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Originally Posted by Jonathan
It is wrong for people who should not be in jail to be there.
It is wrong for people who should be in jail to not be there.
Police falsly planting evidence to score a conviction is blatantly wrong and anyone can see that. Police disproportionately stopping and searching, or engaging in other forms of profiling is wrong. Judges handing out harsher sentences to some people because of racial preferences are wrong. These people are horrible and at a minimum should lose their jobs.
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Yes, but the problem here is how do you hold them accountable? This kind of prejudice is very easy to conceal and even harder to prove, if it is challenged at all.
Add on that society is predisposed to view black and Latino men with suspicion, due to the media we consume, what happens when the judge is called out for being racist by the uneducated latino "mutt" who was caught with pot on him. Who's going to believe that guy?
The civil rights movement forced racism to become invisible. It didn't get rid of institutionalized racism.
but I want to address this:
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Cascading individual failures that ruin lives.
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Yes and no. Yes in that these ARE cascading individual failures, but "no" in the fact that they aren't individual failures that exist in a vaccume. People react to their environment. Versus mentioned the Lucifer Effect for instance, you should google it right now.
There's no group of evil men made mad by privilege and power plotting over brandy to keep down People of Color. Bloomberg doesn't wake up in the morning, drink a cup of baby blood and think to himself "How can I be an evil bastard today?" That's not how this works,
rather the environment itself conspires organically to push these kinds of interactions between individuals
Capitalism and racism cause social stratification. Social stratification causes alienation. Alienation causes people to lose sympathy. Loss of sympathy causes people to behave towards each other in cruel, anti-social ways.
Do you know that the "individual failures" of those crooked cops is literally bread into them by the job? First when you sign up for the police, they give you a personality test to see if you're "sensitive" or a "Hard ass" if you're more sensitive you don't get the job because they find that sensitive cops quit more often after a few months and they don't want to waste money. The job is extremely hard and depressing. So they hire only hardasses. What they don't take into account is that the experiences on the job hardens cops who DON'T quit, which turns the more extreme "hard asses" into terminators and virtual sociopaths. Then hit these terminators with a militaristic, macho, racist culture, and illegal quotas that they have to fill or they'll be reprimanded and put them in bad neighborhoods where people hate them, and see what they do.
Who's fault is it when they engage in the above behaviors? When they beat the crap out of innocent people, or overreact, or shoot 9 innocent bystanders because they're trying to take down 1 gunman (yes this happened in NYC recently). Certainly they are to blame but they aren't the only ones,
the way we live pushes them and everyone else into these confrontations.
Like I've said before, what happens with Stop and Frisk is inevitable. It's math. It's not just a few bad apples or even a whole bunch of them, it's that the box the apples are in is full of mold spores.
The answer is to get rid of the box.