Telling black people to 'be nice to cops' to prevent being murdered is evil as hell

[mythology]

173. I think that it would be more accurate to explain what you are doing to the cop like

the cop is an idiot, because a while a smart cop might realize what you're doing, idiot with a gun is always dangerous (cop or otherwise), especially if they feel (accurately or otherwise) threatened. Expressly state what you are doing, if you have to do something strange, explain why, move slowly etc. Whether one "should" have to do that is another question, but we don't live in the world of "should" at this time. It's not about being polite, it's not about kowtowing to the "man", it's about decreasing the odds of being the victim of police violence. Will it prevent all police violence? Obviously not. But if the situation was as bad as some seem to think it is when they claim that nothing a black man can do will decrease the odds of a cop shooting/killing them, why do more interactions not result in shootings? If cops are expressly racist and out to get blacks, and are statistically unlikely to go to jail for doing so, why aren't there thousands more yearly?

If the issue is less overt racism, but more subconscious racism, then being aware of what actions might trigger the subconscious isn't being evil, it's being smart.

In the long term, yes we obviously need to do things to lessen or eliminate racism, but realistically that won't happen overnight as we didn't get to this point overnight. I think that the notion that trying to find intermediate steps to reduce the likelihood of police violence is a good thing, and those steps can be on both the side of cops via better training, body cameras, more civilian oversight, different policing policies, but it can also be done by recognizing that for a variety of really shitty reasons, we as a culture have demonized black and brown people (more so men) and being aware that people might read your actions differently as a result.

I (on a much smaller scale) experience some of that in martial arts as I'm bigger than most people, play an aggressive style and as somebody once put it "I only smile when somebody kicks me in the face", I have had to learn that even though I have trained very hard to be good enough to be scary without making contact, people can misinterpret me as being out to hurt people. As a result, I learned to take some steps to mitigate that. Calling that sentiment evil is really short sighted, especially in a situation where people can live or die.