It's a kind of philosophical issue at root. Parallels can be seen in the both the Death Penalty in the US vs. UK and more generally in Innocent Until Proven Guilty in both legal systems.
In the UK the death penalty was abolished because it is untenable that one innocent is killed accidentally. Innocent until proven guilty (and I might be mistaking the actual thing here) means that it is indeed better for 10 guilty people to walk free than 1 innocent person be imprisoned.
If we reject some of these fundamentals for how we run our societies then we might repeat of the Terror during the French revolution. During the Terror they said "well, the mob cant be controlled, but it generally did good." Political philosophy and History can teach us many things.
Huh? I'm directly addressing the point of the article.
Because our institutions are structurally racist and legislative remedies are unattainable, social pressure must be applied. It's unfortunate that while just in the aggregate social pressure is occasionally unjust in the specific, but that's what you get when you deny justice systemically.
> Because our institutions are structurally racist and legislative remedies are unattainable, social pressure must be applied.
This is 100% backwards; structural, institutional problems demand structural, institutional solutions. Want to end structural racism in the U.S.? Start from the clearest near-term goal, viz. reforming criminal justice. Then move on to the next most visible problem.
But if even one individual is falsely accused of racism, that's untenable?