I'm saying that it's not such a simple thing to assign blame one way or the other.
Yet you proceed to do exactly that:
Many of the deaths included in the statistics are caused by people committing suicide-by-cop, people harming others, people harming cops, people resisting arrest, people disobeying police orders, and people reaching for objects out of view of the officer. And then there's people with mental illness and people on drugs.
In determining whether a killing was "lawful" or not, you have to do it case by case. It's unhelpful to make sweeping generalizations against either the police or black people and paint either of them as "to blame".
It's just not that simple.
BLM isn't claiming that all police-induced black fatalities are unlawful; they're highlighting the ones like Eric Garner, killed for selling loose cigarettes. George Floyd, killed for passing off a fake $20 bill. Treyvon Martin, not killed by a cop, but a child literally hunted down by a “concerned citizen” who was subsequently let off scott free. Or Ahmaud Arbery, also hunted down by “concerned citizens” who went unarrested for MONTHS and only AFTER the video went viral. Or Botham Jean, gunned down in his OWN HOME by a sleepy police woman who stumbled into the wrong apartment and instead of realizing like 99.9% of rational people would have that she was in the wrong, saw a black guy and shot before asking a single question. BLM is protesting the kinds of cops and “concerned citizens” who abuse/misuse their authority and the institutions that empower such individuals to do what they feel is within their right in taking black lives with impunity. This is a rhetorical question because I know the answer and don’t expect you to answer honestly (not a judgment of you as a person, I just know how Internet debates go: give the answer that deflates the other person’s point,) but can you honestly imagine replacing any of those few names listed with a white 40-something suburban housewife? Could you imagine a cop kneeling on the neck of a “Karen’ for over 8 minutes, the final three of which she’s unresponsive with no pulse? If you say “yes,” you’re being willfully disingenuous. I can however find a multitude of pictures with a group of proud white guys standing around the corpse of a black man hanging from a tree, some even in color lest we forget that racial violence and discrimination in this country are alive and well. What better profession to be in for a power-hungry hatemonger than a cop: here’s a gun; go where “the most crime happens” and enforce the law…
It's like BLM is blaming emergency aid shipments for causing fatalities, since, whenever a location receives emergency aid, there's always a lot of deaths. No, that's obviously wrong to anyone who thinks about it for more than one second. Locations receive emergency aid BECAUSE there's some huge disaster that warrants it.
The "immediate threat" isn't the police. BLM is wrong about that.
Communities with a disproportionate amount of crime are "the threat". They are the "huge disaster".
Police are only responding to the threat, and when they do, there is going to be a disproportionate amount of fatalities.
BLM looks at these fatalities, and decides that the police must be the threat. BLM is oblivious to the issues which caused these fatalities in the first place.
So you default to the side of the police; you’re welcome to feel that way and therefore unqualified to speak to the plight of black people with any authority when it comes to the tenuous relationship blacks and the police have had since forever. Read my first paragraph again.
Selling loose cigarettes.
Passing off a fake $20.
Jogging.
Walking home with Skittles and an iced tea.
Sitting in his own home eating ice cream watching TV.
Which one of those is a capital offence?
If the police are just doing their job and responding to criminal “threats,” I would like to think they have the wherewithal and onus to respond with the
correct amount of force. As a black person, I’ve never committed a crime in my life, yet on two separate instances, I found myself engaged with the police for literally having done nothing: a spent taillight led to my car being literally stripped clean by two cops insisting I had weapons or drugs because I said I didn’t have any weapons, but the officer’s flashlight landed on a safety box cutter I used at work every day. During a traffic stop in Louisiana, the cop stopped half way between his car and mine on a busy highway and use hand gestures instead of words; when I tried to approach him with my license and registration in hand (which is what I thought his mime show was indicating,) he put his hand on his gun and commanded me to return to my vehicle. Turns out his gesturing was to “close my door.” And that’s just little ol’ me; I can think of countless friends and family with stories of their own; I can turn on the TV and see innumerable stories from strangers.
The police and justice system ARE a proven threat; you’re fortunate you don’t have to experience that way.
