Radio jockey resignation...

[Sacred Jellybean]

You're not helping, ABF!

Don't listen to him, Dar. We both can agree that all lives are important, regardless of race. No one race is more important than the other. Police brutality is bad for everyone. But, the problem is, that's not how society today treats black people. Police and the justice system at large are far more brutal towards black people. Here are some examples, large and small:

• You're more likely to be assaulted by a police officer if you're black/latino: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/punf0211.pdf  This is regardless of the amount of police interactions, i.e. not just because black/latino commit a disproportionate amount of crime.
  
  
• Blacks people receive sentences that are almost 19% longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files...aphics.pdf
  
  This is controlling for factors such as age, education, citizenship, weapon possession, and prior criminal histories.
  
  
• Judges are more likely to depart from sentencing guidelines to give a more lenient sentence towards whites, and also, less likely to give them jail time: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/320276
  
  
• A judge is less likely to grand you bail if you're black: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26999
  
  
• This is even true if you have higher rates of "pre-trial misconduct" by whites vs blacks. In other words, if you're black and keep your head down and play by the rules, you're still less likely to be granted bail. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ra...1ef0775ada
  
  
• In traffic stops, police are more likely to search black/Hispanic drivers than white: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1
  
  
• Blacks are also more likely to be given a traffic citation: https://people.ucsc.edu/~jwest1/articles...Police.pdf
  
  
• If you're a minority, you're more likely to be stopped by a white cop, than a cop of the same race as you: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/322810. Vice versa is also true, but most cops are white, so who's getting the raw deal here?
  
  
• All-white juries are more likely to convict white people than black. This gap is eliminated if you get at least one black jury member. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/127/2/1017/1826107
  
  
• You're 2.5x more likely to be killed by a cop as a black man than a white man: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/...white-men/
  • Usually the talking point that comes next is "well, black people statistically commit more violent crime, so of course it'd be disproportionate." While this may be true, there's also no correlation between violent crime and police killings: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl...ne.0141854
    

Let's dispense with the dry statistics. Look at what happened in Michigan just a month or so back. White men stormed the capitol building, armed, to protest stay-at-home orders. https://www.foxnews.com/us/michigan-lans...uns-rifles

Just look at these men, armed and screaming into the cops' faces, who simply stand there and calmly abide it.



Black people, on the other hand, have been murdered by police in the street for using a fake $20 bill, selling cigarettes, and holding a BB gun. Can you IMAGINE the media frenzy and if dozens of armed black men stormed a capitol building and screamed at police/lawmakers?? The national guard would have arrived at the scene and ventilated them in about 10 seconds. As it was, these white men were "peacefully protesting", and not so much as arrested. THIS is how society treats whites and blacks differently.

So, all that being said, do you understand why people specifically use the line Black Lives Matter? It's not that other lives don't matter, it's that we as a society need convincing that black lives matter just as much as whites.