. . .but George Floyd was killed because he resisted, not because he’s black.
If you don’t resist, you will be fine. If you obey the cops and pose no threat to their safety, you will be fine.
The cops don’t know you. They’ve seen some messed up shit in their lives. They don’t know your intentions, they don’t know what you’re going to do. They’re extra cautious. If they feel threatened, they’re not gonna hesitate to take action against you. If they feel like it’s your life or their life, they’re going to look after their own lives.
The moment you resist, they are not gonna treat you nicely. They’re going to look at you as a threat to their lives. You lose any benefit of the doubt they were willing to give you the moment you start resisting.
You are on your own the moment you start resisting.
Now, that cop in Minneapolis definitely was wrong to kneel on Floyd’s neck. And then to continue doing so after he had already lost consciousness (in all likelihood, died).
I am not on that cop’s side. Not even a little tiny bit.
Just because Floyd was giving them a hard time doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed.
The cop was wrong. What he did was indefensible.
And everyone acknowledges this.
But Floyd did himself no favors when he stopped cooperating with the police. There is no scenario where not cooperating with police can lead to any good outcome for you.
I’ll say it once again in case I wasn’t clear enough: even though he gave the cops a hard time it doesn’t mean he got what he deserved. But he opened himself up to that possibility when he started resisting.
So what “radical changes” do these “protesters” actually want? What are they hoping to achieve?
Make it illegal to call the cops on a black person? Make it illegal to arrest a black person?
You will never get to a point where the police are perfect and never make mistakes. You will never get to a point where there are no dickheads and assholes in the police force.
What do you want? Perfection? Does anything short of 100% perfection warrant riots?
It’s a noble goal to want police to be perfect, but it’s never going to happen. You’re dealing with human beings. There will never be a time in history where all cops are perfect angels who never make mistakes. You are setting yourself up for disappointment if your demand is perfection.
Nobody is defending the cop that killed George Floyd. No meaningful number of Americans think he was right.
The overwhelming number of Americans think the officer was wrong.
They were on your side–until you started burning your city to the ground.
What are these rioters and protesters so angry about? Who do they think they are opposing?
Who doesn’t think black lives matter?
People in Washington D.C, Atlanta, Los Angeles and all over the country are protesting one police officer in Minneapolis.
An officer who has already been fired, already been charged with third degree murder, and who is already under arrest. He’s sitting in a jail cell right now.
What more do you want?
I think the people involved in these riots and “demonstrations” just want to be angry. They want to riot. They want to feel like they’re part of a historical moment. They want to feel like they’re Doing Something Great.
The white people just want to virtue signal and show they’re Not Racist. That’s a given.
As a whole, they’ve been brainwashed by Hollywood and the media to believe America is a racist hellhole.
But honestly, what can be done to make sure this never happens again? What policies could be implemented?
Literally nothing. The cop broke the law.
George Floyd was murdered by a cop. It’s sad that it happened. It should not have happened. The cop should be brought to justice, and George Floyd’s family should be paid a fat settlement from the city of Minneapolis because they were wronged.
I’m not saying arresting the cop and paying Floyd’s family a settlement makes it right, because nothing will bring a dead family member back to life.
But sometimes these things happen in our messed-up world. If we lived in a perfect world, we wouldn’t even need police in the first place.
There is literally nothing that can be done to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future.
Except for people to not resist when they get arrested.
According to the Washington Post’s database, since 2015, there have been 49 unarmed, not-fleeing-the-scene black people in the US that have been killed by police.
There are 42 million black people in America. At the very least, you have to admit there is not an epidemic of black people being “slaughtered” by police.
There’s an epidemic of media coverage, of course. But there is no epidemic of killing.
Three unarmed black people have been killed by police this year. One was fleeing.
Last year, there were nine unarmed black people killed by police. Six were fleeing.
The WaPo database doesn’t even have information on how many were resisting arrest. Fleeing the scene is the closest thing they have.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics only has arrest data for years up to 2014, and in 2014, there were 11,207,143 people arrested in America. In 2015, there were 994 people shot and killed by police.
Since we don’t have data on total arrests for 2015, we can look at other years to see if we can ballpark it. In 2013, the number of total arrests was 11.3 million. In 2012 it was 12.2 million. In 2011, it was 12.4 million.
So the number of total arrests in America actually decreased by 1.2 million between 2011 and 2014.
Let’s just assume the number of arrests didn’t fluctuate very much from 2014 to 2015, and that 11.2 million is a fair estimate for the years since 2014, i.e. that we can reasonably estimate about 11.2 million people were arrested in America in 2015.
Only 94 of the 992 shot and killed by police that year were unarmed, and only 56 of those 94 were both unarmed and not fleeing the scene.
56 out of 11.2 million. That’s 0.000005%.
And we still don’t even know how many of those 56 people were resisting. We don’t know how many of those 56 cases the police were actually justified in killing the suspect.
But even if we assume all 56 cases of unarmed, non-fleeing perps being killed were unjustified and wrong, that’s still only 0.000005% of arrests.
56 out of 11.2 million comes out to 1 in 200,000. You have a 1 in 200,000 chance of being killed by a cop while you’re unarmed.
And the media focuses on the 1, not the 199,999.
You are ruining my justification to be outraged. Please don’t sprinkle the soothing water of level-headed reason on my flames of emotion-driven fury!
Ok Let me rephrase: go out and burn it all down! Down with whitey!