Bishop Jakes is praying..
I wonder why a Conservative pastor would get mixed up in this fiasco..
Going on the books I’ve read by Jakes, he’s driven by emotionalism that’s often tempered by good sense.
In this case, emotionalism wins, because he’s a True Believer in racial profiling, in the sense that it’s totally wrong and totally out of hand and leads to the death of innocents shot down by cops.
Granted, I believe racial profiling happens myself, but I’m thinking racial profiling in the sense that blacks are more likely to be pulled over in a lot of neighborhoods for little stuff. But the problem there, IMHO, is that they are unfortunately identified with idiots who happen to look like them, and the solution is to rein in those idiots. I also don’t buy that cops are gunning down black innocents in large numbers.
I’ve also been hearing about cops killing innocent young men, black or white, for years, because it’s a big deal in libertarian circles, and nearly every supposed example of cops supposedly over reacting that I have looked into, the person stopped was the one who initially escalated the situation, and the cops had good reason to shoot. (Cops killing dogs for no reason, and cops doing stupid stuff in no knock raids, and SWAT teams being completely stupid, OTOH, seems to happen with depressing regularity.)
The one time the cops did not have good reason to shoot, IMHO, was when Michael Bell was pulled over in Wisconsin — one cop yelled, “He has my gun”, and another cop essentially executed Bell on the spot. Had Bell actually grabbed the gun, shooting him would have been legitimate, IMHO. But since subsequent evidence showed that the cop’s gun belt had been caught on a broken mirror, it was a tragic mistake. Bell’s violent resistance still created the situation, and to me he still shares responsibility for what happened. But from a Monday quarterback perspective, that shoot was not justified.
Michael Bell was white. The disagreement here is not racial; it’s about responsibility and what that means.