43....

I don't agree but assuming I did, could the same be said for "mostly good" LEOs?  

Oh. So now "POC" are showing up at your home with pitchforks, huh? 

Those scary POC's! 

I’m not a fan of protests.  I believe real lasting change can best be made through the ballot box.

Having said that.  I do believe the majority of protests start out with the intention of being peaceful.  A chance to peacefully call attention to their cause.

But as history has shown us, there is always someone or a group of someones who see protests as a way to destroy parts of the “establishment “.  Which means any potential good a peaceful protest might obtain is lost because of the looting and violence done by a few.  Sometimes this done by a few members of the group and sometimes it’s done by some outside the group.

For starters, the cop didn't have to come out of the car with "are you on parole or probation?" What was the point of that? Since when did that become relevant to a traffic ticket. Unless that is part of the procedure, that question was irrelevant and starts the interaction off on the wrong foot. No matter what answer he gives, she is going to run the information to confirm, so why request it? My guess (and I believe that is what his mother thougth as well)--if he lies about it, I'm sure she would be able to charge him with some sort of obstruction. As a mother, I would also be upset about this type of "gotcha" for a simple traffic stop. She is probably quite aware of the ridiculous "we smelled weed" statements that police have used to search a car in hopes of finding something they can charge. Even if the mother KNOWS her son has nothing to hide, she is justifiably suspicious that he could be "set up" for false charges.

As a white woman who only sees the world through a "cops good, suspects bad" lens, you don't have the perspective to understand why innocent POC are every bit as worried about a traffic stop as an LEO might be. Yes, a few cops are killed in traffic stops. But many POC are targeted with wrongful stops for a "broken taillight" that really isn't broken as a pretext for searching the vehicle. Unarmed POC have been killed by cops during traffic stops (I would cite a statistic for how many but have not been able to find a clearcut source.) Compliance during a traffic stop does NOT guarantee a good outcome (Philando Castille). 

In 2019, 6 LEOs were killed while conducting traffic violation stops according to the FBI (and for the record, 1 is too many). www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2019-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty. The "danger narrative" of routine traffic stops is overblown. repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2484&context=mlr. Yes, LEOs are at risk of being harmed on the job, but routine traffic stops are NOT a significant source of danger and do not justify the actions of the police officer in the video.

You asked: what could have been done differently?


A response that would have avoided this escalation would have been:

"Sir, I pulled you over for running the stop sign. I'm going to need your license, registration, and insurance."

He hands over the documents.

"Please stand beside the car where I can see you while I run your information." She returns to patrol car, runs his information, and almost immediately discovers whether or not he has warrants for his arrest or is on parole/probation. She writes the ticket and has him sign for it.

No need for back up. No need to get into a pissing match with the mother. Just good old-fashioned professional behavior by an LEO that did not need to get all twisted up in proving she was in control. No need to ask him about his criminal background/parole status which is a completely unnecessary question because no matter what he says, she is going to have to run the information.

And I don't think the mother would have been so upset about a simple traffic stop if the officer had just said that upfront without questioning whether he was on probation/parole. As soon as the officer said that, the mother's spidey senses were on overload--"What does she think my son has done? Did she pull him over because she thinks he is a suspect in a crime? Is this a pretext stop?" By bringing up probation/parole, you have put the driver/mom into a state of being anxious over the true intent/purpose of the traffic stop, and if they are smart, they are not going to answer any questions. And when the officer says "he has to answer my questions," she is wrong. He does not have.to.say.a.word. You know, Fifth Amendment and all. I believe there is case law saying that you have to provide identification, so that is not a Fifth Amendment issue, and he complied with that request. But he does not have to say anything else, and to insist that he does is just bullying behavior by the officer.

Hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors have organized all over the country this summer. Randoms from the right and extreme left crash the peaceful protests, typically after the peaceful majority have left due to curfews and just life. If the randoms are what you are calling violent protests then I guess we disagree on semantics. What it appears to be is violent clashes between opposing small groups and there’s no protesting happening. To continue to lead with this is dishonest and misinformed.

It is just like when we tell our daughters to go someplace safe if they feel uncomfortable.  I have a 19 year old (white) son. I would expect him to stop and be completely courteous.  However, if my 19 year old's black friend chose to go to a safe place (mom), I would completely understand.  She has had to have a much different conversation with her son about what to do if he is stopped with the police than I have had to have with my son.  And yes, I say this as a relative of an LEO.

Now do the “other side”.

The OP is the one who brought up majority.

It’s almost 100 years later, and thousands of Americans are in the streets daily, protesting the same violence and racism that the Chicago commission documented. It may seem like nothing can change, but Muhammad said the last several weeks could be a wake-up call for some Americans to what policing in this country really means.

Part of that awakening, though, also involves understanding the history of police violence. Muhammad’s work focuses on systemic racism and criminal justice; The Condemnation of Blackness deals with the idea of black criminality, which he defines as the process by which “people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not.” That process has been a vicious cycle in American history, Muhammad explains, wherein black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, then deemed dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further.



I spoke with Muhammad by phone to better understand this history, what it means today, and what it would take to make 2020 and beyond different from 1922. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Anna North

Can you trace how the idea of black criminality appeared in America, starting with slavery?

Khalil Muhammad

The notion of criminality in the broadest sense has to do with slave rebellions and uprisings, the effort of black people to challenge their oppression in the context of slavery. Slave patrols were established to maintain, through violence and the threat of violence, the submission of enslaved people. But we really don’t get notions of black criminality in the way that we think of them today until after slavery in 1865.

The deliberate choice to abolish slavery, [except as] punishment for crime, leaves a gigantic loophole that the South attempts to leverage in the earliest days of freedom. What that amounts to is that all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights were then subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminals. And the only thing that wasn’t criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land.

Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South builds up a pretty robust carceral machinery and begins to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this. And for the next 70 years, the system is pretty much a criminal justice system that runs alongside a political economy that is thoroughly racist and white supremacist. And so we don’t get the era of mass incarceration in the South, what we get is the era of mass criminalization. Because the point is not to put people in prison, the point is to keep them working in a subordinate way, so that they can be exploited.

Anna North

What was happening in the North while this mass criminalization was happening in the South?

Khalil Muhammad

There had already been African Americans [in the North] before the end of slavery, and they were subjected to forms of segregation. But it wasn’t really until the beginning of the 20th century, when streams of black migrants began to move to northern cities, and particularly during World War I and what became known as the Great Migration, that we began to see the increased ascription of black people as prone to criminality, as a dangerous race, as a way of essentially limiting their access to the full fruits of their freedom in the North.



Social science played a huge role. What we’d call today “academic experts,” of one kind or another, were part of the effort to define black people as a particular criminal class in the American population. And what they essentially did was they used the evidence coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery. They used the census data to point to the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. They were almost three times overrepresented in the 1890 census in Southern prisons.

So that evidence became part of a national discussion that essentially said, “Well, now that black people have their freedom, what are they doing with it? They’re committing crimes. In the South and in the North, and the census data is the proof.”

And so people began to build on that data and add to it. Police statistics began to become more important in determining how black people were doing, whether they were behaving or not. We quickly moved from census data to local data, from South to North, and we begin to see the consolidation of a set of facts that black people have a crime problem.

Anna North

So it’s a cycle: Black people were incarcerated in the South, and because they were incarcerated, this whole theory that black people were criminal was built on top of that?

Khalil Muhammad

That’s exactly what I’m saying. Of course, there’s no footnotes or asterisks to what was happening in the South. People just take the data at face value, kind of like people take the data at face value today. They just look at the data and say, “Oh, well of course, look what’s happening in these communities.”

Anna North

How do we see these attitudes about black criminality play out in policing around the country, leading up through the 20th century to the present?”

Once we have the consolidation of the fact that crime statistics prove nationally, everywhere, that black people have a crime problem, the arguments for diminishing their equal citizenship rights are national. They’re not just Southern any longer. And they’re at every level of society — local, state, federal.

They are existing in cultural products like The Birth of a Nation, the first truly major Hollywood film release. Black criminality becomes the most dominant basis for justifying segregation, whether legal or by custom, everywhere in America.

It had already defined the heart of the Jim Crow form of segregation, but it really begins in the Great Migration period to shape the maldistribution of public goods for black people — access to neighborhoods, access to schools, access to hospitals, access to forms of leisure. And, of course, all of these restrictions are enforced by white citizens but most especially by local law enforcement, by police officers.

In the South, police were less on the front lines because there were fewer of them. There was more vigilante enforcement of white supremacy: A white man really could shoot a black man or woman down in the middle of the street and get away with it. That was less likely to happen in the North — what was more likely to happen was for a white resident to simply call the police.

The same basic idea that in white spaces, black people are presumptively suspect, is still playing out in America today. The idea that police officers should prevent crime in black communities, rather than simply policing the borders of black communities, is what gave us stop and frisk, which actually is not just from the 1990s or inspired by “broken windows” policing, but versions of it were playing out very officially in the 1960s. And by looking at the archives, which I’ve done in my book, unofficially and unnamed, going back to the 1910s and ’20s.

So this idea that you can prevent crime in a community where the crime statistics say a lot of crime happens, and presume that a certain demographic of black men — especially in that community — are likely criminals, that logic begins as early as the 1960s. And it’s still playing out.

While that pattern played out, one of the things that happens during Prohibition is that the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol creates this massive underground economy, which is now being regulated by white ethnic men who don’t sue each other in civil court, but actually shoot at each other when they’re competing over the spoils of bootlegging. And a lot of that action is deliberately put in black communities.

The speakeasies, the corruption is hidden within black communities. Everyone is complicit in this: The bootleggers are complicit, the police are complicit. The only people who aren’t complicit are everyday working-class black people who don’t want what’s happening in their communities to be happening.

The effect of that is to produce yet another battery of crime statistics coming out of Northern cities that shows high rates of arrest of black people during the Prohibition period, when in fact, they’re being targeted for political clampdowns of overwhelmingly white underground activity. It’s just remarkable.

And yet again, the white public doesn’t read any footnotes or get any asterisks to it. What they get is evidence of disproportionate numbers of arrests in the black community during a time where just about everybody knew who was behind bootlegging.

And a lot of that action is deliberately put in black communities.

The speakeasies, the corruption is hidden within black communities. Everyone is complicit in this: The bootleggers are complicit, the police are complicit. The only people who aren’t complicit are everyday working-class black people who don’t want what’s happening in their communities to be happening.

The effect of that is to produce yet another battery of crime statistics coming out of Northern cities that shows high rates of arrest of black people during the Prohibition period, when in fact, they’re being targeted for political clampdowns of overwhelmingly white underground activity. It’s just remarkable.

And yet again, the white public doesn’t read any footnotes or get any asterisks to it. What they get is evidence of disproportionate numbers of arrests in the black community during a time where just about everybody knew who was behind bootlegging.

[But] black people — black reformers, black activists, black scholars, black journalists — were always documenting what was happening to them. They were always resisting and they made some headway, beginning in the 1920s, around calling attention to systemic police racism and discrimination.

Anna North

That’s the next thing I wanted to ask about. I know that you wrote about this a little bit in your Washington Post op-ed last year — talk to me a little bit about the history of protests against racist policing.

Khalil Muhammad

The earliest days of the civil rights movement were focused on the problem of lynching. The NAACP literally begins because of lynching. And [one] reason was because of the threat of lynching in the North. It’s not to say that the progressives who founded the organization in 1910 didn’t care about lynching that had been going on in the South. But it was kind of like a George Floyd moment. It was like, “Holy smokes, if this can happen in Springfield, Illinois, where a lynching had occurred in 1909, then we’ve got to draw a line in the sand.”

Alongside their focus on racial violence in the earliest days, they also began to pay attention to police violence, particularly in the North, because the NAACP leadership was in Northern cities. It was headquartered in New York. And so what was happening in their own backyards was more like systemic police violence than lynch mobs. And that began the process, particularly for W.E.B. Du Bois, who establishes kind of a police blotter, or let’s call it a police-brutality blotter, and the primary magazine for the organization.


Ida B. Wells, who was also another founder of the NAACP, begins to organize around police violence and other forms of racial violence in those cities. African Americans themselves start to resist policing and call attention. Ministers, teachers, bricklayers — essentially what was the working and professional class of black America at the turn of the 20th century — are very vocal, and they demand police reform. They demand accountability for criminal activity amongst the police and they don’t get any of it.

By the 1920s, the first of a series of race riots erupts in East St. Louis, spreads to Philadelphia. Another one occurs in Chicago. The Chicago one is sparked by the death of a [17-year-old] swimming in Lake Michigan who crosses an aqueous color line. Black people are outraged. They want justice. White people take offense and begin to attack them in their communities.

@leowife interesting comment on MSNBC today. More cops have died from Covid then have died on patrol. He KNEW by Feb 7th and stated it on tape that it was 5 times more deadly then the flu. Airborne (wear masks)

You misread the study.

Those 570 violent demonstrations you are referring to included COVID 19 protests too, and 20% were something other than either BLM or COVID protests.

To quote:


You may want to actually read the study, and not misrepresent it. 

acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ACLED_USDataReview_Sum2020_SeptWebPDF_HiRes.pdf

In all sincerity, and no snark, what does that have to do with what I am discussing?

Whether or not you think that between 15 and 26 million protesters - the overwhelming majority of whom were peaceful - wanting to make their voices heard and taking a public stand is an effective medium for change given is irrelevant in a discussion of purposefully misrepresenting the actual numbers and making verifiably false claims to push an agenda.

If you want to discuss whether millions of people marching in unity is worthwhile or not, that is a thread topic of itself and not what I was talking about at all (and honestly have no desire to discuss).