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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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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).