Chauvin Murder Trial

[Rev. Rye]

Frankly, I suspect that, as long as black people remain disproportionately poor, with little opportunities to rise above the parts of town their grandparents were redlined into, and as long as there’s a strong correlation between poverty and crime, There’s not going to be much we realistically can do to stop police brutality against black people.

A cop may come into the force, truly having little to no animus against black people, but, the longer you keep going on patrol, odds are, you’re going to see a disproportionate amount of black faces, not as victims or witnesses, but perps. And the more you see of those black faces, the more you start to get this little bias. Maybe not even something you could express in words even if the rest of the force is okay with you doing so, but if you took an IAT before you joined and again years later, you’d find a lot more implicit bias against black faces. And then you might find that punishing black suspects harder comes a lot easier than you’d expect.

And all this is assuming that shit like this hasn’t been normalized on the force in general, and depressingly, in many cases, it has.