Also, it’s not about waging war on normal cops. It’s about getting normal cops to change their culture into something more sane, so they get rid of bad apples instead of protecting them. Currently cops are like a big fraternity where the bad apples are heavily protected by fellow cops and therefore prosecutors know not to prosecute a probably-guilty cop under normal circumstances because the prosecutor needs the goodwill of the other cops, needs their cooperation, to do his own job of prosecuting all the non-cop criminals, which are more in number, so, all for the greater good, he doesn’t immolate himself.

Of all the police officers I’ve spoken with in all my years, very few weren’t tough-guys. You know what I mean by tough-guys? Walking around with their chests puffed out. Talking over you. Casually interrupting right in the middle of your sentence. Average IQ of 104, give or take. Macho. Manly men. Angry when their authority is challenged. Maybe they have to be tough-guys to some degree to handle a job like that.

Does that make them evil? Not in my book. I heard one of the recent cops that shot a black guy in the back cried about it after. I doubt he was all that different from most cops. I doubt he was an evil man who wanted to kill blacks. No big chip on his shoulder about race. But in the heat of the moment, he wasn’t smart enough, or kind enough, or whatever enough, to break out of the tough-guy-catch-bad-guy mindset. Aiming at a person’s back. No threat to himself. That’s a mindset right there. A black life didn’t matter to him right there.

But afterwards a black death mattered to him. Now he has to live with being a straight-up murderer no matter what a court says, with video evidence so he can’t twist it around in his head. Did he think of himself as racist? I seriously doubt it. That tough-guy culture and an unacknowledged assumption that black males are significantly more dangerous… that’s a powder keg waiting to explode, in most normal cops, and they don’t see it because they don’t see themselves as racist and they see their tough-guy attitude as just a normal attitude, and maybe you do too. Am I making sense to you?

Outside of the heat of the moment, attitudes need to change, so that inside that moment, a white officer feels he’s aiming at something valuable, which overpowers the feeling of needing to stop the bad-guy, and so without thinking, he naturally stops short of firing.