Thursday, June 11, 2020
The US national security adviser says there's no systemic racism in policing. Studies suggest otherwise
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/systemic-racism-in-policing/index.html
When a Trump administration official said he doesn't think systemic racism exists in policing, many were stunned -- especially after studies have shown different races are often treated differently.
"No, I don't think there's systemic racism," national security adviser Robert O'Brien told CNN. "I think 99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans. Many of them are African American, Hispanic, Asian."
There’s overwhelming evidence that the criminal-justice system is racist. Here’s the proof.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/
Of particular concern to some on
the right is the term “systemic racism,” often wrongly interpreted as an
accusation that everyone in the system is racist. In fact, systemic
racism means almost the opposite. It means that we have systems and
institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes,
regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them. When
you consider that much of the criminal justice system was built, honed
and firmly established during the Jim Crow era — an era almost everyone,
conservatives included, will concede rife with racism — this is pretty
intuitive. The modern criminal justice system helped preserve racial
order — it kept black people in their place. For much of the early 20th
century, in some parts of the country, that was its primary function.
That it might retain some of those proclivities today shouldn’t be all
that surprising.
How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21280643/police-brutality-violence-protests-racism-khalil-muhammad
Social science played a huge role. What we’d call today
“academic experts,” of one kind or another, were part of the effort to
define black people as a particular criminal class in the American
population. And what they essentially did was they used the evidence
coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery.
They used the census data to point to the disproportionate incarceration
of African Americans. They were almost three times overrepresented in
the 1890 census in Southern prisons.
So that evidence became part of a national discussion
that essentially said, “Well, now that black people have their freedom,
what are they doing with it? They’re committing crimes. In the South and
in the North, and the census data is the proof.”
Data | How badly are African-Americans affected by police brutality in the U.S.?
https://www.thehindu.com/data/data-how-badly-are-african-americans-affected-by-police-brutality-in-the-us/article31734968.ece
African-Americans are three times more likely to be killed in police
shootings than white people. Close to 42 per million population of
African-Americans were killed in such shootings in the period, the
highest among all races.
George Floyd: The personal cost of filming police brutality
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52942519
By the time 17-year-old Darnella Frazier started recording, George
Floyd was already gasping for air, begging, repeatedly, "please, please,
please".
The camera had been rolling for 20 seconds when Mr
Floyd, 46, uttered three more words that have now become a rallying cry
for protesters.
"I can't breathe," Mr Floyd said.
The
words were slightly muffled. He strained to speak as he laid face down
in handcuffs, pinned to the floor by three police officers. One of those
officers, 44-year-old Derek Chauvin, pressed a knee against Mr Floyd's
neck.
'It Was a Tinderbox.' How George Floyd’s Killing Highlighted America's Police Reform Failures
https://time.com/5848368/george-floyd-police-reform-failures/
Floyd’s death under the knee of the white MPD officer on May 25 has
reignited furor over the persistence of police brutality against people
of color in the United States. As Americans gathered to protest in more
than 70 cities, they raged against the same tepid solutions proposed by
local and national leaders that have fallen far short in the past:
opening investigations, firing police officers, and simply promising
more reforms.
Nowhere is that pattern clearer than in Minneapolis. More than half a
dozen government investigations and reports reviewed by TIME show that
the same reforms were recommended time and again over the past two
decades in the MPD to increase accountability, curb use-of-force
violations and build up community trust — with seemingly little
implementation. “People in this community have been very concerned about
the Minneapolis Police Department for a long, long time,” says Hans
Lee, a pastor at Minneapolis’ Calvary Lutheran Church. “It was a
tinderbox.”
Brian Arbour: Trump reelection threatened by low approval ratings, coronavirus pandemic and racial strife
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-election-biden-brian-arbour
Voters seem to have made up their minds about President Trump early,
and are fixed in their opinions about him. The fact that his numbers
have moved so little across his presidency shows that voters know what
they think about the president.
If you want President Trump to win
reelection this November, these numbers are bad news. When presidents
run for reelection, the campaign is often seen as a referendum on their
leadership.
For each of these measures above, a majority of
Americans have a negative opinion of President Trump. In all, 54 percent
disapprove of the job he is doing as president, 55 percent have an
unfavorable impression of him, and 52 percent say they will vote for
another candidate.
Of course, there is still plenty of time for Trump and his supporters
to make their case to the nation about why he should be reelected.
Trump won in 2016 by driving down public approval of his opponent
through caustic attacks on her character and integrity; he’s likely to
do the same in the next few months.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)