this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Authorities have released shocking video that shows a white police officer in Illinois shooting a Black woman – who called police in fear of a home intruder – in the face, killing her.

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[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev -5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

you are upset that a few headlines about cops being prosecuted hasn't completely turned the bus around on attitudes towards police yet in the four years since 2020?

To solve the problems in this country, you need to be able to see what's going on clearly.

Back before about 2015, there was clearly a systemic problem of police violence against minorities in this country, and it wasn't taken seriously or identified as a problem by the media. There was a lot of white society that was waking up to it as a real thing that existed, but a lot that were not, and government and media were slow to even realize it existed. I think at the point, regardless of what the scope of the problem quantitatively was, most of what you were saying was accurate just because it was so important to get people to even recognize the problem.

Now, I think it's swung the other way. I think the stereotype that every single cop is the enemy is creating a lot more problems than it solves.

  • Underfunding departments leaving real crime unaddressed or leaving them to use substandard police because that's all they have in terms of manpower
  • People being pointlessly hostile to cops during normal interactions, to the point that the citizen is the one escalating everything and sometimes creating a serious issue for themselves when the cop is literally just trying to politely do their job
  • Attention being taken away from other aspects of the justice system that still badly need reform (imbalance of power between prosecutors and public defenders being a big one)
  • Making departments that are trying to take big steps to address the problem have a pretty justified reason to say "you know what fuck it, our funding got cut anyway and everyone I interact with all day just yells at me, so you know what, I'm gonna go back to slamming people on the ground when I arrest them because what's the difference"
[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I have zero indication that meaningful change has occurred aside from your assurance that it has and a handful of anecdotal headlines about cops being prosecuted.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, and that was why I was asking -- do you have any idea quantitatively? I have to say, I do not; probably my impression is based on a sort of anecdotal impression same as yours is. It would be good to look at something like, how many use-of-force complaints have there been, how many was bodycam footage made available for and what did things look like when reviewing the footage? Things like that.

Just basing things on a general anecdotal impression isn't a good thing to do on either side, I don't think.

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just basing things on a general anecdotal impression isn’t a good thing to do on either side, I don’t think.

Fair, but I remain unconvinced there has been meaningful change even as I acknowledge your point. We KNOW what the starting point was. If I'm to be convinced it has changed, I think the burden is on those (not necessarily/specifically you) who are telling me it has.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This and this are probably the best overviews I could find about what has and hasn't changed. It's a little frustrating though -- it's hard to find something substantial about "okay yes but what has the result been."

And, the things I could find about the result sometimes used very weird metrics (like lumping together all police shootings without making any effort to distinguish justified shootings from unjustified or attempting to determine what percentage were unjustified in order to point to whether that number is going down or not).

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago

Those do look like good articles though, thanks!

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

(like lumping together all police shootings without making any effort to distinguish justified shootings from unjustified or attempting to determine what percentage were unjustified in order to point to whether that number is going down or not).

I'm going to really frustrate you anyway because although I acknowledge that some shootings are justified, I also don't trust how they are categorized since (to my knowledge) this categorization is determined by the content of the police reports themselves, and so would require me to believe that every false report was caught out and none slipped through.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hm, that wasn't what I was talking about wanting to see. To me, what would be good to see would be a breakdown of, starting from the total number of shootings or use-of-force incidents in any given year:

  • How many the agency didn't release bodycam footage for
  • How many we got the bodycam footage and it looked justified
  • ... it looked debatable
  • ... it looked unjustified

That's a fuck of a lot of work, which is presumably why we don't see it. But that to me would be a good way to analyze whether things are actually working.

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago

But that to me would be a good way to analyze whether things are actually working.

I agree, and to put my cynical hat on again, I think would be the job for the oversight teams that (to my knowledge) cops throw a tantrum about whenever they come up, and which I don't think are widely implemented, or not effectively implemented in many cases.