4 Officers Shot Dead By Snipers, 7 Wounded in Dallas Protest Against Police Violence

[Thumpalumpacus]

Being a black man in the south, I'll take my experience over any rationalization for police attitudes towards POC.

America is not Europe. It is hard to appreciate the racial divide here if you haven't experienced it first hand. I have the added benefit of being light skinned (my mother is white), so not only am I brown, but if the right level of bigotry is applied, I look like any brown person you have a bias against. If I'm in Florida, I look Cuban or Dominican. If I am in Southern California, I look Mexican. If I'm in the South, I look like one of them there A-Rabs. Or black.

I used to drive an Audi, and I got pulled over with my white friend in the car. My right blinker needed to be reset and was doing the super fast blink, and the cop pulled me over. I was asked whose car I was driving. I had a service weapon pulled on me for reaching into my glove compartment without asking for permission. I lived in Tennessee for exactly two weeks at that point. My white friend has lived here for almost his entire life, has been pulled over a bunch, and has never been treated like that.

Now one data point does not make a trend, but if you think race relations in America between police and black people are in any way okay, you're being intentionally blind. I know for a fact that the vast majority of police are great people and great policemen. I think their training and accountability has been hijacked for so long that they are not equipped to handle mental illness, and the self tightening screw of people afraid for their lives because some police will not hesitate to shoot you if you are brown.

Police should be community oriented. They need to be trained to deal with mental illness and drug use/side effects. They need to be trained to de-escalate before using their service weapon. They need to be accountable, and they need to be held accountable. Body cameras need to be mandatory. Profit motive needs to be taken out of citations. Personality evaluations need to be done before allowing someone to be an officer to uncover personalities that have a huge potential for causing issues. This stuff works in large cities, and even better in small cities. Take Los Angeles and Las Vegas for example.

Spot-on. I'm a white member of an interracial family which includes blacks and Latinos. I am most certainly treated differently than, say, my son or my nephew. Odd that a honky like me should have to have The Talk with his son, but I goddamned well did. He will not get the same shake in a traffic-stop that I do, because his Mexican heritage is obvious.