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Carole Roseland's avatar

I'm horrified by Sonya Massey's murder, and yes, African American and Hispanic people have a much higher incidence of being killed or seriously injured in a police encounter, especially in the last few years, while the number of white people has stayed fairly constant. I believe there are factors other than overt racism, however, in how these tragedies occur. I believe that policemen are being encouraged to use firearms and deadly force a lot more than they used to, when it's not really necessary for a situation like this. Police seem to shoot first and rationalize/explain later. They also may not be adequately trained to deal with mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, or even people who are verbally abusive. The blame also rests on police departments who keep people like Sean Grayson or Derek Chauvin in their organizations, especially when a policeman has a history of excessive force, has improperly fired their weapon or has been let go from other jobs for misconduct. These homicidal poliecemen, and probably many others, were already problematic, yet they were kept on, maybe because cops are in short supply these days. As much as I try to respect all police, I believe some of them are bigots, some of them are paranoid of being injured, some have PTSD, or they could just be on a power trip, using their authority to mete out their own kind of frontier justice. Fortunately, we still have many good cops who do their job admirably and fairly, putting their lives on the line and saving others. Police departments should be held accountable for finding the red flags in personnel files and for weeding out bad cops. Their partners also have a responsibility for doing the right thing and for stopping a bad cop from doing harm.

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Frankie Holmes's avatar

I hear you on this.

I don’t think the lack of vocal response reflects a lack of moral outrage.

My son and I spoke of this despairingly recently. We haven’t joined any online outrage group, and we don’t publish remarks on Facebook, but the gravity of this event nonetheless impressed us.

Again, these are such complex issues that people try to solve with soundbites. It is difficult to be a law-enforcement officer. As someone recently noted, in Europe, the training is over a year whereas in the United States it may be substantially shorter. We have a very different culture about guns and we an underlying white supremacy culture. Just as our troops returning from Vietnam, experienced derision from the American public, so have our law-enforcement officers, and that includes those whose career choice was to protect the citizens they serve.

The issue of mental health is another complicated issue that is poorly understood and even less well funded. While our legislators in Texas feel the issue is no, unlimited access to guns but rather psychological problems, they don’t fund mental health care nor pay the professionals for their life, saving skill set so we are chronically understaffed.

I hear your outrage and I feel it as well as I am sure many do. We will hopefully enable significant change by voting for Kamala.

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