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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Mass shootings in the popular conscience mean shootings where random innocent people are targeted either for unknown reasons or because someone doesn't like a particular group. These were all shootings where specific people were targeted for specific reasons, probably drug-related. These stories usually get decent local coverage but some gang beef in Memphis isn't likely to concern people a thousand miles away like it would if the same guy shot the same people at a shopping mall for no reason.

Journalists had no issue pointing out when a police officer who allegedly did something abusive is White.

Because when gangbangers shoot other gangbangers it's expected. If the shooters are caught, they invariably go to prison. It isn't complicated. Cops are supposed to be there to protect the public, and in a society where accused criminals have rights, we don't excuse police shootings just because the victim was probably a piece of shit. We expect the police to have better judgment and self-control than the criminals. When someone is killed while in police custody it raises questions about the proper role of police and use of police force that simply doesn't come into play when one random civilian murders another random civilian. Pointing out black-on-black crime in response to police violence is an exercise in futility because it ignores the dilemma that people in violent neighborhoods face — they don't want to deal with criminals on the streets, but it's hard for them to trust the police when they treat everyone like criminals.

Journalists had no issue pointing out when a police officer who allegedly did something abusive is White.

Because when gangbangers shoot other gangbangers it's expected. If the shooters are caught, they invariably go to prison. It isn't complicated. Cops are supposed to be there to protect the public

"The police should he held to a higher standard, therefore we should make a big deal of it when the officers involved in an incident are white"? I'm not following your reasoning here.

If there were a case to be made that the race of a police shooter is more important than that of a gangbanger, we would either have to exempt black cops, or be open about the fact that they are, for one thing, way more likely to shoot than their white partners at the same crime scene. I would be very surprised if the alleged racism of white cops towards black suspects were enough to outweigh their less trigger-happy baseline.

In practice, the racial angle is never played in the opposite direction, and with a few exceptions, shootings by black police officers do not make national news. (When I asked GPT-4 (!) to provide counterexamples along the lines of Mohamed Noor, it pretended to misunderstand and gave me a list of black police shooting victims after stipulating it couldn't vouch for the shooters' also being black; when reprompted, it could not find any.)

Even as someone who appreciates the enormity of black violence, particularly black on white, I find it easier to recall the names of white (-coded) on black shooters. Where is the black George Zimmerman? Statistically there should be many of them, but no one comes to mind. Your conflating "white" and "police officer" is telling, in that expectations are higher for both. In my opinion, the correct framing is more that blacks are incapable of being the target of the media outrage machine, which strongly prefers white people when available, and their being a police officer is just a bonus (and relatively frequent compared to the extremely low overall rate of white on black crime).