1) The people with the power over the police have almost no contact with the people being policed. Neighborhood schooling reinforces that problem. It ensures that ability to afford housing segregates black people from white people. (Note: it’s not a question of funding. Here in DC, most of the shiny new LEED Gold schools are 99% black. Therefore, white parents won’t send their kids there, notwithstanding the gleaming facilities and lower housing prices in the surrounding area.) School choice gives black people the power to create integrated schools, instead of waiting for statistically wealthier whites/Asians to get woke enough to want to do it. I think people would be much more sensitive to policing issues if they didn’t just hear about these things a couple of times a year on the news, but were faced with people in their PTA suffering the consequences of police brutality. I would add that, unsurprisingly, a decisive majority of black people support school choice.
2) With notion of black people being “the other” rooted since childhood, qualified immunity and police unions eliminate the near term, immediate consequences of acting on those instincts.
The two things that make people think before they act are empathy and self preservation. The libertarian approach is a double-barreled solution that could hit both.
Perhaps if we had some serious, organized, factual discussions on some of these matters (as opposed to the all propaganda all the time approach we've become so accustomed to), people wouldn't continue to hold the same opinions they (supposedly) hold at the moment.
Six months from now, is the average white American small business owner going to be more or less likely to hire a black person? That's the fucked up shit that is going to last another decade. That's the stuff that maintains generational poverty. And there's a thousand other subtle, unspoken things like that which are going to broaden our divide.
The real pain - at least on the inter-generational poverty and deprivation side - is that in six months, the average American small business isn't going to exist in heavily-black neighbourhoods, and that probably won't change much in six years, and other businesses are probably going to be pretty thin on the ground there too. Apparently some places never recovered what they lost in the sixties race riots.
Though I expect that the consequences of the police actions to stop this will also be anything but temporary. It seems to take years of careful work to rebuild trust between police and the community they serve, and to restructure policing to be less hostile and dangerous.
But you end up in a situation of further tragedy where people start destroying property and assaulting others, and they screwed up by doing so. The message has been diluted, lost in all the noise. Expanding it nationwide hasn't broadcast the message positively.
It's juvenile and short sighted, the people are on their side, saying yes this was wrong, yes this has to stop, murder is unacceptable, etc. They are now looking at the situation with a different viewpoint, asking themselves if the police violence may be justified with this group, look at what they did to our community when WE AGREED with them and were willing to help.
That isn't a political thought, that is a rational thought. Destroying communities, rioting, looting, killing people, it never brings more people into your corner. America is a civil society that respects law and order. Much of America now is just happy they don't have to live around anywhere where this is happening, that is going to be the only takeaway from this tragedy now. The chorus on social media doesn't reflect that. The riots turned average Americans against this event.
A barrier, metaphorically, was quickly slammed up between people, and now it's just noise and chaos.
Right here on HN posts about the protests were being flagged left and right because people are more concerned about the freedom to side load apps on iOS than minorities getting harassed.
