What happened in Dallas is tragic

[angrychair]

Having a loved one murdered in a hail of gunfire is awful and we should care and it is not right.
But we cannot let anyone water down or belittle the message that their is very real institutional racism and a very real militant civilian police force who are killing people of color at a significantly higher incident rate than whites.
What is happening is real.
It's not opinion.
It's not conspiracy theory.

Race remains the most volatile flash point in any accounting of police shootings. Although black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year, The Post’s database shows. In the majority of cases in which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone with a weapon or brandished a gun, the person who was shot was white.

The Washington Post has created a good article and a good database on these type of statistics.

Article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/wp/2015/12/26/2015/12/26/a-year-of-reckoning-police-fatally-shoot-nearly-1000/

2016 Washington Post Police Shooting Database:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/

This matters. It's real. It's right to be concerned and to protest.
Love, peace and understanding are what make this country great.
We are better from the things that unite us, not divide us.

This is not a "them" problem. It is an "us" problem. It will not be solved by "them". It will be solved by "us".

[SheilaT]

1. I'm somewhat surprised

that something like this hasn't happened before.

Not that I condone what happened or would encourage others to do the same, but still.

[TeddyR]

2. Pretty sure it has happened before

I thought someone targeted police in New York last year?

[SheilaT]

8. I'm not remembering that.

But since I rarely watch main stream media (no TV here) there are stories that I miss.

[TeddyR]

3. I'm not sure it is institutional racism

For example:

But most interesting, perhaps, was the race of the officers who fired their weapons. About two-thirds were white, and one-third black — effectively identical to the racial composition of the St. Louis Police Department as a whole. In this study, at least, firing at a black suspect was an equal-opportunity decision.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/sunday-review/race-and-police-shootings-are-blacks-targeted-more.html

[angrychair]

5. Institutional racism isn't about the race of the LEO

It's about the actions they take and the actions of the justice system as a whole and the reaction and perception of the media and community.

It's also not about a snapshot in time of a single city's police department.

I humbly request you actually read the article and the database for this year and last year.
I also suggest you look at the current prison population and sentences handed out.

It is institutional racism and it is very real.

[JustinL]

7. those findings are not inconsistent with institutional racism

From Justice Marshall's concurring opinion in Castaneda v Partida, 430 U. S. 482, 503 (1977):

Social scientists agree that members of minority groups frequently respond to discrimination and prejudice by attempting to disassociate themselves from the group, even to the point of adopting the majority's negative attitudes towards the minority.(2) Such behavior occurs with particular frequency among members of minority groups who have achieved some measure of economic or political success and thereby have gained some acceptability among the dominant group.(3)

(2) G. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice 150-153 (1954); A. Rose, The Negro's Morale 85-95 (1949); G. Simpson & J. Yinger, Racial and Cultural Minorities 192-195, 227, 295 (4th ed. 1972); Bettelheim, Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations, 38 J. Abnormal & Social Psych. 417 (1943); cf. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 494, and n. 11 (1954) (noting the impact on sense of self of de jure segregation in schools).

(3) E. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie 213-216 (1957); Simpson & Yinger, supra, at 209; A. Kardiner & L. Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression 313-316 (1962); Lewin, Self-Hatred Among Jews, 4 Contemporary Jewish Record 219 (1941).

[Photographer]

4. Disheartening, but the legal system here in the States has radicalized a large segment

of society. As others have inferred, it's been coming for quite some time and I am not surprised to see it take the tragic face it has.

[uponit7771]

6. MOTHER JONES: The SCIENCE of why cops shoot young black men

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice