On 'White Fear Being Weaponized' And How To Respond [View all]

[gollygee]

https://n.pr/2Lwwxux

On the other side of the ledger, people who were fighting against this kind of ethos in our country — this very punitive, racialized ethos — want to resist this now, so they're much more likely to pull out their cellphones ... and because of cellphone video and its ubiquitous role in this conversation, all of us are bearing witness to the problem.

Policing in general, it's got to begin to reflect on the fact that people who they've been policing under various forms of zero-tolerance policies or "broken windows" policies has created tremendous mistrust — and done tremendous harm in those communities.

And as such, every police encounter between a white caller and an African-American or Latino suspect doesn't come with a blank slate. It comes with a history. It comes with a present. And police agencies have to develop new training protocols that deliberately deal with that. I like to think that we could imagine a situation where these nuisance calls are quite distinctly handled from emergency phone calls.

We've got to come up with some policies that raise the costs of bad behavior — of treating people differently than you would want to be treated. And that is a problem of white fear being weaponized, and that is a problem of police officers being a little too prickly when people are upset about having been judged harshly or inappropriately.