You don't have to be racist to participate in systemic racism. US policing produces racist outcomes even from "not-racist" people. I'm going to explain (again):
* why I've probably been pulled over way more times than most people you know, even though most of the times I'm pulled over, I get no ticket (because I did nothing wrong)
* how I stopped getting pulled over so much (because I understand the system)
* And why lots of cops say that the average voter is more racist than the average cop
Imagine yourself as a police officer. Hopefully you don't consider yourself racist! You're all ready to fix the system "from the inside" by being a good cop.
Your police chief tells you that you must write 200 tickets a month. If you fail to write 200 tickets a month you will be fired.
Imagine you write a ticket for a rich white lawyer that lives in Atherton. They can easily afford the $80 ticket; they bill out at $800/hr! But they will take a day off work just to go fight the ticket in court🤡
If they overturn that ticket, it doesn't count to your total. If they show up in court and you don't, they win by default. If you go to court to make sure the ticket sticks, you're in court, and not out writing more tickets. As a police officer, you lose.
You're incentivized to write tickets that "stick."
If you wrote an $80 ticket for a Black janitor in East Palo Alto, they can't afford the ticket, but they *really* can't afford to take a day off of work. And they don't like courthouses...
If you write 220 tickets and 30 get overturned, you only wrote 190 tickets. Your job is at risk. If you write 210 tickets and only 2 get overturned, you're good!
Not all Black folk are poor, but your probability of getting a ticket that sticks is higher with Black drivers. If you (illegally) search the vehicle and find weed, you might get 2 tickets! The daily double!
But you can't search the car or the person, without escalating. You are *incentivized to escalate*.
This makes Black people not trust police officers. Because police officers seen like they are always trying to find some reason to mess with you, violate your civil rights, and "hem you up." And you visibly see that they don't seem to do this with white folk.
Again, I'm not even talking about the racist cops here, of which there are many! I'm just talking about the ones who just go with the flow of what the system wants them to do.
Black cops do this too. Black cops pull over Black drivers.
@mekkaokereke Thank you! This is so important to understand! Once the ball gets rolling, we can end up (and have ended up) with systemic racism even if somehow everybody individually is "not racist." (As if!) The effects of historic racism are still being felt today in nearly every area of life, even before adding in the fresh new racial horrors that never end.
I used to say "wake up, wypipo," but I guess that label has been co-opted, so... open your eyes, wypipo! A cop doesn't have to be a neo-nazi to be part of a system that has never quite moved past its history as "slave patrols." On top of that, many cops are actively neo-nazis too, so not only do we not make progress, we move backwards.
And all the while, people with their eyes still closed claim we've moved past racism because we elected a Black president.
🙄
