(06-03-2020 10:53 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(06-03-2020 10:10 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  A couple of years ago, I had a discussion with several black friends about a situation where a white police officer saw a young black male loitering around in a neighborhood, and there were reports of young males throwing rocks through windows and breaking them. The officer stopped the kid, found out that he was far from home, and determined that he should take him home. He cuffed the kid and put him in the back of the police car and drove him home. When he got there, the kid's mother came out and pitched a fit. My black friends were totally pissed off at the officer, and asked me how I would feel if that were my son. I said I'd probably thank the officer for bringing him home and talk to my son and find out if he did it, and pretty much wear his butt out if he did. They could not believe that I wouldn't have gone ballistic on the officer. From that conversation, I came to realize that black and white children are taught very differently about interaction with police. Black kids are taught to distrust them, white kids are taught to trust them. And I have to believe that has some impact on disparate treatment.

The point was brought home to me again by an article a week or so ago by a black professor from an urban university. Obviously intelligent and well educated, he was stopped while walking from his car park to his classroom, by police who said he matched a description they had of a burglar. He was detained for several minutes and released, still in time to get to his class. What he said that caught my attention was that while he was being detained he made up his mind that if they tried to put him in the police car, he would resist physically, because he felt that if they got him in the car, they would haul him off and kill him. I'm not aware of any situation where that has ever happened, and any time police kill a black man it gets pretty widely publicized, so i tend to believe that is a pretty irrational fear. But if a highly educated and presumably intelligent black man can believe that, then that is clearly a problem.

I appreciate the post and the outcome of the thinking.

But I have to ask, did you forget the Henry Louis Gates arrest and the subsequent diplomacy beer?

The 'diplomacy beer' at the garden of the President whom had very publicly sided against the Cambridge PD? That one?