Sunday, August 13, 2017

Who is to blame? Why did it happen?

When someone is killed by the police, the question of who to blame is always raised. Never is the question of why it happened asked. Yet, if there is a plane crash, the TSA does ask the why question and conducts a very thorough investigation. The investigations ares so effective that for the last several years, the death rate from crashes of American commercial planes has been zero. Whereas, police officers in the United States now kill about 1,000 people and wound more than 50,000 every year.

Many of these killings happen during a routine traffic stop. A warrant is not required to search a car; the search efforts often trigger a confrontation. And there are many routine traffic stops. The Bureau of Justice says that about 26 million Americans were pulled over by police officers in 2011 alone — that’s over 10 percent of the population aged 16 and older. Of course, because of racial bias, a disproportionate number of those people are minorities.

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