Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Walter Sobchak View Post

Individuals must be approached as individuals. It's neither moral nor constitutional to treat an individual in a police interaction differently based on assumptions about how they will behave based on race.
I agree with you in theory. However, this is very hard to legislate. People are human and get to notice patterns. If police notice that a certain group of people tend to actually be committing more violent crime, they will approach that group with more suspicion. That's the way the human brain works. It's impossible to override that.

Now, that's no excuse for outwardly treating people unfairly. I agree that, regardless of their suspicions based upon demographic, they need to treat everyone with respect. However, some of the buy-in to fixing this has to come from the community where the much higher crime rate is occurring.
I agree with all of this and I understand it's part of human nature. Certainly the black community has issues and some of the fix has to come from the black community. But much of the fix has to come from outside the black community, and so far most whites and certainly the government have not been on board. We are on year 401 and counting of unequal treatment (on average), unequal access to basic necessities of life, dehumanization and disproportionate victimization and violence. Do not be surprised when there is hell to pay for any incident like the Floyd incident and do not be surprised when violence flares when everyone's already on a hair trigger. I'm not saying it's right and I'm not saying those who do wrong should not be punished. But until we really tackle the problems, there will not be peace.