See, I'm an optimist. I always believe in the good in people and believe that people are generally good. This is hard for me to believe without any sort of evidence. If you just say "police are evil and racist and secretly Hydra and want to keep the little man down" that just sounds to me like a comic book fantasy.
Well, people are using the argument "it's not that more crimes are actually being committed, it's just that police know about more crimes because they're over-policing this area", so what is "a crime actually is" and "how many crimes there actually are" seems relevant.
The "disproportionate amount of crime" arguments are centered around violent crime, so I don't think this bit of the argument works. Furthermore, over-policing does not cause one to beat their wife.
I'm not disagreeing with you about all the other snowballing factors at play, but it seems to me that you're saying that a disproportionate amount of crime caused over-policing, not the other way around.
It’s 1964, and a Civil Rights Act passes that mandates that suddenly people of color are equal to the majority white people they went from being subjugated to and only more recently less so in that they were segregated from.
Who mandated an equal opportunity? Because that didn’t happen.
Who mandated equal treatment? Because that didn’t happen.
When the “lesser than” black people were suddenly people too, whose minds do you think were suddenly and miraculously changed in accordance with the new mandate? The same cops who’s jobs previously permitted them to treat blacks as sub-humans? The same employers who the day before weren’t even allowing black people in their buildings? Or is it more likely that those same people decided “then” was the time to keep an eye on the newly uppity negroes? So now, “equal” black people who’ve already been relegated to a poorer existence, black people with the same basic needs as privileged white people, are just expected to suck it up and do better in a society with the same authorities that haven’t accepted them or treated them fairly thus far? There’s more crime in black communities because there’s less opportunity; there’ less opportunity because of racism. It’s undeniable. Black people aren’t genetically predispositioned towards crime; it’s a
systemic issue, and that system is the same one with its figurative knee on black peoples’ necks.
Give blacks all the money in the world; they’ll still just be “black” in the eyes of a cop who’s daddy’s daddy enjoyed sicking the dogs or turning the firehoses on the black person’s daddy’s daddy. Income equality would be a great start, but ask Botham Jean, the Harding University alumnus and accountant for Pricewaterhouse Coopers. What did his status as a non-criminal black guy afford him
in his own home?
There are several problems at play here, but acting as if one is less important than another because you feel the latter is more important negates the significant role of the former. Yes, income equality is a factor, but imagine trying to get a fair wage/shot from the same people to whom you weren’t a person as recently as 60 years ago (y’know, years ago that many living today people remember vividly.)