Originally Posted by
Wrecktangle
I'm not saying it doesn't happen because that'd be false. I am saying it is not an epidemic as the media portrays. People have eaten other peoples faces off, it happens, but the issue in this instance isn't the dude is eating peoples faces, it's the drug problem. In the case of police excessive use of force I firmly believe its a culture issue. I just don't see how you get shot unless you do stupid shit. There are always going to be fringe occurrences (like your above example), but most of the sensationalized ones were often always people fighting back, breaking laws, being violent, resisting etc.
I'll give you another anecdotal example. I have an Asian colleague, really into modding cars. Dude always gets tickets. We're out to lunch one day, I get pulled over for doing 41 in a 25. Was trying to make it back to work for my one buddy who is hourly (also in car). He's going on about how I am fucked etc.
Moral of the story I walk away with a warning and he's dumbfounded because he always get tickets, I ask what he does and his answer is that he asks the cop what he did wrong, tells him that he wasn't doing x y or z (when he was), and pushes back at least half the time.
Again it's all anecdotal. There are a lot of problems in this world, but I don't think police killing people is one of them.
There's nothing abstract about stats. You can pick and choose what dataset you want to represent to force feed a populace any singular data point and it'll fit. The bottom line is this. My experiences while anecdotal show that there are right and wrong choices during a police encounter. You can actively choose which ones you make to increase your survival rate, and that is universal across all races.
I think my experiences are sound arguments and I think they are definitely compelling evidence of behavior = results.
They're not the end all be all, they're merely my experiences, but to dismiss them is very unfair.