My mistake. I missed that line. I also disagree with that (as should be evident from what I said in my post).
EDIT: I should say that I definitely agree with this.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by octothorp
If this was just about this one death, I don't think there'd be riots and protests given the swift firing and likely impending charges. But it's not just about this death. A lot of people in these communities find themselves in stressful, unnecessary situations with law enforcement on a regular basis, with risk of injury or imprisonment or even death. That's the really ####ty situation that needs to be fixed, and not even swift and thorough convictions of these cops will fix that problem. Until that changes, every highly visible death like this one is going to be a lightning rod for all that justifiable anger.
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This is all pretty much inevitable. Everything after the initial killing, that is - that part could obviously have been avoided. But protests in response, including property damage (busted up police cars) was just obviously going to happen. Similarly, the escalation to riots and looting was equally inevitable once those protests started escalating.
I'm not sure it's possible to stop this from happening again, either. A good faith effort could be made to implement systemic, fundamental change in the way that police forces are organized in the USA, training could be augmented to directly address these types of incidents with a view to eliminating them, and at some point, a white officer is still going to kill a black suspect, somewhere. And the same thing will probably happen in response.
They still have to change police culture (whether they actually will, I'm considerably more skeptical about), but it seems naive to think that even honest, well intentioned steps in that direction will prevent this episode from playing out again in the future.