mekka okereke :verified:
Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
I still haven't made it to Black history. I'm still working through all this white US history.
Q: Why do Black folk commit more crime? I hear you on "wage theft should be a crime too" and all that... but if we look at convictions for murder, sexual assault, and drug possession, Black folk just commit way more crime! Those are facts!
A: Black folk are *convicted* more. Black folk are *many times* more likely to be wrongfully convicted. Because racism.
mekka okereke :verified:
The Innocence Project is a great organization, and you should support them. ??
https://innocenceproject.org/
But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The Equal Justice Initiative is also worthy of your support:
https://eji.org/
But most importantly of all, make yourself immune to the myths and lies that racist people depend on to get your tacit approval for their atrocities. Don't wait until the systems that were designed to harm Black people, harm you as well.
mekka okereke :verified:
The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other nation.
The Just World Hypothesis prevents most of us from looking too closely at the data that suggests that many of these people are innocent. We have to believe that those millions of people are all guilty. Because the alternative is horrific and genocidal. And we would all be complicit.
All of us.
mekka okereke :verified:
If the purpose of the system is what it does, then the purpose of the US criminal justice system is to incarcerate large numbers of innocent Black people. ??♂️
But again this system *disproportionately* impacts Black folk. It doesn't *only* impact Black folk. There are innocent white people sitting in jail too, as victims of this ever-increasing pressure to fill jails.
This one cop alone generated hundreds of years of jail time, for people of all colors.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITIM1iDTZ7U
mekka okereke :verified:
Imagine a Black person honestly answering these questions in a way that doesn't get them immediately removed from the jury.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v0r6dO-GrRU
Removing Black folk from juries, is the courtroom equivalent of turning off a body cam before planting evidence. It's an intentional act to subvert justice, done by the very people who are sworn to uphold it.
mekka okereke :verified:
The mythology of US racism requires us all to pretend that Black people are all liars, and that cops always tell the truth. In reality, the truth is closer to the inverse.
Through most of US history, prosecutors have kept Black people off of juries. A few pesky Black people on your jury made it much harder for police lies to just be accepted.
So during jury selection, prosecutors ask potential jurors if they "believe the police," or "have ever had negative experiences with the police."
mekka okereke :verified:
This planting drugs and lying is not necessarily because individual cops are racist and hate Black people. Instead, it's the inevitable result of a system that says "Make a bunch of drug possession arrests of Black people!" when Black people don't possess that many drugs.
There's dissonance between the mythology that Black people possess a lot of drugs, and the reality that they don't. In this racist system, the mythology wins.
mekka okereke :verified:
In the aftermath of people catching police planting evidence red-handed, you would think a large scale internal investigation would be initiated to see how widespread the problem is. Right?
Wrong. Instead what most often happens, is the body cams are updated from the default settings to now auto-erase the buffer, and cops get additional training and reminders that the buffer exists.??♂️
mekka okereke :verified:
So cops film themselves finding drugs in the official video, and inadvertently film themselves planting those same drugs in the buffer video. ?
Like this:
https://youtu.be/jP8ERoqoPIQ
And this:
https://youtu.be/FChlMRFEZWQ
djsumdog
The best thing about this statement, remove the race and you get the truth:
“Police tend to use that power in poor — towns and districts more than the luxury condos, mansions and churches of leafy Vermont or Maine.”
Police tend to use their power more in these areas because the people there are more likely to commit crimes that cops have to deal with.
People in rich areas commit more of the crimes that lawyers have to deal with.
mekka okereke :verified:
The use of police worn body cameras has revealed a lot of truth as well. Black people have long maintained that cops frequently plant drugs on innocent people. Now we have evidence of cops doing it, filmed by their own body cams.
Many cops are unaware that their body cam is constantly recording in a buffer that gets overridden. When an officer tries to submit a video of them finding drugs, a few minutes of that buffer gets submitted along with it in the metadata.
MischievousTomato
mekka okereke :verified:
A Black person is 3.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of sexual assault, 7 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder, and twelve times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug possession.
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/Race-and-Wrongful-Convictions.aspx
With the advent of social media and smartphones, all of us can now see how often police lie. It's pretty much constant. Perjury, lying under oath, obstruction of justice, and being an accessory after the fact, pretty much don't count if you're a cop.
Godfrey642
@djsumdog @mekkaokereke @run_atalanta @eridukid So leave everything as it is?
If you have a law (let's take car lights) and youre pulled over bc a rear light is out, statistically if you are black the likelihood is that you will end up being arrested, but warned if you are white. So is it in black DNA to be criminal? I don't see that. Rant at me if you want, but my white skin will ensure that I'm HIGHLY unlikely to be victimised for a light.
Statistically there are far more blacks in jail for possession of small quantities of weed than there are white bankers or advertising execs with cocaine and pills. Work that one out.
There is enough distrust of police to indicate a major problem. Misuse of power can be the drug of choice for any officer, of any ethnicity.Wherever it occurs, its a problem that needs excising. Police tend to use that power in poor black towns and districts more than the luxury condos, mansions and churches of leafy Vermont or Maine. So why?
Irrespective of whether a state or council or district has black civil servants, its the underlying imprinted attitude towards "nasty black ppl" as opposed to "clean livin Christian whites" that's the problem. That's how racism works and is the result of *centuries* of systematic abuse.
djsumdog
Godfrey642
@djsumdog @mekkaokereke @run_atalanta @eridukid The whole point about racism is that the root problem is the structures that support it. Many of which are so long-term ingrained in the system that they are almost impossible to break down.
Hence the good guys who whistleblow are seen as snitches and victimised for stating the obvious, that too many police jurisdictions are mind bogglingly problematic and racist.
Dismantling racist structures is the first but critical step. It requires listening to the victims, detailed understanding of the issues and a political will to purge the evil AND explain to citizens WHY that needs to be done. #policecorruption #racism #firstnations
djsumdog
It kinda proves the case that it’s never the officers/enforcement that’s the problem. After all, police are a good thing and benefit to society as a whole. I mean, would you really want to be back in the era where random Roman soldiers dispensed justice on their whim? Your example is how bad rules, which were changed over to productive rules, helped take that police force and use it for good.
The issue has always been with the laws and those who oversea constables. But of course, no one wants to address that, because cities with some of the worst police situations, are only that way because they’re run by the absolutely most deplorable people like Lori Lightfoot, Kim Fox and all the Soros backed attorneys.
mekka okereke :verified:
US policing evolved from slave patrols used to catch and kill runaway slaves.
Slaves called the slave patrollers, "Patty Rollers" or "Rollers." Black folk today still call cop cars "rollers." Slaves called the wagons they used "patty wagons."
Many slave overseers were Irish. When early police forces formed, many became cops. And Irish were over-arrested for alcohol.
British folk called Irish folk the anti-Irish slur version of paddy, hence "paddy wagon."
mekka okereke :verified:
@eridukid @run_atalanta This is a fun case where the same word can have two different etymologies, both racist in different ways! ?
Paddy is a slur for Irish people. And in the US, people that were not white could earn their whiteness by being racist to Black people. Many Irish in New York and Boston became police officers, because it was a job they were not restricted from having. So people assumed that "paddy wagon" was called that because of the number of Irish police.
But...
Ian D
@run_atalanta @mekkaokereke I thought paddy wagon was because so many police were Irish. Mildly insulting, possibly, but racist?
run_atalanta 😷💯
@mekkaokereke The best thing white people can do is call out the racism where it lives. The second best thing is to learn the subtle encodings in every day life that are taught as good "history" and learn to see the Whitewashing that removes all positivity toward black and indigenous peoples.
So many folksie phrasings are racist.
Taught two 20-somethings yesterday why "paddy wagon" was racist terminology.
It's not anti-black, but it's racist in it's roots.
Fediverse Contractor
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.