Yes, proportionally black people commit more violent crime. And proportionally white people commit more white collar crime; should we then allow police to arbitrarily investigate white people? And statistically more men are serial killers than women... should we allow the police to arbitrarily stop all men just on case one of them could be a serial killer?
You can't equate these different types of crime. Nobody is afraid of white collar criminals. The cops aren't going to be wary about stopping a white guy because he might actually be a fraudulent telemarketer or an embezzler. And serial killing is too rare to be meaningful as a threat. What you have to take into account is that in high crime areas (which are mostly Black) there are going to be more police posted. They are going to be getting more 911 calls, mostly from Black residents, reporting more crimes, which means they are going to be looking for violent or criminal suspects who are invariably described as Black men, going to be looking out for violent Black street gangs and their members, as well as Black drug dealers, and that there will be a strong possibility all these people will be armed.
All of that is going to permeate policing in a given city. Even those cops who don't work in those areas probably DID at one point, and they are going to be a lot more suspicious and wary of young black men than young white men. And that's not because they hate Black people. Black cops and Hispanic cops and Asian cops are going to be just as wary. Remember how some years ago Jessie Jackson said that when he hears a group of young men coming up the sidewalk behind him he feels relief when they're white? He's just going with the statistics and his experience like the cops do.
Western society does have a tradition of presumed innocence. Yes, the theory may be "stop people likely to commit crime", but in practice it lead to harassment of the black population.
I'm not saying it's not a problem and I'm not saying I don't understand the frustration of young black men who are repeatedly stopped when they've done nothing wrong. But the BLM movement is, at its base, talking about Blacks being KILLED by police. And police don't generally do that without some kind of physical aggression on the part of the suspect. And it seems to me that what all this is doing is making young Black men in particular, but also, I've seen, women, much more likely to be resistant and aggressive with police. So in actuality BLM is causing more violence against Blacks.
Then too you have the problem of Chicago. What happens when the police feel that they're damned if they do and damned if they don't? If they just lay back and refuse to put pressure on the streets and the violent crime rate and killings skyrocket, then what?
Now, if your argument is "The republicans just want to stay in power" fine, but the point is, black people are still being disenfranchised.
That IS my point, in fact. If Blacks all voted Republican, there would be no more attempts at disenfranchising them on the part of the Republicans.
Yes, there will be some cases where minorities claim "police brutality" when there was none. There will also be cases when the police actually DO step over the line. Neither situation is ideal, but given the history of racism in the U.S., it makes more sense to concentrate on problem 2 rather than problem 1, at least for the time being.
I disagree. Because police 'stepping over the line' is not confined to minority groups. Police stepping over the line is a universal problem. Blacks might notice it more often simply because they have more interaction with police due to the Black crime rate. But police need to be reigned in and better trained in defusing situations, and in hand to hand combat, so they don't feel they have to resort to firearms as often. And we need to get every cop equipped with a camera.
Now, things are a little different in Canada... we don't have exactly the same history of segregation that they do in the U.S., which does alter the way BLM should be viewed up here.
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