Maybe it'll turn out for the better in the end, or at least I can hope, but right now everything's getting increasingly fucked.
So this week in Atlanta, one Ryshard Brooks, a black man, was drunk and fell asleep in his car at a Wendy's drive-through. The police was called, and he was administered a sobriety test, which he failed, and was put under arrest for DUI; also at this time, a background check turned out that he was wanted for battery of a child. Probably do to possible consequences of the latter, Mr. Brooks decided to grab an taser-gun and fired it at the officers trying to arrest him. At this point, the one of the officers shot Mr. Brooks, who died at the scene. [
vid1] [
vid2]
Meanwhile, the district attorney lies about the incident charged the officer with murder and ten other crimes, unilaterally against normal procedure. (The DA is an elected position, and an election is coming up, which probably has the most to do with why, although the DA is also under investigation for embezzlement and sexual harassment, which may have contributed to this decision.) If the racial combination was anything other than a white officer and a black suspect, this wouldn't have even made the news. But instead, we Wendy's burned down and a lot of the police force just plain walk out in protest. Although the mayor says things are under control, Atlanta Police radio has long silences and no responses to 911 calls [
11Alive]. It seems that Atlanta cops on social media claim much higher walk-out rates than official statements, but who knows.
Probably, some of the underlying cases for US policing terribleness are that:
— Very high economic inequality. In pretty much every society that's grossly unequal, you get more and more reliance on policing to keep the underclasses in line by force.
— Gun culture, the military-industrial complex and the resulting worship of the military. The police drink that up and further warp it into some weird warrior-killer mindset [
HOLY SHIT].
— A veneer of democracy in that a lot of these positions, including sheriffs, DAs, judges, are elected. I say a veneer because in practice, just about no one actually cares about voting on this scale (democracy gets expensive in terms of effort and time of the citizen), so the vast majority of the time, candidates run unopposed, with the actual effect that they make shows of how tough-on-crime they are while primarily protecting the interests of wealthy.
— Of course, also one of the main defund-the-police point that many social programs are cut and the resulting problems are put in the shoulders of the police.
— Well, racism is not irrelevant, and the shadow of Jim Crow is long and also very messed up, but I think it would be by far too reductive alone.
America is kind of a perfect storm of maluses in this regard.