Are you blaming this problem on black culture?
Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
> Are you blaming this problem on black culture?
In part, yes. It's not popular, but I think that black culture has developed "pathological" behaviors, similar to the defense mechanisms we see in children, were the behavior was actually adaptive at one point in time (and likely essential for survival), but has become maladaptive now that the circumstances have changed. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of the backlash over "microaggressions" is that people think talking about "microaggressions" before those maladaptive behaviors in unreasonable and unfair, but we're getting on a tangent.)
> Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
Sure. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice).
My point is that you're getting like 10 variance points from what you wear, another 5-10 variance points from how you conduct yourself, and like 1-5 variance points from the color of your skin.
I'm not convinced there's not a racial component to the policing either -- I just suspect it's much like the wage gap, where what we find is that it's mostly social issues we don't really want to talk about (women leaving work force to have children; men having more variance as a gender; men skewing slightly more competitive) and a little bit actual problematic bias (that last 3-5 cents).
So I suspect we'll find a little bit of genuine bias in policing, but I think we'll find, once we dig further in to the numbers, that mostly what we're seeing is behaviors that correlate highly with facts that make us uncomfortable, and have to do with either economics, social class, or culture.
There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice).
This interesting piece was written by a well educated black lawyer living in a upscale neighborhood about being harassed by cops because his car broke down, so he walked home and a black man walking in his upper class neighborhood was reason enough to harass him:
http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/...