A lot of police are corrupt, and there is an absolute ton of racism in this country so we believe it when the cop tells a lie that implicates a black guy.
Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, and it's definitely not like we're consciously choosing to be racist--this is just lifetimes of unexamined biases, media information, etc. We have these little biases that tell us not to trust the black guy's word and that adds up over time.
Personally, I don't believe a single damn word out of a police officer's mouth. Particularly so if they are under oath. It has nothing to do with race, I don't care who the defendant is.
They say the least reliable form of testimony is eyewitness accounts. Actually, I think the police have the eyewitness beat on this account. Too bad I've never had jury duty, and even if I did I'd probably be dismissed, so unfortunately I'll never get my chance as one of the 12 angry jurists to apply this in practice.
It seems like there are more and more like-minded people who will outright dismiss the grand-standing Detective and insist on just the facts please. Show me actual proof because your word is truly worthless.
Did you read the articles? Police officers were the first ones to report on their fellow officers for their misconduct (i.e. planting evidence) triggering the investigations of Internal Affairs. I suppose the irony here is under your logic you would not believe the whistle blowing officers because they only had eyewitness accounts - and you don't believe a single damn word out of a police officer's mouth - rather you would have sided with the defending officers as you don't care who the defendant is.
I'm sorry, I forgot the most important part, which is why I don't believe a word... it's because it's self-serving. Any time a witness is testifying, the job on cross-examination is to expose the bias or self-serving interest that the witness may have in offering their testimony. When arresting officers testify against a defendant, they are of course just backing up their prior actions. Pretty damn rare is the officer who will admit on the stand that they bungled XYZ component of the arrest, or that they didn't actually have probable cause, etc. Because it's their arrest, it's their own record on the line, they have too great a self-interest in supporting their own arrest, and therefore their testimony should be discounted.
When an IA officer testifies against one of their own fabricating evidence, I can be sure it is testimony that they are thoroughly unhappy about giving and not particularly self-serving. Therefore, more trustworthy. Somehow I doubt, for example, that the IA department operates under quotas and driven by officer-arrest stats.
>Did you read the articles? Police officers were the first ones to report on their fellow officers for their misconduct
In those cases. Not in tons of others, where it took a lawsuit or some investigation started from an independent organization (NGO etc), or even pure chance, to bring misconducts to light. "Internal Affairs" people are notoriously not popular with regular police.
I'm sure that's true, but responding to an article in which honest cops bring to book their dishonest colleagues by saying all cops are bad and can't be trusted is hard to swallow.
Yes, and the honest officers were driven out of the police force while the ones involved in planting evidence got promotions. That seems like a pretty good additional reason not to trust police officers most of the time - anyone who's honest probably isn't police anymore.
I guess you are correct that there is a lot of racism here and there. However, there is also a lot of rabid anti-racism. For example, you'll never read an article in the mainstream press about how blacks, on average, have lower IQs than white people, although this clearly is relevant in the whole crime debate. Why are blacks more likely to commit crimes than whites? The IQ explains a lot, but mentioning it is taboo, it seems. What happened here in Alabama is of course horrible, but it seems unlikely that corrupt and racist cops is the whole explanation for the high crime rate among blacks elsewhere in the US.
This shouldn't be necessary, but I probably need to point out that not every single black person has a lower intelligence than every single white person. It's just the average. Some black individuals have higher IQs than some white individuals, of course. Which means that solutions like segregation/apartheid are ham-fisted and totally unfair to these high IQ blacks.
For more info on the IQ and race thing, I recommend the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.
It used to be that extreme groups kept to themselves and were pretty quickly ostracized because of their extremism. Most people in San Diego wouldn't join Heaven's Gate, and the group wouldn't be able to spread very far because the further it reached, the more pushback it would see.
On the Internet, that isn't really true. There are always enough people who can be convinced of the merit of an idea, and so extreme groups continue to grow in size. As they do this, the overlap between any given extreme group and other groups grows, because the extreme group is growing. This means that their ideas metastasize out into the population as a whole.
Scientific racism, neo-reactionaryism, monarchism, even just defiant "political incorrectness" and "I'm no SWJ"-ness. The heightened availability of all of these ideas produces the same, as group polarization (a technical term in social psychology) happens on a scale never before seen. This is hardly limited to the right wing; liberal-identified Tumblr users are more behaviourally restrictive than most of the anarchist-communists I knew in college, even though the "safe-space" rhetoric of the current liberal milieu originates from more radical activist circles.
Expect to see more scientific racism on hacker news; hacker news is a fundamentally more friendly platform for racist and misogynistic viewpoints because women and people of color are so underrepresented and the focus on "objectivity" and "data" mean that a shoddy study that is the very essence of scientific racism can beat out the stories of however many women or PoC dare to speak out, only to be shouted down.
Most of the people making these comments would probably be fairly reasonable had you both been born 20 years earlier (or possibly later, if the world grows more sane) and met at a party. Few people set out to become a scientific racist, they just see an article linked (possibly by a Stormfront member, who knows) that "just makes sense to them"; they believe it and internalize it; when they see future statements they are more likely to remember those they agree with and forget those that disagree with their existing outlook; gradually, they become more and more "awakened" to the "racial reality" of the world until finally they're posting on Neoreactionary News about how they've finally realized democracy is degenerate and women should never have been allowed to vote.
Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, and it's definitely not like we're consciously choosing to be racist--this is just lifetimes of unexamined biases, media information, etc. We have these little biases that tell us not to trust the black guy's word and that adds up over time.
Overcoming that shit is hard.