I've been lazy about entering into the discussion, but while I disagree with Soulflower's knee jerk, inflammatory approach to this issue, she isn't entirely wrong. Police brutality obviously happens to every race, but the different causes make it so that dealing with the issue in the same way across the board is silly. Anyone who claims that it should be should also argue against hate crimes. Strictly speaking, hate crimes involving assault or murder or whatever are basically the same thing as a normal assault or murder, but the motivations make all the difference, as they are two separate issues that can lead to separate consequences (i.e. race riots, minority distrust of government institutions, etc).
One is likely to be motivated merely by normal issues of anger or petty criminality, while the other is indicative of a mindset that has entirely different causes and effects. You can't treat a violent mugging the same as a redneck beating up a black person, because ignoring the motivation does nothing to solve a problem that is present in only one of the crimes. It's why we differentiate between simple assault and attempted murder, or assault and domestic violence, because motivation and context are as important as the action itself.
Treating a racially motivated shooting the same as a non-racially motivated one will only teach a police officer not to shoot somebody without proper procedure, but will not necessarily discourage a mindset that we as a nation are committed to changing.
I still say that whatever the truth of the issue, the media's coverage of it should be taken with a grain of salt, as it's now trendy for the news to cover police shootings that might be racially motivated, but without properly doing the journalistic legwork to find out the truth. I certainly believe that racial profiling exists, and that a black man is more likely to be shot than a white one -- though the causes are too complex to simply pass off as American police being racist hatemongers -- but we need to stop reacting to every news story as if it's gospel, and take a step back to rationally study the causes and context of police racism. Otherwise we're just going to encourage an even worse climate of resentment.
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
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