As a Southerner, I believe this was bigotry. If the guy had been white, I do not believe that cop would have shot his gun. Does this type of bigotry happen elsewhere other than the South? I really wonder if it is a Southern thing as portrayed by tv.
Isn’t the great majority of police shootings, of whites?
I live in the north, and I can tell you that the cops up here can be just as corrupt, violent, and bigoted as anywhere else. It’s not limited to small towns, or big cities either, and it’s not only happening to black victims either.
I really don’t buy the excuses that “it’s just a few bad cops” anymore. There are systemic issues going on here, because we see the same problems over and over again, in departments across the country. I think the common thing is the types of policies and training that have been enacted by all these departments over the years. Police for decades were losing ground in court cases over civil rights issues, and I think, instead of trying to reform their behavior to avoid the problem, they became defensive. Now an “us versus them” mentality has set in, where the police see any citizen as a potential threat, and see civil rights as something that gets in the way of them doing their job, instead of something that they are sworn to uphold.