Is there systemic racism in US police?

[RockLock]

'I don't think there's systemic racism' in US police forces says Trump’s security adviser.

How blind can you be?

Another black man is dead, not the first one to die at the hands of police and the Trump squad still claim that you get good guys and bad guys in the police, that not all police are racist, that they have non-white policemen so that makes them not racist.

Bingo!

Further footage has emerged of George Floyd being beaten up by the killer cop (I won't ever say his name) in a police car while his colleague stood guard, just before they put him to the ground and murdered him. So this adds to the premeditation argument and why this third degree shit won't stick.

Love some of these answers which imply that the answer is obvious -which it is

I have been wondering whether to start a thread about racism in the UK but am wary as there is still much denial about it because racism is not so obvious here

I wonder if the restraints procedures allowed should also come under the microscope? Do any non BAME people ever die from their application?

@RockLock

Love some of these answers which imply that the answer is obvious -which it is

I have been wondering whether to start a thread about racism in the UK but am wary as there is still much denial about it because racism is not so obvious here

Just be sure to wear you hard hat if you do start a thread about rascism on here. Sadly a lot of mumsnetters are in denial about it still happening (check out the thread about Amy Cooper as an example).

There's systemic racism everywhere but it is particularly obvious in the US.

There’s good and bad in every profession. I think America is basically a racist country still.

GreytExpectations, yeah, I saw that thread, made me feel sick but not surprised.

Just be sure to wear you hard hat if you do start a thread about rascism on here. Sadly a lot of mumsnetters are in denial about it still happening (check out the thread about Amy Cooper as an example).
I think some of the posts on the Amy Cooper thread went beyond apparent blindness no racism and veered into white supremacy.

Yep. I agree. I also agree about racism here. People can deny it all you want but I literally experience it almost daily 🤷🏻‍♀️

@Miafey

Just be sure to wear you hard hat if you do start a thread about rascism on here. Sadly a lot of mumsnetters are in denial about it still happening (check out the thread about Amy Cooper as an example). I think some of the posts on the Amy Cooper thread went beyond apparent blindness no racism and veered into white supremacy.

Oh definitely. Mumsnet is horrible when it comes to discussions on rascism. I really need to stop getting involved in them because they just make me angry.

Yes. There is.

When a black man gets murdered in plain sight with zero effort to conceal the murder, this is a systemic issue. It can no longer be written off as a case of a "bad apple". Bad apples hide their actions from the public, but most importantly they hide their actions from their colleagues and their superiors.

The entire barrel is rotten, and black Americans have been trying to tell everyone else that for decades.

I think it's time we believed them.

I wrote my dissertation about systemic racism in the uk criminal justice system. This was mid/late 90s but the figures were startling. So a black person had a significantly higher chance of being stopped by the police, more chance of being searched, more chance of being arrested rather than let off, more chance of being charged, less chance of bail, more chance of being found guilty and more chance of a harsher sentence. It was an accumulative, snowball effect.

I’d love to know what the current figures are. Sadly I suspect they may not be much improved.

Sadly a lot of mumsnetters are in denial about it still happening (check out the thread about Amy Cooper as an example).
Not in denial, complicit in it.

Not in denial, complicit in it.

This.

America is an odd place. I’ve lived here for seventeen years, all the time in the liberal north east. Undoubtedly there is widespread racism, from the extremely overt to the subtle. It’s a country where your race may not necessarily hinder your rise to the top (Obama, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Oprah, Jay-Z etc.) but if you’re a minority, particularly African-American, chances are your life will be extremely difficult to the point of deep suffering.

I am hoping and praying that George Floyd’s death is a turning point.

(To the posters who say racism isn’t as bad in the UK, I think you’re deluded. A lot has changed for the better since Toxteth and Brixton, but the London riots—in response to the death of a black man by British police—were only nine short years ago.)

A lot of mumsnetters are just openly racist.

The 'Will Black Lives ever matter' thread earlier this month was also awful. Quite a few mumsnetters posting false, far-right, racist propaganda.

(Including those fake stats about 'black on black' crime that were previously posted by Trump on twitter)

[quote screamer1]twitter.com/chadloder/status/1266994073501487104?s=21[/quote]
Relieved someone else has posted a link to this - I posted it on another thread... crickets.

It is one of the most terrifying things I've watched in a long time - systematic police brutality, unarmed, peaceful protestors (and completely uninvolved passers-by) being thrown to the ground, pepper sprayed, shot with rubber bullets.

Members of the press - ditto (one female journalist has lost an eye to a rubber bullet), and arrested while doing their job.

Nurses in a field hospital threatened with being shot while they tried to staunch bleeding from rubber bullet wounds.

A child pepper-sprayed in the face.

And this isn't just happening in Minneapolis, this is the whole country - New York, Seattle, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas... the list goes on and on.

It may not be all of them, but it's a hell of a lot of them. And the rot starts right at the top - there's footage of a very senior police officer charging past barricades in order to attack a woman protester.

Today 21:40Ursula2001

I'd have to read the individual cases to really make a true decision (which I think many don't).
LOL

I think there's no doubt it's systemic simply because there is absolutely no attempt to root out racism (or any other bias) in American police forces - mostly because in most areas they have virtually no training. In small towns, it's literally "here's your gun and badge" to anyone approved by the elected police chief.

Some enterprising small towns have even raised money by letting people pay to be police - time.com/3826881/oakley-michigan-reserve-police-officers/

Scared poorly-trained officers are going to be quick to the gun and not to argue with their colleagues, so all biases will flourish. Add the huge levels of segregation and ignorance created by US zoning laws and other holdovers from pre-civil rights eras, and you have systemic racism.

I'd never say the UK police don't have racism in the ranks, but it's nothing like pre-Macpherson and that was nothing like the levels of racism in the US today.

So the previously linked twitter post was a police office doing a 'white power' sign to protesters while his colleagues laughed?

You should have said what it was rather than just linking to it, because most people don't just click on links. Also the author of the tweet, an American, used the Americanism 'throws down' so I assumed they had thrown down a sign that a white supremacist had been waving. This was obviously the complete opposite.

American police are completely corrupt and institutionally racist. There have so many videos posted of brutality and racism during these protests. But nothing will be done 🙄🤔

@Ursula2001
Why are you talking about Duggan on a thread about racism in the US police?Sorry, love, your racism is showing! 😂

I'm on another thread at the moment about the use of social media as a tool to share and comment on the George Floyd case and its awful. Apparently innocent black men being murdered is a "political issue" and they don't discuss politics on FB they also don't understand why posts on social media help these causes, one poster even suggested social media causes the story to have been "twisted" because video footage and eye witness of a murder obviously has another side.