In threads like this I typically chime in on the technical aspects of firearms usage. I hope that doesn't make it seem like I'm taking the side of law enforcement in general on race issues. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Babypeters and GVC are forcing me to think about this issue in its broader scope. Now, first off, I don't know the specifics of what happened in this shooting. My inclination is that the officer was threatened and made a decision to use lethal force and ultimately I don't think he will be found guilty of a wrongful use of force.
That said, I find many of the comments here to be much like the comments in regard to illegal immigration. Clearly someone crossing our boarder without going through the proper channels is committing a crime. It's easy enough to sit back and say I'm not racist, but them Mexicans need to follow our laws if they want to be in our country. That's an easily defensible stand to take. They break the law, they are not welcome here. But ignores the much much bigger issue, which is that our immigration system, our immigration policies and our immigration enforcement are all broken...unless the goal is to keep people unlike ourselves our of "our" country. If that's the goal then the best course is to claim not to be racist and to throw our hands in the air and stand behind the letter of the law.
But there is a huge evil taking place in our country right now. It is absolutely disgusting and it is undermining our national strength and besmirching our national identity. We have essentially re-instituted Jim Crow but in stealth mode. It's easy. Simply give police officers (honest hard working people at their core) mandates in minority neighborhoods to aggressively enforce laws that are commonly broken by all people in all neighborhoods at essentially the same rate, and give officers in white neighborhoods a mandate to ignore the small stuff and maintain positive community relations. The best part is, it doesn't have to be a top-down conspiracy. You just say that in poor, high crime neighborhoods it is necessary to be more aggressive in "fighting crime" which in most cases means enforcing drug laws for simple possession. From there you stop and frisk, stop and search, stop and interrogate, stop and harass the local populace. That's really all there is to it. If those same tactics were used in Sandy Utah we'd see significant portions of our young adults going to court and being sent to prison. Do that for 50 years and Sandy Utah would be a hell hole that hated the police. So many of their young men would be ex cons that they wouldn't be able to get decent work. They wouldn't be productive members of society. They would be playing the victim card, as it were, and the rest of us could sit comfortably and debate what it is about the people of sandy that causes them to have such inclinations to lawlessness and violence.
There are problems that need to be fixed. We can't argue the technicalities of an individual case and ignore what brought us here. We need to fix the evils that permeate our law enforcement models and our legal systems.
But we don't really need to...if we're happy to disenfranchise the black community and lock their sons in cages because we never liked them anyway.
