I really wish people would stop treating police brutality as a race problem. It isn't, and treating it as such gives dog-whistle blowers the ability to dismiss it. Cops are borderline untouchable in most of this country, and they are able to wantonly abuse their power as a result. Just as one example, John Pike, the pig who assaulted protestors at UC Davis with pepper spray for no reason (for which the protesters got won a million-dollar settlement!) received $38,000 in worker's compensation - for "depression and anxiety" stemming from his own abuse of police weaponry against innocent citizens. If police actually had proper oversight you could have a Klansman on the force in a city full of black people and the minute he abused his power in any form he'd be kicked off the force and thrown in jail with the same sentence a citizen would receive, an additional 3-5 years for abuse of police power, and a lifetime ban from ever being on a police force. Instead, what we have is a system where cops get a paid vacation until the media attention turns away and then it's back to normal.
Police brutality isn't just a race problem, it's a poverty problem, it's a policing problem, and a race problem. Denying that race has anything to do with police killings is equally incorrect as saying that race is the only problem.
Absolutely, that's something that people never seem to talk about. It's either A or B, and that's such a "black or white" (excuse the phrase) way of looking at it. The problem is, looking over a lot of the recent police shootings that have received major media coverage, whether it was racially-driven or not, the victims happened to be black.
I second this. Both extremes (always about race, never about race) are incorrect and harmful to the well being of all people in our country. What upsets me about these police brutality incidents are 1) that they ever happen at all and 2) so many people jump on the cases as a reason to generalize police offers as either never, or always, being racist in their decisions.