There are always at least two sides to any issue, and usually more than two. That's why it is dangerous to get news from a single outlet, or worse, from twitter and facebook. E.G. "White officer kills unarmed black teen" While this is true, it ignores a whole lot of stuff that drastically changes the story.
The alternative is to spend a lot of time reading, researching, digging, questioning, and thinking, to come up with a well-rounded informed opinion. But this is a lot of work. If I can't spend the time to create an informed opinion, I'll go with the low-information diet, in order to avoid creating a dangerous opinion.
As someone who has been following this closely (lots of reading, researching, questioning, thinking, and discussing), there appears to have developed three distinct, but occasionally overlapping viewpoints (obviously I'm missing a lot of details here, I'm just trying to summarize)...
Liberal Democrats - seem to be focusing on the social injustice aspect
Libertarian Republicans - seem to be focusing on the abuse of government authority aspect
Vanilla Republicans - if you respect those with authority none of this would be a problem
My personal observation is that while there is certainly a racial aspect of this, care must be taken to ensure that we don't lump all police officers into the same "racist" bucket as those who are actually racist. This is where I think a straight up liberal approach to the solution will fail.
The libertarian point about abuse of authority is good, but it can not be denied that race does actually play a pretty big factor here.
The vanilla Republicans are irritating because their contribution to the discussion seems to basically amount to "nothing to see here, please move along...." It's frustrating because there are real problems to solve here and ignoring them or throwing stones at those who highlight those issues is not helpful in any way.
My view of the state of the police forces across the United States is that it is absurd that we ask an organization, with a dangerous job, who literally needs to live and breath the motto of "take care of our own" and charge them with the responsibility of "policing their own." If you are an officer of the mindset that you *need* to care for the officer next to you to the best of your abilities, if you see that person do something flat out illegal it creates a huge moral dilemma. The system as it stands does not allow for
good officers to hold
bad officers accountable for illegal actions. As I understand, attempts to "police their own" typically ends in being ostracized and thrown out of the club.
As far as the right way to go forward, I think New York State Attorney general Eric Schneiderman has a good idea... his proposal is that any use of force by a police officer that results in death to an unarmed civilian is to be dealt with by his office. In my mind, that seems reasonable, because it removes any conflict of interest between the local prosecutor and the officers who directly work with them.
Regarding racism..... I really don't know how that can be addressed. I think most people agree that racism is bad, and if they don't agree I don't really care what they think. The problem is determining intent. It's borderline impossible to prove that someone's intentions were racist if they don't just come out and say it. So I think working the procedural issues in the justice system that are causing the lack of accountability among police officers is the best way to curb that.
*edit* -> I accidentally omitted a critical detail to Eric Schneiderman proposal in the state of New York; fixed.
