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[Frumple]

We don't know. Might as well ask why the friggin' safety was apparently off. Unless there ends up being a trial, we almost certainly won't find out (not that a trial would guarantee things, either, but it makes it more likely). Beyond that, adrenaline and whatnot tends to make for pretty terrible aim. And there's SG's point, yeah.

[Rolan7]

Oh, my bad.  One of the two shots at the car did hit Brown...  I was focusing on the later part of the encounter and missed that.

That actually helps me understand Brown's later actions a lot better.  It's hard to expect someone to act reasonable after they've been shot.  In which case, yeah, it really comes down to who attacked who first...  Which isn't clear.  Maybe Brown attacked an officer who approached him, or maybe Wilson wanted to retire and hates black people.

[SalmonGod]

Another unarmed black man shot a couple weeks ago.  Only just learned of it.  Not going to post any news articles.  More productive to just google the name - Akai Gurley.

A couple notable things about this one. 
-The police are stating that the victim wasn't doing anything wrong when he was shot, and the shooting was completely an accident.  No smear campaign or anything.
-There are claims that the officer responsible chose to text his union rep while the victim lay dying, instead of seeking/offering help or reporting the incident.

[palsch]

I can't remember if I remembered to link this or not, but the 2002 study it links to - and particularly the extensive discussion - are well worth a read.

From the concluding sections of that discussion;

These studies have demonstrated that the decision to shoot may be influenced by a target person’s ethnicity. In four studies, participants showed a bias to shoot African American targets more rapidly and/or more frequently than White targets. The implications of this bias are clear and disturbing. Even more worrisome is the suggestion that mere knowledge of the cultural stereotype, which depicts African Americans as violent, may produce Shooter Bias, and that even African Americans demonstrate the bias. We understand that the demonstration of bias in an African American sample is politically controversial given the nature of this task, and we offer two considerations. First, the results of a single study are not definitive. Our findings should be replicated by researchers in other labs with different materials before generalizations are made. Second, our goals as psychologists include understanding, predicting, and controlling behavior. Ultimately, efforts to control (i.e., reduce or eliminate) any ethnic bias in the decision to shoot must be based on an accurate understanding of how target ethnicity influences that decision, even if that understanding is politically or personally distasteful.

The studies reported here suggest that Shooter Bias is present among White college students (Studies 1–3) and among a community sample that consists of both Whites and African Americans (Study 4). The effect is robust and clearly a cause for concern, no matter the underlying cause. On the basis of our data, though, bias does not seem to simply reflect prejudice toward African Americans, and there is reason to believe the effect is present simply as a function of stereotypic associations that exist in our culture. That these associations can have such potentially profound consequences for members of stigmatized groups is a finding worthy of great concern. Since the death of Amadou Diallo, New York has witnessed a number of similar, though less publicized, cases, and Cincinnati, Ohio, has added Timothy Thomas’s name to the list of unarmed African American men killed by police officers. Social psychological theory and research may prove invaluable in the effort to identify, understand and eventually control processes that bias decisions to shoot (and possibly kill) a person, as a function of his or her ethnicity.

The further studies back up their results, finding a similar bias in police samples, if somewhat reduced as a function of training.

The biggest problem I have with the response to these shootings is the way, to borrow a phrase, the victims are put on trial for their own murder. They are thugs. They had a history of violence or crime. They came from violent families. They weren't sufficiently deferential to the police. They were otherwise doing something wrong that otherwise justified their death.

This simply feeds back into the stereotypes that in turn justify (or at least guide) the shootings in the first place. Black bodies are seen as weapons and black teens seen as inherently violent and that helps justify lethal force in defence against them. And every time there is a shooting there is another effort to rebuild and reinforce those stereotypes.

So long as the stereotypes exist there are going to be shootings due to police (or others) seeing black people as an inherent threat that needs lethal force to stop. But so long as such shootings are happening we are going to have such stereotypes spread among police because they can't afford to not justify such shootings to themselves, the media and the wider world.

[smeeprocket]

This is funny because most if not all witnesses did not corroborate with the police story. And a coroner report showed he had to have had his hands in the air when he was shot. So it's all irrelevant. He was unarmed and surrendering and was gunned down.

Race has everything to do with it. If you don't think so, you are just being a clueless white person. There's a long long list of unarmed deaths of black people doing absolutely nothing to get killed, or black people cops have shot at and failed to kill for things like trying to hand over their license when it was requested.

Why even trust the police so implicitly, in all of these cases they have been confirmed as inherently dishonest.

And the real case we should be looking at, if you want to single one out, is the garner case, where the entire thing was video taped. There was no reaching for a gun or any sort of question of what happened. It was five police officers assaulting an unarmed black man who was, at worst, mildly uncooperative, which, based on his words was because this was a common thing for the police to harass him. He repeatedly says he can't breath. The chokehold is illegal. Everything done was excessive force and no restraint. Incidentally, the video taper was indited on a gun charge. I find this interesting, because that probably wouldn't have happened if he hadn't taped the incident, and in some states, it is a felony to tape the cops at all.

So even body cameras seem kind of useless, when the prosecutors try really hard to not get an indictment, and that happens despite the entire thing being taped.

We also have the case of the twelve year old boy with the toy gun. The tape for that was recently released and multiple lies by the police became evident. He does none of the threatening things they claim in the video. He was gunned down immediately.

So what I don't understand is, if you want to be obtuse about the brown case, you don't really have a justification to question the other two cases.

If you want I can start digging up more unarmed black people being murdered by cops without repercussions, or things like the black woman in jail recently that was brutally beaten by correctional officers and they also weren't indicted.

The only people that are saying that race isn't what matters here are the people that do not have this threat to deal with because of their race.

[Lagslayer]

I didn't realize this was the oppression olympics.

[SalmonGod]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Bohandas]

The only people that are saying that race isn't what matters here are the people that do not have this threat to deal with because of their race.

Racism may be the motive but excessive force is the crime. If there was reform to allow use of excessive force to be properly dealt with then the effect of racism on police brutality would be functionally eliminated because all the seriously biased officers would eventually either put their biases aside or end up in jail. (and while Such reform is admittedly an unrealistic utopian pipe dream, at least it's not as much of a pipe dream as eliminating racism is [the only way I could see that happening would be if more than half of the population was mixed race, which, while entirely plausible, would necessarily require several generations to happen])


EDIT:
Also, any sense of espirit de corps among the police needs to be actively discouraged and replaced with an atmosphere of internal discord and strife such that an officer who witnesses another officer commit a crime will be willing or eager to arrest them.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Racism is certainly a huge problem amongst police (and the specific incidents of this thread likely would not be without it), but even if we were able to flip a switch and purge all racial bias from the minds of cops, they'd still regularly murder people. They'd just be color blind about it. More solvency is needed than for racism.

[Bohandas]

Racism is certainly a huge problem amongst police (and the specific incidents of this thread likely would not be without it), but even if we were able to flip a switch and purge all racial bias from the minds of cops, they'd still regularly murder people. They'd just be color blind about it. More solvency is needed than for racism.

What we need to do is discourage the sense of espirit de corps within police departments - and perferably replace it with an internal atmosphere of strife and discord - so that officers will be willing to arrest other officers that they catch comitting crimes

[SalmonGod]

Agreed with MSH.  There are still enough cases of police unjustifiably maiming and killing white people to be alarming.  It just happens to black people a lot more often, and in many cases doesn't seem like it would have happened at all if the person wasn't black.

Example: 
Eric Garner could have happened to anyone of any race.  He wasn't immediately and totally compliant.  He spoke back.  White people get away with that (and more) much more often, but they do still get killed for it, too.
Even the kid with the toy gun could have played out the same if it was a white kid.  I'm pretty sure I've seen at least two cases of white kids getting shot because of toy guns.
But if Michael Brown were white, he would probably still be alive.  I sincerely doubt a white person would have been engaged with such abrupt aggression for jaywalking.
If Akai Gurley were white or living in a predominantly white area, he would probably still be alive.

Racism is definitely a problem.  But defaulting to violent responses and lack of accountability are larger problems.

[Phmcw]

The only people that are saying that race isn't what matters here are the people that do not have this threat to deal with because of their race.

No they are peoples that live in a country with a functional police force.
The black cops shoot 78% of Black men, it's in the study. It's not white supremacism.


Everything else is wrong with your police, but the amount of racism seems rather average ( though I do understand that American are more racist than us in the sense that they generally give race a lot more importance).

Edit :or to say it another way, your police could be twice as racist, if you had decent rule of engagement, training, policing philosophy and prosecution policies you wouldn't have a black men murder by the police problem (you'd still have the huge black on black violence problem, that one would be solved by schools).

[Sheb]

Also, it should be noted that all solutions that have been proposed to this problem are race-blind solutions: put cameras on cop, improve accountability by having an independent agency supervise the police, have more training, etc etc etc. All of those solutions address the "cop kills people" problem, not "cops kill blacks".

I think what I'm trying to say is that while there is a race aspect to this, it's more of an aftereffect: the US is still by and large a racist society (Not that other countries are much different), so when police shit hits the civilian fan, blacks are going to suffer more from it.

[Reelya]

Maybe a way to reduce the tendency of cops to cover for each other's bad actions is to link pay to performance, on a station level. I'm thinking this because of example from industries where they enact profit-sharing. When that kicks in, workers stop turning a blind eye to other workers stealing - because you're not just ripping off the "boss", you're ripping off your fellow workers.

So, maybe have bonus pay divvied out for the whole station based on reducing complaints. Then, one cop who racks up an excessive amount of complaints from the public isn't just presenting a bad image, he's losing his own money, while also literally taking money out of his fellow cops wallets.

I think this could be an effective approach, since it would change how cops would about their own actions and the actions of their fellow cops, and is motivated by emotions of greed and guilt, so it's not something too "out there". A change like this could go a long way to changing the culture about how police view their interactions with the public.

[Cheeetar]

Where would the public submit complaints? What would happen in the event of an underfunded area that has issues with getting decent police coverage?