Can you expand on that? What does 'systemic' means in this context? I always hear that but I'm not sure what they mean. I'm sure the policemen don't get orders in their weekly stat meetings to hunt down black guys.
That was a well-thought answer.
I would say the biggest evidence is in how the police treats black vs white suspects. In each of these incidents, the police
shoots at the black suspect rather than arresting him (generally we're talking about a he). This is not normal and would not happen in any other developed country. Meanwhile, with white suspects the police is pretty understanding and treats them like human beings.
Here are some hard numbers from
Pew research, based on years of data gathering through surveys. Roughly ~10,000 people and ~8000 police officers were surveyed across the 2017 police report and the 2019 race report.
- 84% of black adults & 63% of whites surveyed say the police treats blacks unfairly compared to whites
- 87% of black adults & 61% of whites surveyed say the US criminal justice system treats blacks unfairly
- 44% of black adults mentioned they were stopped unfairly by the police due to their race/ethnicity, as opposed to 9% of whites. The number increases to 59% for black male adults.
- 65% of black adults have been in situations where people acted suspicious of them.
#6 through #8 are also worry-some, as they show the differences between the general public viewpoint and the police officers' viewpoint.
- In 2016, ~66% police officers thought the fatal encounters between the police and black Americans were isolated incidents and not signs of broader issues. 60% of people surveyed thought those fatal encounters were in fact sign of broader issues.
- 68% police officers said the protests were motivated by anti-police bias, and only 10% said the protests were motivated to hold the police accountable. Only 27% of white officers surveyed said the protests were motivated by a desire to hold the police accountable, versus 57% by black officers.
- 92% of white officers say the US has made changes to assure equal rights for blacks, vs. 29% of black officers
"Systemic" has been more of a buzzword recently, so here's a more precise definition from the
Washington Post (leans left):
... we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them
Those systems and institutions are present from birth. Black students (in fact, students of color in general) tend to attend schools where most of their peers are poor or low income (
source: The Atlantic, left bias). The hard number given was 75%. This is problematic because public schools are tax-payer funded, so the prevalence of low-income households means the school has insufficient funding to educate its students (as opposed to schools in primarily white districts). This means black students generally have a difficult time competing in college admissions against students who
have had those opportunities. In fact, at top universities many black students are from families that immigrated recently and are fairly well-off, such as Nigerians and Ethiopians. Two of my friends in college were just like that. To tick off the "diversity" box, schools like Harvard
tend to select black students from wealthier/immigrant families. When this happens, genuine African Americans that have been in the US for generations are passed over. Even if you make it through college,
simply having a black-sounding name can make it more difficult to get a job. In that article from Harvard Business School, only 10% of applications with black-sounding names (and presumably evidence that the applicant
is black, such as being part of an organization for black Americans or having attended a Historically-Black College and University) received call-backs, versus 25% for white-sounding names and a "whitened" resume.
A lot of people on the right will tell you these issues aren't real. Trump will tell you those brutal officers are only a few "bad apples." The statistics say otherwise. This is why all of these protests are happening and why there is so much unrest.
...
George Floyd's case is interesting. You mentioned he appeared high, and in fact he
had deadly levels of fentanyl in his system (11 ng/dL; death could occur at merely 3 ng/dL). Still, it is not normal to (basically) torture a suspect, and chances are that a white suspect in the exact same circumstances would
not have faced the same fate.
