So have I and I am a white dude.
Ditto. Used to happen somewhat frequently when I was in college, got less common after about 30.
Every few months during my college days I'd get pulled over, they'd take a super long time after they took my license/insurance/registration, roughly half the time backup would show up (3 times said backup was a K9 unit), and after a total of about half an hour they'd return my documents and tell me to "be safe out there" or similar. No explanation given. That was back when I drove a red 2 seat Geo Metro convertible. It sounded like a swarm of angry bees that got angrier as you went faster. Speedometer stopped at 85, taking the car over 70 was a very bad idea that made it make noises car engines aren't supposed to make.
I'd just assumed that they were on the lookout for someone whose description I also met.
Had a friend get pulled over because he was driving in the wrong part of Baltimore and it was assumed by the police that a bunch of well dressed white guys driving in that part of town at that time were either looking to score drugs or looking to deal drugs. They were just lost, they'd made a wrong turn and this was before you could get good directions and GPS from your phone.
Being a road worker is a more physically dangerous job than being a cop.
This would not surprise me. Cars are by orders of magnitude the most dangerous thing most people deal with on a daily basis, and road workers have to deal with at least hundreds of them, at a place where there's a sudden change in traffic flow every day as part of their job. While also working with equipment that is dangerous in and of itself.
Personally I think the body cam should be on 100% of the time the officer is on duty. And any attempt to cover the camera should result in immediate firing.
This. They are public servants in the course of their job - they should be as transparent as possible at all times. The footage of any given incident should also be accessible by the public on request.
So I'm confused, I've seen some outlets report that the shooter was white, and others than he's middle eastern. I know his name is Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, or at least that's what reported, but that's just a name and no indication of nationality.
And he seems to have been born in the States.
Article linked a few posts before you suggests he was Syrian and born in Syria. He was reported as white because of course he was - he was a mass shooter, therefore he needs to be a white guy and reporting first gets you more clicks that reporting correctly. That's the "correct" story to tell unless and until proven wrong.
The problem? I'd be curious to know how many sign up to become a cop to truly uphold the law versus those chasing a power trip, the feeling of being above the law they'd pretend to uphold. I'm reminded of the Stanford Prison experiment. In a nutshell, a psychological experiment wherein students were assigned roles as either prison guards or inmates, and even in the clear simulation, the perception of power by the pseudo-guards led to the abuse of said power to the point the experiment had to be abruptly ended. Goes to show how easily manipulated, malleable and corruptible a human can be, particularly when they stand to gain de facto dominance over another person or group. Now we have these people out there whose literal, actual JOB it is to wield such power, and those same people come from a society that has traditionally marginalized minorities, those whose basest crime will always be not being white.
Better read up on criticism of Stanford Prison Experiment - there's a lot to suggest it's not as revelatory (or even demonstrative of anything) as has been suggested. For example
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-letexier.pdf . Specifically, there's evidence to suggest that the guards knew what Zimbardo was going for and were trained to create that result.