Where does the police racial prejudice come from in America?

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RandyBobandy

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It's baffling from an outsider looking in and seeing these cases constantly pop up against minorities and not only that, but the lack of surprise at the outcomes of the cases

I mean, I'm a white guy from Ireland and I'm not going to pretend racism doesn't exist here, but stuff like this, with police, would never happen to minorities in my town here. It's a disgusting practice and the police there seem to be protected

What is going on over there?
 
Slavery kind of set a really bad precedent of white people being treated better, combined with white people still being the majority in most places, to my knowledge.
 
Your comparing your town to an entire country, we got a big basket here with alot of apples

edit: also the amount of and the level of criminal the average american cop has to deal with with and the added factor of firepower breeds a different animal than most other countries sunday morning cartoon police
 
I'm sure it started around the time they considered blacks as half people. And by "they" I meant the "leaders" of that time who codified laws to say as much.
 
I'm not saying there's not a race angle, but bear in mind white people get killed by police too.

Dillon Taylor, for instance, was an unarmed white kid killed by police. A cop told him to take his hand out of his pants, he did, then the cop shot him.

The cop was cleared.

Before that, there was a white kid in Alabama (or Georgia) killed by a cop because the kid had a Wii controller in his hand (he was home, by the way).

There are just too many police killings period. It happens to blacks more, because they tend to have more interaction with the police - of which racism plays a role. But also because laws tend to affect the poor most of all , and blacks are disproportionally poor.
 
The country is a massive mix of cultures that have been killing each other for thousands of years + dominate racial majority being descended from the British Empire and it's favorship of eurocentric, anglo domination of other races being inherently inferior to whites + goverment modeled after said Empire during the heyday of said Empire + hundreds of years (remember, the US has only been a soverign nation for less than 250 years) of racist, Anglo Dominate culture being spread as an inherent truth and fact at every level and, at some points in our history, scientific fact.

Also, due to the above there's just higher instances of reporting due to higher scrutiny. I've read some pretty twisted shit out of France from their handling of the Roma peoples, but it seems to hardly get any press anywhere due to I guess how new-ish of a phenomenon it is vs. racial discrimination being so prevalent and widespread throughout all of american history.
 
A little bit of context.

"Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s. …

Segregationists began to worry that there was going to be no way to stem the tide of public opinion and opposition to the system of segregation, so they began labeling people who are engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and protests as criminals and as lawbreakers, and [they] were saying that those who are violating segregation laws were engaging in reckless behavior that threatens the social order and demanded … a crackdown on these lawbreakers, these civil rights protesters.

This rhetoric of law and order evolved as time went on, even though the old Jim Crow system fell and segregation was officially declared unconstitutional. Segregation[ists] and former segregation[ists] began using get-tough rhetoric as a way of appealing to poor and working-class whites in particular who were resentful of, fearful of many of the gangs of African Americans in the civil rights movement.

Pollsters and political strategists found that thinly veiled promises to get tough on “them,” a group suddenly not so defined by race, was enormously successful in persuading poor and working-class whites to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party in droves.

Unfortunately, this backlash against the civil rights movement was occurring at precisely the same moment that there was economic collapse in communities of color, inner-city communities across America.

In an excellent book by William Julius Wilson, entitled When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor, he describes how in the ’60s and the ’70s, work literally vanished in these communities. Hundreds of thousands of black people, especially black men, suddenly found themselves jobless.

As factories closed, jobs were shipped overseas, deindustrialization and globalization led to depression in inner-city communities nationwide, and crime rates began to rise. And as they rose and the backlash against the civil rights movement reached a fever pitch, the get-tough movement exploded into a zeal for incarceration, and a war on drugs was declared."
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From Michelle Alexander, the author of the book the new jim crow.
 
people find people of the same race easier to relate to. there has always been a bristling undercurrent of hostility between police and the working class poor, whoever they are. But now the lines are drawn both economically and racially, and it makes it easier to dehumanize or classify some stranger as an "other", and that disassociation turns a human being's internal empathy way down, and if they're under stress or feel threatened they have a tendency to act in a more hostile manner than they might under normal circumstances.

not to mention America's unique history, the fact that blacks are a minority, and that the majority of law enforcers and social managers are of the majority and lack a certain connection on a personal and social level with some of the people that they deal with.
 
livestOne said:
Your comparing your town to an entire country, we got a big basket here with alot of apples
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Nah, its a nation wide problem.


RandyBobandy, Look up the War on Drugs + CIA's drug operations in the inner city. We have laws that target the minority population. Our nation has more people in prison than China, with minorities being overly represented.

Me not being able to walk into the front entrance of a restaurant was my parents generation. America was built on racism. Look how It treated the irish immigrants in new york city. Things don't change with people in power. Certain classes are disparaged. People don't even have to realize its out of control, like the post above, as it doesn't change their day to day life. So it just becomes hidden for the most part.

The police are still samples of the population, you have to remember. In some states, things just aren't progressive. Still, to this day. America has race problems still, and its evident in the way you witness police handling minorities. Nothing has really changed in that regard.
 
akira28 said:
people find people of the same race easier to relate to. there has always been a bristling undercurrent of hostility between police and the working class poor, whoever they are. But now the lines are drawn both economically and racially, and it makes it easier to dehumanize or classify some stranger as an "other", and that disassociation turns a human being's internal empathy way down, and if they're under stress or feel threatened they have a tendency to act in a more hostile manner than they might under normal circumstances.

not to mention America's unique history, the fact that blacks are a minority, and that the majority of law enforcers and social managers are of the majority and lack a certain connection on a personal and social level with some of the people that they deal with.
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Yeah. It's easier to foster an "Us. vs. Them" mentality when the cops are one race and the perceived "perpetrators" are another.

You're told to keep an eye on Black men because "they're the ones who commit crimes." So they get increasingly scrutinised and increasingly arrested and increasingly sent to jail for victimless crimes (like weed possession) and cops are increasingly twitchy against them.

So black men ask to be left alone because they're being unfairly targeted...which cops interpret as resisting arrest....and now all of a sudden you have a dead, young black man and a court system who won't punish the officer.
 
Seanspeed said:
Police and how they deal with minorities, especially black people, is certainly an issue in the UK as well.

http://www.release.org.uk/publicati...rities-policing-and-prosecution-drug-offences
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It's an issue all over Europe. But nowhere as bad as in the US. Just look at the stats. And the sad part is you get flack for stating this. People on this forum literally think that their life would be as miserable in Italy as it is in the US for minoritys. It's not even comparable. And again, yes. There's a real and still too big problem with Racism all over Europe but it's also way different.
 
Infinite said:
A little bit of context.



From Michelle Alexander, the author of the book the new jim crow.
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Alexander and Coates, two incredible writers if you really want to look more into this problem. It goes far deeper than just racial prejudice. It's a history.


And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.- Coates
 
livestOne said:
edit: also the amount of and the level of criminal the average american cop has to deal with with and the added factor of firepower breeds a different animal than most other countries sunday morning cartoon police
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Which isn't really an argument, because that is a direct outcome of the flaws of your society. It's not just the way it is, there are reasons.
That aside, I can assure you, that bad stuff happens in other countries, too. The difference is, we don't take every hillybilly for this job and the training lasts three years, instead of three months. Police here would never shoot, without trying to de-escalate the situation first. They would never shoot a minor AT ALL and IF they have to shoot, they'd aim first at the legs.

Germany has over 80 Mio. people living in a country as big as Montana, but in 2011 police only killed six people and shot (iirc) less than 50 bullets at people. Ask yourself why they can manage this and you don't.
 
scamander said:
Which isn't really an argument, because that is a direct outcome of the flaws of your. society. It's not just the way it is, there are reasons.
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In addition the United States has crime rate lower than the international norm. Shit like the war on drugs just bloats our prison population and makes policing far more heavy handed than anywhere else.
 
scamander said:
Which isn't really an argument, because that is a direct outcome of the flaws of your society. It's not just the way it is, there are reasons.
That aside, I can assure you, that bad stuff happens in other countries, too. The difference is, we don't take every hillybilly for this job and the training lasts three years, instead of three months. Police here would never shoot, without trying to de-escalate the situation first. They would never shoot a minor AT ALL and IF they have to shoot, they'd aim first at the legs.

Germany has over 80 Mio. people living in a country as big as Montana, but in 2011 police only killed six people and shot (iirc) less than 50 bullets at people. Ask yourself why they can manage this and you don't.
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Incredible post.
RandyBobandy said:
That's just depressing
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I admire you for noting a problem, and being curious about the causes.
 
It's a really complex issue.

You've got ingrained perceptions that lots of people have (not just cops) which become self-fulfilling prophecy of a sort. Black people are perceived as criminals and violent and lesser, so they get worse jobs, become outcast, are more likely to actually then BECOME criminals, etc. Spread this out over generations and you get a very large socio-economic gap, a large cultural gap in many areas, and police prejudice as a very visible outcome among many others.

For instance, I don't actually doubt at all that there is more actual crime in a lot of the black neighborhoods or anything like that, I don't think those statistics are just because of higher arrest rates or anything, but I do think they come about BECAUSE of the racial bias that is in the system. Similarly, a cop whether they think it or not pulls over a black guy because he's statistically more likely to be committing a crime and then ALSO in doing so they contribute to that statistic. The whole thing is a feedback loop resulting from the fact that they never had a fair shot to begin with.

People may disagree with me on the particulars but I think most of us can see how it got here, the much harder question is how we fix it. (How, not why or what the result should be, but the line from A to B is certainly a lot fuzzier than either of the end points).


EDIT: To elaborate why you're hearing about all of this stuff now, some of it is just the cop mentality of watching out for their own (which apparently spills over to many lawyers who fancy themselves that same type of role), but also it's easy to look at an individual case and say 'yeah, I could see how this cop was afraid for his life and shot someone in self defense'. The problem isn't always the specific cases (Though the NY one is clearly fucked, I'm talking general terms). The real issue is that it happens at a disproportionate rate to people of a certain skin color BECAUSE the cops are predisposed to believe that those people are more likely to be dangerous. Shit's coming to a boil because it's been happening for a long time and it's not always been easy to point to every single case and say 'this was wrong' (it has happened, but it also happens to other people, the difference is the number of times the cop would de-escalate more quickly if the subject was white than if they were black. Perception of threat level - causes some of those cases to seem very fuzzy where you don't want to throw the cop in jail for life if you genuinely think they were doing their job and just made a horrible mistake, and it's why you have public supporting them. It's not just 'racists' it's people who don't want to believe that innocent police officers should feel unable to do their job for fear of being labelled racist.

The issue is, they ARE racist it's just too subconscious for most of them to even realize it, and it's causing all of these problems.
 
Culture, media and ingorances. I say these as an Asian-American. No one is born "racist" however I do believe growing up, the environment influences the judgement of the person. It's an endless cycle...
 
As a Brit looking in I tend to assume I'm getting to read about a handful of bad cases in a country of more than 300 million people.

What's more scary to me as an outsider is the level of deference our US cousins show to their police, the seemingly acceptance of police using force if someone doesn't do as they're told regardless of innocence and the militarisation of their police forces.

I can't imagine being afraid of my local police.
 
rambis said:
The civil rights act was only 50 years ago as well.
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We have a natural tendency to accept a new-better epitome of lifestyle as an established standard. It's natural because it's how we grow up, learn the world, accept realities around us to make decisions, dream of better contexts for ourselves, and work out a plan of survival and benefit. It is an evolved psychological dynamic.

However, it can play these tricks on us. We can forget how short a history has been. We can think of humanity as we immediately experience it in ourselves as innate to our biology, as the base level of what being human is, rather than realizing we are all born little cavemen who are raised into ongoing cumulative constructions outside of us called culture and civilization, our evolution outside of us that goes back into us.

With that blind spot we excitedly look to the next technology platform while overlooking the fact billions are still without clean water and millions can't read, we get sucker punched by the reality of people filled with bigotry and lacking the empathy that was instilled in us, and we take the wrong approach to infrastructure corrections in politics and social reform in urgent issues like environmental exploitation.

It's so important to keep a grounded view.
 
I have to think that the media has a lot to do with how some white people perceive black people. Whether depictions in crime films, or stories on the news, or to 'aggressive' hip hop music that is fairly alienating if you're not into it (not how I feel, but how I feel people may perceive it). Cops are part of the world too, they're affected by these things. If a white person would cross the street if they see a black kid coming towards them, there must be the equivalent of that in aspects of the police force too. It's sad
 
Seanspeed said:
Police and how they deal with minorities, especially black people, is certainly an issue in the UK as well.

http://www.release.org.uk/publicati...rities-policing-and-prosecution-drug-offences
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It's interesting that we're every bit as bad when it comes to disproportionate arrest and conviction rates, yet we're worlds apart on brutality. I wonder what makes us so different. The heavy presence of firearms in America? Is American society just generally more violent and this extends to the police? Is it down to the recruitment and training of police officers? Disciplinary procedures?

Fucked if I know.
 
Thugs with authority. The people that get attracted to law enforcement are the type that abuse their power when faced with anyform of opposition to their ego.
 
roundabout said:
I have to think that the media has a lot to do with how some white people perceive black people. Whether depictions in crime films, or stories on the news, or to 'aggressive' hip hop music that is fairly alienating if you're not into it (not how I feel, but how I feel people may perceive it). Cops are part of the world too, they're affected by these things. If a white person would cross the street if they see a black kid coming towards them, there must be the equivalent of that in aspects of the police force too. It's sad
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My friend was a military brat who spent most of his childhood overseas. He moved to my town his final year in highschool and was only here for a week before a random white guy pulled a gun on him for walking down the street. Most of this is unwarranted IMO and stems from history rather than any media presence.
 
Spork4000 said:
My friend was a military brat who spent most of his childhood overseas. He moved to my town his final year in highschool and was only here for a week before a random white guy pulled a gun on him for walking down the street. Most of this is unwarranted IMO and stems from history rather than any media presence.
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No, the media contributes to it too. For example look at the reporting done on this so called knock out game that apparently swept the nations inner cities. What we see in the media greatly contributes to perception.
 
SmokyDave said:
It's interesting that we're every bit as bad when it comes to disproportionate arrest and conviction rates, yet we're worlds apart on brutality. I wonder what makes us so different. The heavy presence of firearms in America? Is American society just generally more violent and this extends to the police? Is it down to the recruitment and training of police officers? Disciplinary procedures?
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It is the gun culture. If you realistically only have to worry about a criminal having a knife, you don't need your gun ready yourself. If you have a high chance of encountering someone with a gun, gun will be your default thought.

Infinite said:
No, the media contributes to it too. For example look at the reporting done on this so called knock out game that apparently swept the nations inner cities. What we see in the media greatly contributes to perception.
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And yes, the media thrive on fearmongering. There isn't more crime, but there is way more reporting of crime.
 
When you see the people you police no better than 'thugs' prejudice is not far behind. As an outsider, watching the US police operate in Ferguson for instance, is like watching US military leaving the green zone to go and patrol enemy territory, when the police are already in that mindset. Shit will always pop off.

Then you have unsuitable people doing a job that's supposed to attract the best of your citizens not the dregs, small town no hopers and ego monsters.

And the biggest problem? The Blue Code of Silence, if you can't report fellow officers for being racists,psychos and whatever else criminal shit they get up to nothing will change because decent officers have to maintain silence through fear.

Imagine that. Something that is painted as 'brotherhood' is instead used to keep everything quiet through unspoken punishment no matter how horrible, lest you be labeled a 'rat' and have your career ruined.
 
roundabout said:
I have to think that the media has a lot to do with how some white people perceive black people. Whether depictions in crime films, or stories on the news, or to 'aggressive' hip hop music that is fairly alienating if you're not into it (not how I feel, but how I feel people may perceive it). Cops are part of the world too, they're affected by these things. If a white person would cross the street if they see a black kid coming towards them, there must be the equivalent of that in aspects of the police force too. It's sad
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Oh absolutely.

Think about the folks that live in predominantly white neighborhoods. The only minority contact they have is what the media puts out. As we all know a lot of it is usually negative.
 
There's a long, historic series of events of slavery, dehumanisation, exploitation and poverty that set all these pieces in place, but I fear a significant part of it is also is a self-perpetuating cycle of prejudice. Even cops that aren't racist are going to be taught about which groups of people and areas are statistically more "troublesome" than others. They get taught to put their guard up more and this will make them more likely to act rashly out of fear. The more you are looking for trouble, the more likely you'll be to find some. I'd also like to point out that this is in no way limited to America. The groups of people that suffer from this may change, but the same patterns usually show up. The US simply has an extra layer of firearms thrown into the mix. When the prevalence of weapons is that much higher, you'll probably be that much more nervous in confrontations as well. Media representations do not help with this at all either.

An acquaintance of mine (Dutch Antillean-American) had been caught with weed on him quite a few times during his adolescence. While he was indeed technically in the wrong in the eyes of the law over there, the fact that they profile and target him for these things makes it normal that he'd get caught more often than people that don't get profiled. This in turn somehow validates the preconceptions in the records, which keeps the cycle going. The system is kind of fucked when the only way to break the cycle this is for everyone in that demographic to try way harder to be a model citizen than the rest, because they as individuals are carrying the weight of their entire demographic.

I once read an article here on GAF about assuming straight white males are racist, misogynistic and homophobic until proven otherwise. It's the easiest parallel to draw between the subjects that a straight white male can easily relate to. It's clearly an unfair assumption and it's unfair you are expected to prove yourself. Everyone outside of that demographic will agree that it is, but it's sometimes hard to give people the benefit of doubt when you've noticed certain patterns. Ultimately it's up to education, the influence of people in the positions of power, and the collective support of us all to better this. It will sadly take a lot of time and patience from everyone involved. Until then be appreciative when people give you the benefit of doubt, and try do your part when you see injustice.

*edit*
I see I'm echoing a lot of the sentiments that popped up while I was typing.
 
Dabanton said:
Something that is painted as 'brotherhood' is
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...NEVER GOOD.

Seriously. Have you ever seen an organization in the entire world that calls themselves a "brotherhood" that isn't completely fucked up toward people not in said brotherhood? It's the biggest fucking red flag on our entire national police force.
 
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