There is plenty of evidence to suggest that African-Americans are treated unfairly by law enforcement and the judicial system. It is logically impossible, however, to know if racism is responsible for any given police shooting, because you cannot know if the officer would have responded to a white man in a different way. It is a little bit like attributing hurricanes and tornadoes to climate change; you know that global warming makes them more likely, but you can’t know if they would have occurred in any event.
The MSM frequently appear to buy into the notion that the life of a policeman is more valuable than the life of an innocent civilian. That really irritates me. Why do we grieve more for someone who is paid by the taxpayers to put his life on the line than someone who isn’t?
It is frequently necessary in this world to make choices, but this isn’t one of those occasions: I don’t have to pick between the police and the community. I don’t want policemen to use unnecessary force, but I certainly don’t want anyone to shoot at them, either.
Here is the bottom line: (a) the police have a difficult and dangerous job, and it is inevitable that mistakes will be made that will cause loss of life on occasion; (b) some of these events may be attributable to racism, but some of them probably are not; (c) there are issues with racism in the system that need to be addressed on a community-by-community basis, but that information is best derived from comprehensive studies, not individual events; and (d) the police are not immune from criticism, and there is nothing wrong with peaceful protests.