Are you saying that black communities should be reasonably crime-free before they can expect institutions not to systematically discriminate them and enact retributionless, extralegal violence upon them?
What I'm saying is that when black people kill more than ten times more black people than cops kill black people, somebody is not wrong to ask why the focus should only be on the cops.
Again, the focus isn't only on cops. There's plenty of time, effort, money, etc. spent on minimizing "normal" violence and crime. Society is quite capable of doing more than one thing at once, even if the media likes to focus.
You can't realistically claim that the focus isn't on the police right now.
And they're not even wrong. Policing in the US is in serious need of reform.
But you're doing the thing you're saying you're not doing. If we can do both things at once, then why shouldn't we do both things at once? Why are we dismissing people who want to do the other thing?
As far as I'm aware, none of the efforts to curb normal violence and crime ("Problem A") have declined. The only thing that's changed is that more people are joining the chorus to fix policing ("Problem B").
Nobody is going to dismiss you for wanting to fix Problem A. But that's a very different thing than intruding on conversations about Problem B to tell people to focus on Problem A instead.
The Black Lives Matter movement is explicitly about dealing with systemic racism and state violence against Black people. If you want to contribute to solving other issues (and there are many other issues), go for it, but I don't see what that has to do with Black Lives Matter.
Again, how is that relevant? Are you saying that black people somehow deserve no protection by police because "they should get their house in order" first? (Whatever that should mean)
You bring up a good point: far more black people are killed by other black people than are killed by cops (white or black). But we don't hear about it, demonstrations are rare and news is non-existent.
It would be a significant improvement if black people quit killing their own. And it would save far, far more lives than were all police to never kill another black person. But it is completely the responsibility of blacks to quit killing other blacks.
And 40% of police officers inflict domestic violence on their families, yet we give them weapons, a license to use violence to back up their authority, and release them into the streets, where they can do... Pretty much anything they want, without legal or social consequences.
Because one of those groups is a set of criminals that will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the other one of those groups is a set of government agents with a history of not being held accountable for their actions.
There's never been a lack of focus on intra-community violence. It's been the go-to "whataboutism" for ... ever. It's also not relevant to the question of why government authorities should be exempt from the consequences of violating the law.
> Because one of those groups is a set of criminals that will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the other one of those groups is a set of government agents with a history of not being held accountable for their actions.
You could say that about both groups. There is a cultural tradition in the relevant communities of not talking to the police, which causes disproportionately many of those murderers to get away with it, and the murder solve rate in the US isn't all that high to begin with.
You tend to get more murders in proportion to how much the perpetrators expect to get away with it, so the numbers are telling a story there.
> There's never been a lack of focus on intra-community violence. It's been the go-to "whataboutism" for ... ever.
Apparently not to a sufficient extent to actually address the problem. If you don't want people to keep pointing to it then get there to not be something to point to.
> It's also not relevant to the question of why government authorities should be exempt from the consequences of violating the law.
The officers in question are facing homicide charges, as it should be.
You're just begging the question in limiting it to government authorities. If Black Lives Matter then shouldn't all of them?
Are you saying that black communities should be reasonably crime-free before they can expect institutions not to systematically discriminate them and enact retributionless, extralegal violence upon them?