Where do you think those people developed their ideas and beliefs about their relationship with police? It’s not like whole communities have conspired together to be as bad as they can be and to fuck the future generations. They developed that from their own experiences and experiences of those before them. Ignoring the shitty relationship the police have had with black communities doesn’t help us understand the complex problem and it’s not fair to not take that into account. Things like the war on drugs and our shitty past with racism have really had a disproportionate effect on their communities.
This is a huge problem and I certainly don’t have the answers or know everything about the root cause... it’s something that needs to be studied far more. But when we look to blame individuals we miss the forest for the trees and make no progress.
What I think is the root is ages of institutional racism that has been a leading cause in keeping their communities poor and disenfranchised, and that is a really difficult cycle to break. We see the same issues and attitudes in similar communities from other races, including whites. The difference is that blacks have had a uniquely difficult path in this country that has lots of fallout including making it extra hard to break the cycle of poverty, crime and etc, as well as the fact that it’s an extremely emotionally charged issue where the wound is continually reopened and aggravated.
Both the the driver and cop were fighting against generations of mistakes set against them from before they met that culminated in this stupid interaction between two people. Yes, individuals make dumb mistakes that should be examined and dealt with, but if we stop there we don’t fix anything. This is how aviation works; when a mistake is made we don’t just end when we find out who made the mistake, we ask the further questions of why they made the mistake, and what were the systematic factors that may have contributed to the person making that mistake. And that is why aviation is extremely safe, and is the gold standard for safety and root cause analysis.
When we say things like “man that black community should just be better”, it not only solves nothing, it just exacerbated the problem. And frankly I don’t know how any could pretend there isn’t an issue with police force in this country, especially toward black people. That’s a reality, and it has to be one of the first things that improves... but we can even come together and recognize it as a problem.