I'm not denying that those occur and I'm not denying that institutional racism exists, or that it influences these interactions.
What I'm saying is the root cause is poverty, and the solution to the institutional racism is socioeconomic - not social. There are racist cops out there, that's a fact, and they reinforce and perpetuate their racism by targeting poor areas because crime is more prevalent in lower income areas all over the world, another fact.
The remedy for this isn't disciplining or re-socializing cops although that may help, the remedy for this is investing in lower income areas and getting all of black America in the middle class. Whoever wants to tell you there's a better way of solving this isn't actually interested in solving it; material circumstance is the most crucial factor of this discussion - it is the source. People can treat symptoms all they want, I believe the efficient way to solve it is by treating the cause, not the effects.
No, I'm fairly familiar with it.
I don't think many of the people who have had bad run ins with LE were poor or below poverty level..
You can draw a direct line from police brutality and cops who abuse their authority today right back to the LE of the 1800s post slavery. LE has ALWAYS been used as a force to keep the black community under thumb and LE agents have always had wide discretion in how they uphold the law as long as they upheld the law be it codified or defacto.
In the United States, the Black Codes were laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War. As the war ended, the US Army implemented Black Codes to regulate the behavior of Black people in general society. A central element of the Black Codes were vagrancy laws. States criminalized men who were out of work, or who were not working at a job whites recognized. Failure to pay a certain tax, or to comply with other laws, could also be construed as vagrancy.
Nine southern states updated their vagrancy laws in 18651866. Of these, eight allowed convict leasing (a system in which state prison hired out convicts for labor) and five allowed prisoner labor for public works projects. This created a system that established incentives to arrest black men, as convicts were supplied to local governments and planters as workers.
Jim Crow laws came after and lasted from 1870s to the 1960s just like with Black Codes Law Enforcement was given wide discretion on how to enforce and uphold the law where minorities were concerned.
In the late 20st century...you see this again with the war on drugs and privatization of the prison system. Again LE exercised wide discretion in jailing, profiling and killing blacks based on the laws and attitudes of today.
Just LAST YEAR the JUSTICE DEPARTMENT released a report that found that LE was still operating on some system that was used to enforce Jim Crow laws. Ronald Davis, Community Oriented Policing Services director for the Department of Justice, said at an event at the Center for American Progress. These are operational systems and policies and practices that exist today.
Its the legacy of those laws that fill jails with black men in disproportionate numbers since they've been keeping stats on it. Its the legacy of those laws thats shaped the perception of "black on black crime".
