Kay-Rants Racism
Apr. 13th, 2021 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
As my longer term friends may recall I spent many years being a bad driver, while putting a ridiculous number of miles on various vehicles. I think the last of my traffic infractions was before Joshua, but definitely years ago.
I have a lot of experience being pulled over.
I have had tickets for speeding
Fix it tickets
Failed to stop tickets
Registration out of date tickets
Warnings
and at least 2 accidents that involved police.
In the registration case my registration was a couple of years out of date it would have been reasonable for the police to assume I'd stolen the car. (I'd just been moving a lot, and the relevant paperwork hadn't caught up with me.)
I have never been asked to exit the car. I like to think I'm generally polite, but I imagine I was not calm and polite in every occurrence. Many of you are likely aware that I'm not the nicest person to be around when I'm running late, and I've gotten better than I used to be.
It never occurred to me that I was in danger of anything more than an expensive ticket.
I'm apparently not threatening enough to merit a requirement that I keep my hands visible, that I exit a vehicle, that I get shot.
The racism that means I'm perceived by police as less threatening than Daunte Wright and any of the souls here https://sayevery.name/ NEEDS TO STOP!
I don't have a silver bullet. I know that it is going to be hard, but it needs to be done.
There are things we know we can do.
- Multicultural education starting in kindergarten, and going up through required professional training
- Decriminalization of 'crimes' that are disproportionately persecuted based on race
- Making sure trials and discussion about law enforcement killings focus on the killing. The victim is not on trial, even if the person killed was a criminal the law requires that they have their day in court.
- Training to minimize use of force by law enforcement
- Minimizing lethal options for law enforcement
- Screening to catch internal bias before law enforcement officers are approved to use lethal weapons.
- Equipment changes like
- make sure the activation for a taser is different than the trigger for a gun so that if someone thinks they have a taser in their hand the movement to activate it won't accidentally shoot a gun.
- make sure that the non-lethal options are worn on the dominant side