Posted on 09/14/2014 1:10:53 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I think this is a classic example of what happens when a law enforcement agency isn't trained or prepared for an unexpected or exceptionally large event.
Ferguson is a city of 21,000 people. Its police department has 52 sworn officers. Only three are black, when about 68% of the city's population is black. This imbalance affects the current situation tangentially, but I doubt that it's a problem that the City of Ferguson is unaware of or that they haven't tried to fix it.
Anytime a white police officer kills or seriously injures a minority citizen in a predominately minority community, there will be an outcry. Accusations of racism follow immediately and certainly, and the precipitating conduct that led to the incident is lost in the conversation.
There is something of a Litmus test one can do to evaluate whether the motive behind an action is motivated by racism: change the ethnicities of the players. So, instead of Michael Brown, we have Michael White, a 6-5, 265 lb. Caucasian, 18 years of age. He enters a convenience store in his small community and takes a package of cigars. When the clerk tries to stop him, White grabs him and tosses him around in order to leave unencumbered.
A few minutes later, White and at least one companion of the same ethnicity are walking down the middle of a public street, eschewing the sidewalk provided for pedestrians. A uniformed police officer (he can be whatever race you want him to be -- I don't think it matters) who is of inferior physical size to White sees him and asks him and his friend to move to the sidewalk. The pair refuse. The police officer may or may not know about the strongarm robbery at the convenience store...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Quora Questions are part of a partnership between Newsweek and Quora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnership here.
Answer from Tim Dees, Retired cop and criminal justice professor, Reno Police Department, Reno Municipal Court, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal Police Department.
Not that it really matters one way or the other.
Neither one has a paper edition, if that helps.
They left “how” out...
Which appears in the link but not the title.
68% black population.
I pity the white officers.
----
Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it.
www.AnySoldier.com
(An entirely free service)
Better Question:
.
“Why does a town of only 21,000 citizens require a police force of 52 sworn officers?
Yep. When I was growing up in a town of about 20,000 WITH A STATE PRISON in it I think we had 10 officers.
Black males
I live in Cypress Ca with about 50000 people the same size police force as Ferguson with 21000 people.
“Quora Question: What do police officers think about Ferguson, MO police handled the aftermath of the Brown shooting?”
(about) “the way”? “fascist” (police officers)?
“unarmed” (Brown)? (shooting) “murder”?
It’s not you Vet, it’s them. Nothing about Newsweak makes sense. Precision in writing lends itself to precise thinking by the reader. The left prefers fuzzy thinking.
Until the interweb allowed public discussions, all we could do is write rags like Time and Newsweek, and they pitched negative letters. No one was able to call them on their nonsense.
This is the work of professional wordsmiths by the way.
Idiot lefties refuse to explain this so they can use it as a wedge issue.
The explanation is simple: Black police officers are in high demand and the richer, white communities will pay them much more than less affluent areas - such as Ferguson. This is why the black State Police captain, who is from Ferguson, left the town to work for the State Police!
In modern America, fact pertaining to race mean nothing. The only thing that matters is that the black person come out on top, regardless of what happened to cause the original problem.
It's okay to say White officers are incapable of policing minorities but imagine the uproar if the Crackers said minorities were incapable of policing us.
“Its police department has 52 sworn officers. Only three are black, when about 68% of the city’s population is black.”
I would imagine that the officers are required to be able to read.
This from Newsweek? Is it opposite day?
What he failed to include in his race neutral hypothetical was the community activist on the scene within seconds of the shooting spreading the “hands up / shot in the back” story.
As a police officer, allow me to say, they screwed it up. Royally.
You are correct. The sentence is poorly worded. ‘how’ should be between ‘about’ and ‘Ferguson’.
In the early 1990’s Furguson was mostly white, so not unusual that most of the police force would be white unless there was a large turnover for some reason. Now the population is mostly black due to public housing projects being built there.
From the article:
In Missouri, 56% of black men graduate from high school, where 81% of white men do (National Table Data). 27% of white Americans have poor credit records, where 48% of blacks do (Study: African-Americans More Likely to Have Bad Credit | BadCredit.org). The reasons for this are an entirely separate debate, but it boils down to there being substantially fewer black men than white men who are qualified to be police officers.
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