massey

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

Honestly?  Generally our group hasn't paid too much attention to them.
 
Hunteds have the problem that nobody else cares about your hero's chosen villain.  The other players don't care and the GM doesn't care.  Nobody wants to have the game interrupted while we deal with your Hunted.  Chances are you didn't create a villain as cool as the Joker or Brainiac.  We don't want to sit through the bi-weekly stomping of Taserface again.  And players quickly figure out that they're gonna fight somebody every session anyway, so they might as well get points for it.
 
Psych Lims just end up describing the character that you wanted to play anyway.  Psych Lim: Doesn't take crap from anybody.  Psych Lim: Smartass.  Psych Lim:  Thinks he's the smartest/toughest/coolest guy in the room.  But you were gonna act like that anyway.
 
Players don't tend to take things like Vulnerabilities, or other things that can affect them in combat.  They end up taking things that kinda help define the character, as long as it doesn't cause them too many problems.  It's not just one or two players who do this either, it's everybody.  So we just end up kinda ignoring them.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I'm a defense lawyer and 90% of my practice right now are DUI arrests.  They never ever take someone's keys and let them walk home.  I've had clients arrested after they pulled into their own driveways.  Regardless of your feelings on this particular case, they don't do that for anybody, white or black.

It's almost as if they have a quota or something.  

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I'm a defense lawyer and 90% of my practice right now are DUI arrests.  They never ever take someone's keys and let them walk home.  I've had clients arrested after they pulled into their own driveways.  Regardless of your feelings on this particular case, they don't do that for anybody, white or black.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I'm a defense lawyer and 90% of my practice right now are DUI arrests.  They never ever take someone's keys and let them walk home.  I've had clients arrested after they pulled into their own driveways.  Regardless of your feelings on this particular case, they don't do that for anybody, white or black.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this.  I'm just going to state things as I see them.  It will be kinda long.  I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade.  Some of this will probably offend some people here.  So be it.  I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful.
 
 
 
This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one.  In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police.  Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed.  Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things).  Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males).  About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down).  For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect.  But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place).  However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact).
 
Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me.  Mistakes happen.  Accidents happen.  Outright murders happen.  We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator".  Police departments in the United States are local.  They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops.  You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator".  You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody.  Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system.
 
It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings.  I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have.  Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it.  I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine".  And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested.  People are going to see things differently.
 
However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system.  We need to change these things.  Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them.  Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary.
 
--Police unions have far too much power and influence.  In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney.  That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop).  Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts.  Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers.
 
--There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now.  African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians.  Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians.  Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed.  Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here.
 
--Cops aren't tested for steroids.  This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it.  I've seen these guys in the courtroom.  Everybody knows who they are.  They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it.  Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids.  I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing.  Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me.  I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall.  Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids.  But we need to start doing something about it.
 
--No one is keeping track of bad cops.  Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful.  It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database.  When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that.  When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him.  As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there.  But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him?  A lot less bad cops would get rehired.
 
--Police are not trained enough in de-escalation.  They're not trained enough, period.  But they're especially not trained in de-escalation.  Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting.  Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly.  This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money.
 
--Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police.  Prosecutors are friends with cops.  They marry cops.  They work with cops every day.  It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago.  Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times.  In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt.  Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings.  This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama).  Again, it's politically costly.  In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury.  This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents.  It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence.  Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable.
 
--There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement.  I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn.  They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid.  They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran.  Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted.  Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun.  The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair.  Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live.  They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods.  To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court.  But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it.
 
 
 
All that said, there are problems in the black community as well.
 
--Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot.  The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over.  I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me).  But this perception is not accurate.  It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest.  And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force.  I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway.  We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot.
 
--While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime.  I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence.  That's heartbreaking but it's true.  It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby).  Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect".  But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that.  Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket".
 
--There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities.  Driving without insurance?  Driving while a tail light is burned out?  Not using your turn signal?  Not wearing your seat belt?  "That's not even really a crime, man."  I actually had a client say that.  Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants.  A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run).  And of course then there's something illegal in the car.  I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..."  Well, shit.
 
 
 
Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway.  In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black).  But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

Tasers have one shot, and there were two cops. However, I’m not sure how the taser was built pointswise. Perhaps the civilian could have spread the beam, or executed a Sweep maneuver. 

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when...
 
Dean Shomshak

Dame Vera Lynn, the forces sweetheart passes away at the age of 103 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53091856
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13118290
 
She went out to entertain the troops even as far afield as India and Burma.
RIP

I do prefer things to flow more naturally from the game, but decent complications will flow into the game pretty naturally.  Of course, if our heroes are on a Space Opera extended scenario, it's pretty tough for frail old Aunt Nellie to show up.  But she could be struggling to pay the mortgage while Our Hero can't be reached, and when he gets back, she's one step away from foreclosure.  That Complication has not shown up for quite a while, relative to its frequency?  It will likely be more significant when it does rear its head.
 
I'm also leery of Hunteds, DNPCs, etc. on more than 8-.  They need to be super-engaging to show up more than half of the time, especially if you're dealing with 4 or 5 players.  Imagine if even the Joker featured in 50% of stories where Batman appeared.  Even 8- is a lot, really.  14- becomes like some of those Supers cartoons where virtually every episode involves this villain or group of villains on the other side.
 
Mind you, that depends on whether you view that as "11- every time we game for three hours" or "11- that they will at least put in an appearance or be seen off-screen at some point in time over this multi-session arc".  It's more an art than a science.
 
If I got frequency on vulnerabilities or limitations right, they'll show up with appropriate frequency.  If not, maybe swapping out Frost King for Lightning Lord every now and then, or just equipping VIPER agents with experimental "new SFX" weaponry can do the trick.  You told me electricity was very common - that means you are either a human lightning rod, or a lot of villains use electrical devices, have electrical powers, hit you with downed power lines or knock you back into electric fences and generators.
 
I do like 6e lowering the number of complications so we can limit them to central character concept issues.  When everyone does not need a couple of Hunteds just to make the character sheet balance, it's easier for those that remain to be more central to the game.

With all great respect for Doc Democracy I handled this in the exact opposite way.  He rolled everything up just the way it says to in the book.  ((ALL HAIL THE BIG BLUE BOOK!!!!))  I just kept a mental tally using 8 or less, 11 or less etc. as a guide for how often these things should show up. That way I could build episodes in a more natural way.
 A Hero’s 14 or less hunted hadn’t shown up in a while....well let’s do a three or four part story with them as the prime villains. Then you might not see them for another six months of real time.
Doing it this way let me spend more time on the storytelling side. It all depends on the GM’ing style your comfortable with.

In my experience, the process goes something like this: 
Two weeks before session 1: Tell the players that hey, we're shifting GMs for a bit and it was a major story arc we just finished, switch PCs if you want but get me the sheet by [one week before session 1]. 
One week before session 1: I have one PC's sheet.  Ask the players for their sheets ASAP.  Plan anyways, hope to get sheets soon. 
Week leading up to session 1: Complete silence from the players. 
Session 1: All but one player sends me their sheet day-of, generally no more than two hours before game starts.  Plans are already finalized.  Half the PCs have obvious issues that require immediate attention to fix, so there's no time to work the game around the PCs.  The last player seems utterly determined to not hand over their character sheet, for reasons beyond anyone's knowledge. 
After session 1: Too angry at players refusing to provide sheets to give a flying fornication about working them in. 

Thanks, N-B.  I appreciate you volunteering yourself and your experience as an example.
 
That's the problem with HERO since Day One:  if someone in the group doesn't "get it," then no one in the group ever gets it.  It's left as a confounding, confusing system that will always seem more complicated than it is.   Coming to places like this board doesn't really help, either: the answer they will get will always include "must" and "have to" and "can't."  And usually the same people saying that chanting the "exactly what you want" mantra.
 
The game is fiction.  The rules are real; they are for simulating fiction that you and your friends intend to create together.  You have complete control, and everything works the way that you say it does, period.  A case can be made for _anything_.  I mean _anything_-- remember Mind Control under the Stretching Powers SFX?   The case can be made.  At absolutely no point do you _ever_ have to accept that because the case can be made, then it _must be that way_.
 
There is nothing wrong with accepting that you want it to be that way, but there is _no_ mandate that you do anything other than what you want, period.
 
 

Of course it would be a Limitation.  Let's just go down the list of things it does to aid the enemy. 
- The enemy knows it's there.  Foes likely to run into the DR are going to know it, as will foes with attacks likely to bypass it.  Anyone with a relevant Adjustment Power is going to know they've got a target. 
- The enemy knows the SFX.  For example, nobody's going to use a NND: Forcefield attack on somebody with DR defined as a visible forcefield.  It wouldn't do anything and they know it!  But they might have wasted a shot if the forcefield wasn't obvious. 
- The enemy knows your SFX.  If Electroweak Man's forcefield is bright and glowy, it shows the world (or at least the parts of it that can pass a SS roll) he has electroweak force based powers. 
- Everyone nearby knows if your combat powers are active.  Secret ID stuff, social stuff, disguise stuff, all sorts of fun implications. 
And more, this is just a minute's thoughts on obvious things. 

I think you'll find, Brian, that the phrase is BadWrongFun and has NO dashes.....
 
😄
 
Doc

Thanks for the warning.  There are always trade-offs, but the great part of the Hero system is we get to choose which ones we want to make.

No worries, I didn't take it that way. I already knew what you'd say and inserted it into my mind for you! 
 
 
So I guess I should have been clearer. Multipowers aren't necessary for what I was saying. I'm riffing off of this conversation earlier this year, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head. The whole discussion then was about dividing magic costs or not, a la Fantasy HERO Complete dividing spells by 3 to reduce cost (If I remember correctly). Again, this amounts to  Multipower without calling it a framework: you just get the cost benefit for free. 
 
So there's nothing that says you couldn't charge points for everything, as suggested by Doc Democracy in the link, but keep the DCs low. No need for Multipowers either. But the ongoing debate in Fantasy HERO is how to keep free equipment balanced with purchased spells. Simply making everything purchased solves the issue. The equipment builds are all available if you get the Equipment Guide, or any number of sources. Use those guidelines, and add another Limitation: weapon of opportunity, and you're good to go. So a fighter has a 2d6 KA with all the typical data (OAF, real weapon, roll required, etc., and add "weapon of opportunity") and he can use any weapon he has a Weapon Familiarity with. If he loses it, he's without his "power" until he finds another weapon. He can also have an RKA to go with it, with a similar build. Armor would follow the same model, with PD caps based on the campaign guidelines. Make them really low for low fantasy, or really high for Fantasy Champions. Levers, dials and switches to your taste, and we no longer have to argue about how much a spell should cost to "balance" the free sword that requires a WF of some sort. The arguments become moot (ok, who am I fooling? The arguments continue on just because . . .) and we have some internal consistency.
 
I know, I'm taking this discussion sideways, but it really comes back to the same issue as we usually see: how to balance magic with mundane equipment. All that mundane equipment, by the way, that was built with the Powers rules in the first place anyway. It's all just special effects for the powers. Giant sword-wielding plate-male wearing warrior? Same as a KA casting, Armor casting wizard. Just different special effects. Spell ends? Re-cast it. Sword breaks? Just get another one. 
 
Ok, that's just a little bit more description for what I'm proposing. Just another way to conceive of it.
 
One quick edit: I forgot that the discussion I linked was revolving around Resource Pools for magical items and equipment. I misremembered it as Multipowers and inserted my foot into this discussion. Sorry. But the point still holds: once people can start buying magic items in Fantasy HERO, all bets are off as to why we all shouldn’t be paying points for our equipment anyway. 
 
I actually prefer low fantasy with little to no magic, but it still holds, just with much lower campaign limits. Even heroic level games like Danger International offered ways to use character points to buy more money in order to get better equipment. So why not just eliminate that mediating step and just pay points for equipment?