Officers clearly are fearing for their lives and view potential encounters with black males through a lense of negative intent, which is causing them to react more aggressively. Greater accountability and training will be critical but only if the culture of the police force changes. This could be very difficult as a lot of police officers may take these jobs exactly because they're attracted to the danger and violence (In Canada many of the bouncers I knew were on steroids only had high school educations and many wanted to be cops...).
What is a threat is gun ownership. British police do not expect to be threatened with a firearm, or shot on a routine traffic stop. In the US, the police have to expect that as normality.
Now I know there are a lot of US citizens who believe in the right to bear arms, and many more militant NRA members believe that is more about defending themselves from the state, but if you take a step back, they've already lost that fight long ago. The state already tramples over their rights, and there are no armed militias matching on Washington to overthrow the corrupt and over controlling state. I truly don't understand that argument.
Taking up arms against the government is a measure of last resort. The human cost would be extraordinarily high if people decided to solve political and legal problems with violence on a national scale.
Right now there are a number of problems with citizen rights getting trampled in the US on but we're not at a point where working through our political systems is totally worthless, nor are we at a point where the whole system should be burnt down and started over.
The existence of the 2nd amendment means that those with power have to respect the fact that they are vastly outnumbered and outgunned (100 million gun owners vs. maybe 2-3 million law enforcement and military combined). Would be tyrants would have a lot more to think about with an armed populace, than an unarmed populace.
Now of course Americans pay a high cost for the 2nd amendment and that shouldn't be discounted. But it is a last ditch deterrent against an abusive government.
(N.B. I'm not American, and am entirely against gun ownership being a right, so I don't think the argument is a worthy one regardless)
(Yes, even criminals are usually unarmed unless they are intending to commit a crime. This is because wearing a weapon outs them as criminals, which they naturally try to avoid.)
If you want to deescalate the war between law enforcement and the public, you must not only change the way the law enforcement interprets its duty, you must also disarm the public.
Why? It doesn't happen.
I agree with you that they have lost that battle. I don't think this is something that, on average, they realize or acknowledge or maybe even understand.
At this point I don't see how it can ever be solved. Even if the US banned gun sales tomorrow there would still be so many firearms out there. Best case, they can try to limit the sales of assault weapons (though there is no definition of that) and closing the insane loopholes that mean no-one needs a background check if they buy a gun at at a gun show, etc.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
That's a lot to go through this early in the morning, so forgive me if this has been covered already, but did they analyze the risk of police officers being attacked/killed by the particular race that there's a (police shooting) bias against compared to other races in those counties?
I'm curious if there's a correlation between "assault on police officers is X times more likely to occur by someone from race Y" and "police officers are Z times more likely to shoot someone of race Y".
I'm not trying to imply anything (even though I know it sounds that way). I'm just curious.
I've met quite a few people that that was the explicit reason they joined the military or police. It's not enough to assume default goodness in people. Police officers, being in a position of public trust and wielding an extreme level of lawfully sanctioned violent power, must be held to a higher standard.
One is the demonization of blacks through the way the war on drugs has been prosecuted. Blacks are far more likely to be arrested or incarcerated for drug crimes, despite an equivalent or in some cases lower incidence of drug use than whites. Blacks are more likely to be disciplined in school, regardless of behavior. This leads to an adversarial relationship and it creates what seems to be a trend of blacks always having run ins with the law (significantly because of unequal application of the law and policing towards them).
Another is the aggressiveness, militarization, and tendency to escalate in the police, much of it brought about by the war on drugs. No knock raids and a propensity to look at every encounter between law enforcement and a civilian, especially a black civilian, as a hostile situation always on the tipping point of violence, and the training to match, has created an epidemic of police encounters that are far more violent than they ever should have been. Police go through training to dominate, to shoot at a twitch if they feel the situation warrants it, and we see the bloody results.
But there's something even darker. And that's the increasing willingness of police forces to commit summary executions on the street of people they feel are, or should be, outside of the protections of the law. Many police have very little qualms about deploying lethal force against "the bad guys", and the public too has been quick to defend the use of lethal force against "bad guys". Rapists, murderers, violent thieves, "scum". And the line on what sort of behavior is allowed has shifted significantly. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 there have been a total of around 1400 legally sanctioned executions in the entire US, for an average of about 35 a year. Police fatally shot nearly a thousand people in 2015 alone. An execution rate nearly 30 times the legally sanctioned rate, and increasing since a low in around the year 2000. This while the rates of both violent crime and of shootings of police officers have been falling. Today the rate of fatal shootings by police is as high as it was during the height of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when violent crime and street murder (by civilians) were at record highs, several times higher than they are today.
Unquestionably the police have shifted toward a stance of committing summary executions during arrests. Sometimes this happens by accident, where the aggressiveness of the police put them closer to suspects and more likely to be in danger, and thus more likely to provoke a situation requiring deadly use of force. The problem here is that for too long we as a society have been willing to look away (as we were willing to look away when our nation began to adopt torture) from these horrors because we thought that only "bad guys" were being affected. But as we've seen, these patterns of behavior easily bleed over and pretty quickly you start seeing routine traffic stops pushed up against the knife edge of life or death circumstance for no good reason, and good, honest citizens are dying as a result.
This last one is very hard to solve, because, as we've seen, it requires a very stunning reversal of perspective for those in law enforcement. It's difficult to come to terms with the concept that you might be a bad guy yourself, that your actions and your training may be horrifically dangerous to civilized life. So people will naturally shy away from questioning their own training, motives, and actions.
I don't.
Most of the cops I know were bullies in high school. They enjoy violence and commanding physical authority over other people. The ability to carry and potentially use a gun is a big draw of the profession for them.
Police violence won't be fixed until we stop giving thugs a badge and gun.
To me, much of the root cause (it's not just black males per se; think of all the dogs shot mostly unnecessarily by police for instance -- https://puppycidedb.com/) is the over-aggressive militarization of the American police force. Which occurred for many reasons, but primarily was due to various moral panics such as the "war on drugs", and the need of our oversized military industry to dispose of excess military equipment. (See Balko's book on this: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...)
Ultimately, the problem I can see with such policies is that the "war" paradigms too many police departments are obsessed with divide people between The Good Guys and The Enemy. The police force should be about community first (protect and serve etc.). But when the motif is more Good Guys vs. The Enemy, this probably does allow things like racial bias to play an oversized role. And when the motif is more War War War, it probably encourages hair-trigger responses.
In my opinion, American police violence (and we do IMHO have the most over-aggressive culture of any rich world nation I've seen) won't be fixed until this attitude changes. This is less a police officer issue (officers can be trained to any culture) and more of the type of culture encouraged at a legislative level.
I fail to see any evidence to justify (or at least motivate) that assumption.
I live in France, where we've just had terrorist attacks, and I'm afraid we'll meet the same pattern, 15 years later than USA:
- People want the police to do its job (securing the streets, which goes from checking car insurances to being detectives on terrorism),
- So they vote for more police,
- The police doesn't do much more than assaulting easy targets, picking up girls who come to lodge a charge (true story), and walk on cyclist lanes (not much traffic enforcement because it's unpopular and not much detective work because it's risky),
- So people vote even more right-wing,
- Police has more powers, but still doesn't do its job much, and assaults even more weak people,
- Then we get people who kill police (like in Dallas) or burn police cars (like in Paris) because they're abusing their power.
Already, President Hollande made the same talk and took the same path on 13th Nov 2015 as Bush on 11th Sept 2001, so I'm a little afraid there's a trend were.
Now what societal changes could happen that would disrupt a race to the bottom of police brutality, like in USA?
The UK had this problem with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and more generally the policing of Northern Ireland with troops. The only way out of it was the restructuring, renaming, and re-populating with affirmative action of the force as the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Another key part of the solution is a willingness to actually prosecute unlawful shootings. The key case here is Lee Clegg, a paratrooper on a roadside checkpoint who shot at a car driven by teenage joyriders that failed to stop. It was ruled that shooting after the car had passed was no longer justified.
The US has got to this point because it is not willing to effectively prosecute the use of lethal force against black men where it is not absolutely required. The US also has a very flexible and expansive idea of "required".
(PSNI are routinely armed, unlike most of the rest of the UK, except anti-terrorist patrols at airports and high security locations.)
To emphasise what you've said, the root and brach reform that has happened in the RUC/policing in NI over the last decade (or more) can't be underestimated. Among the biggest factors, as I perceive them are both top down and bottom up:
* Engaging the civilian leadership of the effected Catholic/Republican communities in leadership and accountability positions (e.g. Sin Fein/Stormont)
* Making on the ground community relationships with the effected communities a huge priority, through: targeted engagement; community relations and frankly, demonstrating the RUC's value through active/effective community policing and crime reduction.
* The confrontation and acknowledgement of the previous injustices. Truth and reconciliation is key.
It's been a LONG and painful journey interlinked that isn't finished, but it really could serve as a great lesson to improving minority/police relationships in the US.
http://www.policemisconduct.net/the-problem-with-prosecuting...
I think another important point is despite being armed the PSNI rarely use their weapons. I honestly can't remember the last time someone was killed by a PSNI officer.
- A lot of shitty policing, and covering up of crimes by police has always existed, and we're just much more aware of it because everyone now has a video camera in their pockets. It's possible that police brutality had always been this bad, or worse.
- The general fitness and preparedness level of police has likely declined along with the rest of society. A police officer should be confident that they can handle and control a situation physically, but they are more inclined to rely on tasers or guns if they feel like they could get overwhelmed by a situation. In Sam Harris's interview with Jocko Willink he mentions a video[1] of 3 large cops taking over 5 minutes to subdue a half-naked man in socks. It's hard to watch it and believe that the cops had any adequate training or confidence in how to handle a situation without relying on weapons.
This would have pretty dramatic effects on the number of female police officers.
Look at the video were the police car was torched and the cop beaten with an iron bar. Do you think the perps would still be alive in the US ? The French cop didn't even think about using his gun and was commended for it.
"most European countries conform to the European Convention on Human Rights, which impels its 47 signatories to permit only deadly force that is “absolutely necessary” to achieve a lawful purpose. Killings excused under America’s “reasonable belief” standards often violate Europe’s “absolute necessity” standards."
http://theconversation.com/why-do-american-cops-kill-so-many...
They also suggest very poor training of cops is a big part of it, as well as racism and the prevalance of guns.
The problem is not just the police in the US to me it is the easy access to heavy weaponry by normal people. If it was hard for normal citizens to have guns police would not be shoot first ask question later mode all the time.Robot cops with open-source A.I., verifiable firmware, and a public log of all their decisions.
As long as humans are given any sort of power over other humans, shit will happen. No matter where it is, what era it is.
Humanity has not dealt with bad information reaching this many of its lunatics at this kind of speed.
IMHO this is and should be the highest priority bug on the issue list.
Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page have no idea what to do about it and by keeping quiet about it or being defensive about it isn't helping.
Just try talking about slowing the speed of unprocessed information reaching the mentally ill, the ignorant or misguided and you will be taken out like the communist party is running the show. I expect better from the smart people of silicon valley.
I expect them to work out a fix. No one else has the capability.
For all I'm concerned as a member of the dominating class, the police is daily asking to be shot. Tough luck if you are an uncorrupted agent, but if you are uncorrupted you'd better speak up now.
Obama saying "It's time for a reform" is a mere approximation: If he issued an order for all police to put down all weapons tomorrow, the safety of the street would actually increase.
US police losing all firearms instantly without changing civilian gun controls laws would be a very dangerous situation. Much more dangerous than the current one.
The world didn't got worse, but everybody started to feel that way. Because people now know what they didn't know before.
Two hundred years ago, when your beloved aunt died, you realised that after a week when the letter informing you arrived. During that week you could be happy, because you didn't know.
Now the death, misery, violence and unfairness that happens so regularly in our world is just a fingertip away.
Resulting in fear and anger. Those emotions are good for evading and hunting animals, but not for dealing with complex rules in a globalised society.
And since they're always a kind of "emergency", an overriding situation for our brains to which we instinctively pay attention, that's the ultimate topic for news. Now with unlimited supply - if there's nothing bad happening in your city, local media will borrow something from elsewhere in the country. And if the whole nation had just a peaceful and happy week, they'll borrow something from abroad.
I do believe that as a society we need to reconsider the "freedom of press" in mainstream media. To be clear - the idea is based on the most honorable of principles. But with few decades of instant electronic communication behind us, we know few relevant things to be experimentally confirmed as facts:
- publishers have every reason to pick up most extreme examples for anything, and with lightspeed access to global information, they'll happily do this every day
- media plays havoc with our brains; in particular, with availability heuristic[0] - that makes us instinctively feel that everyone around us is rich hand happy (since our real neighbors, in terms of what we know about them, are media celebrities) and the world is a dangerous and brutal place (since we keep hearing about some crime or attack every single day - and the distance doesn't matter for availability heuristic)
- most people seem to be unaware that brains are not well adapted to our current technological environment, and in particular that if you don't constantly downplay or ignore most of the news, you're being lead to believe extremely wrong things - by the very virtue of availability heuristic
- those people vote
Something needs to be done about at least some of those points there. Trying to just educate people is too slow and too unreliable. I'm not saying "censor press" or something - but we need to somehow take into the account the standard failure mode media triggers in majority of population.
>Resulting in fear and anger.
or it could result in increased awareness about the issues and empathy toward the victims of "the death, misery, violence and unfairness". Such awareness and empathy can be very constructive and a force for progress and thus "good for dealing with complex rules in a globalised society."
History of progress is a history of wider and faster spread of fuller information. Police was brutalizing and murdering black people long before cell phone cameras. With cell phone recordings of such events now available, the society can't anymore just dismiss it and has finally to deal with it.
Historically, news either remained local and did not propagate, or if it did, it propagated slowly, and thus the impact was diffused, largely inhibiting reactionary movement.
Now, we not only have instantaneous hypersensationalised global media, but the filter-bubble echo chambers of social media which amplify and distort events to fit their world view and agenda, whatever that may be.
It's sad, really, as once upon a time we believed the Internet could bring global unity - but rather, it has deepened divisions, pushed political thought to extremes (defensiveness is one hell of a drug), and has brought about much of the societal ill we now see in developed countries.
Is there a solution? Facebook seem to be trying to break people out of their bubbles, but the thing is, people like their bubbles, as they're safe and cozy and they don't get angry at what someone they disagree with wrote.
Now, I'm pretty sure this same argument was espoused about handbills and movable type, and we demonstrably survived print, but again, velocity is the killer. I'm not sure if it's different or not.
Either way, it's the old tribal instincts doing their thing - either we need to collectively adapt (more easily said than done), or we need a technical or legal solution.
Legal solutions take the format of restrictions on speech, which nobody wants to promulgate, technical solutions will be worked around.
So - it's up to us to try to be better, to try to be moderate, to try not to get pissed off.
Maybe the solution is pharmaceutical. Maybe we need Huxley's soma. I don't see how you can change human nature quickly enough otherwise.
If anything, social networks can be part of the solution, because they provide evidence in cases where otherwise there'd be none.
Now it's up to politicians and courts to actually punish corrupt cops.
Police brutality leading to counter-riots predates Facebook and indeed the internet. Trying to hide the evidence is not going to help.
Would you have AT&T start filtering phone calls based on content?
Anything that threatens to lessen profits in the least is hard evidence for the communist party running the show.
</sarcasm>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BugWAiIHTOw
Not for the faint of heart or those that can't deal with blood.
Deleting evidence in a situation like this should be in a special category all by itself.
Note that the couple's four year old daughter was also present.
I'm normally a very high strung person, but when my mother collapsed in front of me with congestive heart failure, I was unbelievably calm (until the situation was under control, after which then I started to freak out). It was a unique experience. I would have expected myself to start freaking out in a situation like that.
Where I live, police are reasonable and populace is unarmed.
On the other hand US is on of a few modern republics that hasn't produced a tyranny yet. And perhaps 2nd amendment may have something to do with that. Along with rest of the constitution.
Washington state also went concealed carry in 1961, and it's crime rate rose and fell with the rest of the country over time. Seriously, it's not an armed population, but an incarcerated one that reduces crime. It is, after all, the point of incarceration.
What about most european countries?
Tell that to the Native Americans and slaves.
"Only" 300.000 black people have been brought to US as slaves. Less than 5% of American families owned slaves.
Also to put things into perspective - between 1MM and 1.3MM white Europeans have been enslaved by Arabs.
What has been done to Native Americans is horrible. Slavery is horrible.
But I have no idea what any of that has to do with the fact that United States is really a one-of the kind country in the world.
I think that Americans should take a long hard look at all the problems on their plate, but they should really stop falling for snake oil peddlers who are selling Identity Politics and trying to benefit from pitting communities against each other.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/07/facebook_drops_feed_...
There are many videos of this, including one where a cop at a gas station asked a black man to show his license and then proceeded to shoot him because he thought he had a gun.
On the other hand shooting police officers only reinforces this kind of training. It's an explosive situation of mistrust, emotion and idiocy.
Anger is such a useless emotion.
Your statements are contradictory.
That the police used her phone to delete it via vanilla facebook app is 100% plausible, but what's far more implausible is whatever mechanism was used to restore it.
What are the options?
Facebook allows you to undelete a video an hour later? Not to my knowledge.
Is there another automated/normal way for a video to undelete an hour later, especially with a modified content setting?
Is there an option that means something other than "someone on facebook staff saw that it was deleted and explicitly restored it without instruction from the user"?
When you delete a posting, nothing actually gets deleted, at least not right away. A flag is set which tells the system not to display the post anymore. The caches of the media files eventually expire and they get deleted. The initial storage location will probably stay until the posting is really deleted. That could be forever, not for any nefarious reasons but because of cross-referencing between database records.
Your posting has a unique id, and when someone likes it, or adds a comment to it, or shares it, the id is used to cross-reference their action/content with yours. If your post is deleted there would be dangling cross-refefences, and database systems usually don't like that. It's often better to leave the record in the database but flag it as "deleted" so it won't be displayed to anyone (except maybe admins and you.)
What I'm wondering about is how it explicitly became genuinely available (as opposed to a lingering cached copy here and there) after it was (allegedly) marked for deletion, in the absence of that functionality on facebook's front end.
1. Some white people are afraid of black people. (the other way probably too)
2. Most people are very afraid of other people carrying guns.
3. Most people are afraid of some form of resistance when they challenge/approach somebody.
Add it up. It's likely that somewhere a white policeman approaches a black person who has, or could have a gun, and experiences fear.
Before this is read as an excuse for the policeman, which it is not:
Keep in mind that fear and anger, fight and flight are intertwined. Hatred can come from fear. Fear can come after hatred. One brain-areal is responsible for both emotions.
The only efficient response to defuse these situations is to eliminate the "very afraid" above and disarm the population.
Half of people killed by police are white. Blacks are 25%.
Blacks are also disproportionally represented amongst violent offenders.
One more interesting trivia - black and hispanic cops are more likely to shoot a black suspect than white cops.
Black people are 13% of US population, yet black men (6% of US population) commit 50% of homicides in the US.
Thus your assumptions are incorrect and thus your conclusions may also be incorrect. It appears that white people are more afraid of being called racist than being assaulted by a person of color.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-kno... http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race... http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/28/5-devasta...
What I said was that situations involving guns tend to scare/alarm all involved parties.
And that getting rid of the guns is easier and will likely have a larger effect than curing people of their racism.
And the police (see UK, where most police is unarmed).
And make police a highly-recognised profession with top-pay, but also heavily scrutinised selection, entrance-tests and no allowed margin for error.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/0...
This is really getting out of hand.
MASS SHOOTING CASUALTIES IN THE U.S. - JUNE 2016
52 verified mass shootings
104 people killed
226 people wounded
These people were victims strictly of mass shootings. Not included
are victims of shootings where three or fewer people were shot. On
average, 91 Americans are killed and more than 200 injured with guns
every day.I don't recall anything like the killings of those police officers happening at a demonstration, we're talking organized targeted response here.
How many of these are suicides, accidents, or gang violence? I ask because you quoted one paragraph which starts by talking specifically about mass shootings, but then generalizes to a fact that is almost certainly 99%+ incidents that are always excluded (suicide, accidents, gang violence, etc).
We need to pay our officers more and have fewer of them, If you start to pay the good ones a respectable salary you'll get more accountability.
We need to train our officers better, we should have an apprenticeship program that lasts at least five years where the apprentice officer rides around with a veteran UNARMED until he picks up every skill necessary to do a good job in real time, two years of community college and then a year as park police isn't cutting it.
We need to reduce conflict on the streets, Philando Castile knew that his taillight was out, the problem is that in an impoverished and racially oppressed culture these small fixes become tough to handle when you have other bills to pay. The officer was either going to ticket him or give him a warning, neither of which would have done any good long term, and so you had unnecessary conflict. We need to change the laws so that cops aren't allowed to harass people over minor things like taillights/inspection stickers/small amounts of marijuana/jaywalking you name it.
Black culture needs to change, stop selling CD's on the corner with a gun in your pocket and get a job that supports your kids, this "gangster" lifestyle is a result of rap music.
The media needs to fined by the federal government for disproportionately reporting on content that is intended to get ratings and thus adds to the chaos and race baiting. How many people were killed in Chicago last week? Can you name them? The media outlets need to be fined to take away the incentive to over report on sensational news. We need something along the lines of a "Fair Media Coverage Act" that will completely destroy the financial incentive of media outlets that over report on sensational news, this would hopefully have the dual effect of (over the long term) slowing down the mass shootings that appear to be happening every other month. These rioters/mass shooters/cop killers are doing it for the 24/7 CNN news reel and the people tune in because the chaos is interesting and exciting, like a war movie with real life ramifications. Destroy the incentive.
Just some ideas for real changes.
Are you sure about that? That's a pretty outlandish thing to say.
>The media outlets need to be fined to take away the incentive to over report on sensational news
How would sensational news be distinguished from highly engaging/interesting news?
You can already see this issue regarding the hate for clickbait, people will call any content with an enticing title clickbait regardless of the value of the content itself.
I'm positive, see the picture of Alton Sterling posing with guns with his kids, this is black culture in a nutshell (not ALL black culture, but a very real part of it)
>How would sensational news be distinguished from highly engaging/interesting news?
News shouldn't be interesting, it should be informative and that's it. CNN/FOX/MSNBC have turned into real life action/crime dramas. I'm convinced that five officers might not be dead if these networks had restrictions on what they could report. You could enforce this by only allowing networks to report for one hour per news story, per media day. Anything over that would result in a fine that would eat into advertising revenue. You could also enforce a rule that would fine media outlets for stating the name/showing the picture of mass shooters so you don't glorify them. Media outlets have too much power in this and there needs to be regulations on them just like any other industry in this country.
There are no groups even united that could stand up to the Federal government. And the USG is strong enough to subdue any two groups that decide to war with each other.
These are not areas at which the US Federal Government excels. Attempts to remedy such situations with overwhelming force will only serve to exacerbate them. I'll guess that the next two decades (or less) will see a phase change in the nature of US governance, even if the superficial forms remain the same.
The majority of us will consider crossing the street to avoid an oncoming $category_of_person. Maybe it's black men, maybe it's police, maybe it's beggars, maybe it's missionaries, maybe it is visibly agitated men of any color, etc.
Maybe you feel like you've failed a bit every time it happens. Maybe your personality changes over time and at some point you taught yourself to abstain from such behavior. But, feelings are harder to change than behavior...
When I pass my own problematic $category_of_person on the street (on the same side, now!), I spend a few seconds with no other topic on my mind than that person.
It is because deep down, some part of me still sees that person as a threat, like a cliff or a fire or a bear.
This is terrible, I know. Look, I'm trying to explain racism. Gimmie a minute...
My mother taught me, before I was old enough to know better, to avoid some categories of people. To fear them, for my safety.
I can, do, and will continue to overcome those crappy cards I was dealt.
But don't put a badge on my chest and a gun on my hip and tell me to go talk to various categories of people in inherently heated situations and expect that evil that has been a part of me since before I can remember to never manifest itself in a statistically significant fashion. That's stupid. Police officer is not the job for me. Duh! See above!
What I'm getting at is that my own combination of upbringing and later enlightenment is not uncommon. (Said differently: it's not uncommon for a person to be less racist than their parents were, right?) And therefor some meaningful percentage of good cops who don't consider themselves racist are, in fact, racist in a statistically significant way. Stress = gunfire.
...So... can we be done resisting the Black Lives Matter meme? Please? Y'all look ignorant when you do that. :)
p.s. the fear when walking thing dissipates immediately if a conversation happens, etc. It's not that big of a deal, right? We'll all have a good laugh about it one day when I am caught off guard and mugged by a white girl... Anyway, I'm sorry. I try.