Idea that the rash of police shootings of minorities might be looked at as (primarily) an infrastructure problem rather than as (strictly) a racial prejudice problem.
This is something that “just occurred” to me and which I haven’t vetted or thought through at all, and don’t have much information about; and it isn’t to suggest of course that racial prejudice isn’t a problem in a general sense, which it certainly is.
But the idea that occurred to me is that the reason all this is coming up “now” (the last decade about) is that it tracks with our income-inequality/ underfunding-of-the-government/ decaying-of-infrastructure problem — all of these being related. We’ve been neglecting all of government’s functions for years and these police shootings are one of its symptoms (undoubtedly magnified by issues of race).
Specifically, the line of argument I’m thinking of would go something like this (and, again, I say this without knowing how much police officers are paid vs. other public sector employees, and without knowing a lot of other pertinent details): “We’re not paying police officers enough to get and retain the quality of officer who can prudently and consistently adjudicate the chaotic situations he encounters, and as as a result we’re getting people who might be a little over-reactive in tense situations, and we’re getting these senseless shootings.”
Again, if it is admitted that U.S. infrastructure is in a bad state, and if it makes sense to think of police and other public servants as being part of that infrastructure, you don’t have to turn to arguments of racism to understand why these senseless shootings might be happening. They’re happening because we’ve failed to fund the government sufficiently.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 