that calculus in marginal cases is clearly subject to implicit (suspect is black = scary and life-threatening) biases. As has been generally agreed upon in this thread, police officers come from the regular pool of citizens and do not have the same kind of training when compared to US soldiers, so why would they not exhibit the same biases that are clearly seen in studies of the general population?
Nobody is saying that every cop is Bull Connor, but individuals who are granted a legal monopoly on lethal force and billions of dollars' worth of military toys each year need to be held to a much, much higher standard.
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We can hold them to a higher standard morally, but they have the same rights as everyone else in terms of criminal charges. I think people completely forget that in the emotion of this stuff. it's easy to think of Brown as the defendant and the police officer as the state, but those roles are reversed here.
Of course, police officers are subject to the same biases as the general population, and because of their job, those same biases can have more dire consequences than others with those biases, definitely. I still don't think it's fair to throw it out there as quickly and as broadly as people do. Sometimes it's just ridiculous, like in the robbery v. theft example. Officer Wilson, who knows, maybe he reacted a certain way because of race-based fear. Maybe Brown reacted a certain way because of officer-based fear. The collision of those fears happens everywhere and it sucks.
And I think some people do think all cops are Bull Connor. Jeff061 does, and I think others feel the same way but don't want the drama of admitting it out loud. Certainly, there are posters here that think that every officer in this town is Bull Connor. There are probably a few citizens in that town who feel that way too. And there are officers who believe they are that hated as a group. It's difficult to be a good officer in that environment, because there's so many assumptions against you. And it's dramatically more difficult to be a black man in that environment, where an officer may assume you'll be hostile because of fear. It's a vicious cycle of hostility and it takes courage on either side to overcome it.