I'm a very opinionated person, but I learned a long time ago that trying to convince random people over the internet is usually not worth the effort. If you're feeling frustrated when having these conversations with people, maybe it's a good sign that you need to take it easy for a while.

This whole BLM and police brutality situation is very emotionally charged. I have lots to say on the matter but I've been holding my tongue since it started. It's not worth the headache.

Yeah and part of my long ass post that I deleted and replaced with this shorter one, was that I felt I shouldn't have spoken out about the gross over generalization with movements like the ACAB and the willful ignorance that there are places were the protesters are being violent and there are places where the cops and community have protested together and that their laser focus on all the attention to the violence by cops onto the citizens is telling that they are not out for justice, but out for revenge.

But then for them to assume that by me pointing these things out that I must be justifying or excusing the actions and as Vertasium said, they aren't arguing against my actual position, but rather what they think my position is.

Well, one thing is to be very clear about your position on something even when unprompted / not directly related to your point, just to prevent people assuming your position. It's not something that should be necessary, but society is pretty heavily polarized nowadays, so if you seem to adopt some positions of one side, people will assume you've adopted all positions on that side. "I'm not a Trump supporter, but I appreciate his defense of law and order in our country", or "I'm not an anarchist, but it's great that we're finally talking about redirecting police funding". It's annoying to have to do but it works to make your message (and replies to it) more focused.

Which frankly that should have been clear in my previous two journals. and I have explicitly stated numerous times. I do not support the excessive force that officers are using in some cites, but I also do not support the fact there are people who are also committing violence against our police officers. Two wrongs don't make a right and an eye for and eye makes the whole world blind, but yet, because I "won't take a side" means that I must side with the "enemy"

The truest of the true. The more famous you are online, the more vulnerable you are to online harassment, trolling, stalking, doxxing, spamming, cancel culture, and being memed out into oblivion. There is quite the peanut gallery on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, and the like.
People who use social media like that on a day to day basis are a confusing mess of a mob, and they are depressed, bored individuals who are more easily sensitive to taking offense from something than ever before.

Yes, the lives of black citizens do matter, just as much as those of other races, creeds, and ethnic backgrounds. Yes, some policemen can be brutal and violent to innocent civilians, so what? There is no need to make it sound like one culture is superior than all the others, otherwise that would cause a massive backlash.

There was actually a black lady who posted a picture of her with a sign on twitter and to paraphrase is said "Not all blacks are criminal, not all whites are racist, and not all cops are bad, ignorance comes in all colors"

I am like, LADY! YOU ARE MY HERO IN THIS!

I've never made an assumption about your stance, you've made it clear that you care on some level and you think what the cops are doing are wrong and I've thought for a while about what felt off about it. It honestly feels like a lot of these calls for impartiality and to focus on 'facts' are trying to dilute an obvious issue. The regular abuses of police powers in police departments and the long history of unarmed Afircan Americans being killed by police in demonstrably higher numbers than other races.

I feel like people keep trying to gaslight me and make me question my own sanity and thought processes. I'm told that I can't trust the media or social media regularly but it's only ever in regards to one side of this. I could of course then doubt the media and social media that is attempting to make me believe that the cops really aren't all that bad and it's all over the top right? Yes I'm not immune to propaganda but nobody else is either. There is plenty of pro cop propaganda out there too.

I go out of my way to read into most things, I have read the actual autopsy report George Floyd's death for example, reviewed my own training manuals. I've said before that based on my own training I feel like the police are very responsible but we seem to agree on that. I often peek into spaces of people who fundamentally disagree with me on most things.

What's getting me frustrated is when I get pointed to riots and looting which yes, are absolutely in the wrong, I don't support it at all. But it's always done to contrast the abuse of police power which in my opinion is a much greater miscarriage of justice. There have been police that have demonstrably attacked peaceful protests, journalists and even completely uninvolved people. I've seen so many videos of this that it starts to make me feel sick to my stomach and most of the time I wait for greater context. Every time someone points that out though someone is there with a story about someone looting a store. It feels like people are on purpose trying to dilute the issue, muddy the waters and create this illusion that there is a 50/50 share of who's in the 'wrong'.

The thing is the police should be held to a higher standard they have power and thus should have more responsibility and my expectations are far higher. In fact if the police hadn't regularly used excessive force leading to the needless injury and death of people, sometimes innocent people, order wouldn't have broken down to begin with. There are credible reports of police covering up/removing badge numbers, removing or disabling body cameras and attacking journalists who have their ID clearly displayed. All of this in my opinion is a far greater crime than looting and vandalism because I expect the police to do the right thing far more than a normal citizen. Martin Luther King himself said that riots are the language of the unheard yet even as they're happening so many are still unwilling to listen. When democracy fails this kind of thing is inevitable and I really do feel like it's going to get worse unless something is done to fundamentally combat the regular use of excessive force by US police forces.

I fundamentally just believe the breakdown of order was caused by the system failing people. That doesn't excuse looting or vandalism no, but it wouldn't have happened if the attempts to do all of this the right way didn't keep seeming to go nowhere.

I am not saying that you have, but others have, assuming that by saying one thing that must me I also must accept everything else, much as KnoxTheRoo point out, that if you agree with one aspect of something, then you must agree with all of them, that is largely my frustration.

I don't trust the media period, one side or the other, they both have an agenda to play out and want to make appeals of ethos to a very specific crowd. My long standing issue, and a friend more concisely described this, is that it is very easy to find, document and spread things that are concretely bad where things that are generally good are more nebulous as good things take time to happen and sometimes happen over periods of time that are imperceptible. But on the whole across the nation and the world, despite the recent events, random shootings have been at an all time low, violent crime has been at all time low, police brutality is at an all time low and all of these terrible things have been declining gradually over the past two decades. For every time a police officer killed someone in 2019, regardless of context, there is likely 5-20 instances of police officers doing there job and doing good by the community, but because they are such normalized events they don't calculated or reported or even tallied. Cops are there to help with car accidents, they are there to find drunk drivers, to stop robbers and murderers, to stop people from selling illicit drugs, to make the community as a whole safer, often times unseen and unheard of. I bet if we started counting the number of times police officers helped people, that number would certainly outweigh all of the bad events that are so easily pointed out. And then when an officer is killed in the line of duty you often have long processions through the city, because they died trying to keep the community safe. My friend also pointed out, that what is happening is not necessarily a failure on the officers faults, but on the fault of the leaders, the people who are supposed to be in charge leaving officers in a difficult stop, And then you have to contend with the fact that there are an average of 3.5 guns per person in the US, which also changes how law enforcement will react.

Again, this does not excuse the incidents where officers have clearly failed in their duties.

The looters and rioters are not just hurting officers though, they are hurting other every day citizens, some of who tried to stopped the looters and were beaten for it, and while we agree it is wrong, I will not turn a blind eye on it and say that the wrongs posted should over shadow the wrongs being committed there, because there are overwhelmingly more peaceful protests going on. It is easy to string together videos of cops doing bad things and when you have tons of people showing short videos of violent acts, sometimes coming from the same protest, it can make it seem like as if these events are more common place than they really are and people are making it seem like this is the norm and not the exception when from what I have been able to find, it still is the exception, and even before now, even if there was an even of excessive use of force every day, it would still be the exception and not the rule considering that someone shared some stats with me and found that there was.... something like 1k deaths caused by officers in the year of 2019, and there are 17k+ police agencies in the US, that is not even 1 per agency. That is a 5% rate compared to the number of police agencies.

Here is the stats page: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
There are some major flaws with this data and here is how I am going to nitpick it having to have done lots of stats stuff in getting my Bio degree.
1. it does not give context to the killings as to whether or not the person in questions was resisting, armed, fleeing, etc. Resisting and Fleeing should optimally be met with non-lethal force before more excessive force should be used. Being armed alone gives the officer provocation to use lethal force, because you don't get to pull a gun or knife on anyone and not expect to them to not also use similar or greater force to protect their own lives.
2. The 24% rate when the population is only 13% fails to account for population distribution. If black people are a higher percent of the population in the areas where the killings occured, then statistically it will be higher than the average of the entire population because the average assumes even distribution, and populations are not evenly distributed. This is the bane of tracking population size for a given species in any large area when biologists are trying to determine a species' overall health

Those are the 2 biggest flaws with that data, but you can also see that the rates vary wildly by region on top of that.

I am not saying that police should not be held to higher standards, but it is hard to do that when you don't have enough people to actually be an effective police force. I wonder what the statics are for undermanned agencies. I am thinking it is higher than we would like it to be. And again, the 3.5 guns on average per person in the US kind of explains the quicker use of more extreme force, especially in places that have more relaxed gun laws. I imagine you can understand the wanting of playing it safe versus taking the risk. We have the benefit of hindsight and like with anything, how you react in the heat of the moment is going to be very different if you can plan ahead or look back at it. It actually brings me to why officers and former military alike want stricter gun laws, because many people think owning a gun will keep them safe, but often fall to consider how they will react in a high stress environment where it might need to be used.

Also look who we have for a president, the great orange who has no flipping clue what he is doing half the time. He has single-handedly caused so many schisms to form between the American people and the government, spreading false news, lying to the public, and just generally not understanding how to be an effective president. But this also comes with what another friend said about America as a culture from an outside view, and it is that the American people and America was founded on this idea of individual responsibility rather than a communal one which has led to general mistrust in any organized power, any form of socialized medicine, because everything is the responsibility of the individual. And that works on much smaller scales, but it is too granular for it to be completely manageable at the scale of the entire US.

Again, change takes time, and it has progressively been getting better, and some cities have managed to handle it rather well, one city that was named to me was Houston, Texas. Which kind of shocked me, but they managed to do, it will just take time for others to catch on and catch up.

And this might be my more Buddhist influenced side talking, but I am not willing to turn a blind eye on any injustice regardless because all violence and harm is an injustice and advocate for pacifism first and foremost and aggressive defense when you have no other option. I just want the fighting to stop, for people to go home and start rebuilding. It is time for it to end, your message was heard, changes will not happen overnight, and I want police to be able to do their jobs without fear of someone crying wolf because they feel personally violated for any use of force.

What the officer did to Mr. Floyd was uncalled for, he could have cuffed him and sat him down considering that he did commit a crime and had committed crimes in the past. But by in large, the police force is full of good people doing a very difficult job that I know I could not handle. I do not envy their position, but I also respect them on the whole, because by in large, police officers become officers because they want to keep people safe, just like any officer in the military, firemen, doctor, nurse. Yes, you have have your outliers, I have had to deal with an outlier pharmacist who is not a nice person, but I have had patient accuse my pharmacists of being mean and uncaring when more often then not they will bend over backwards, and that is true for a large majority of the people who sign up for these types of positions.

sorry for the super lengthy post.

Also I forgot to mention that another friend pointed this out and that was there was some protests taking place a handful of years ago in NYC that the police showed up for just to do crowd control; so they were pretty much unarmed thinking it was going to be a peaceful protest just to have a few people show up and start shooting and looting and basically being vandals. Totally caught off guard with what was supposed to be a peaceful protest and I think that kind of started this, we can't take chances anymore because people can't be trusted. And frankly I don't blame them, not after trying to give the people a chance and things having been fine previously, but you know I don't trust most people as far as I can throw a stone.

I should further clarify that none of what I am saying should be seen as excusing actual misconduct by police officers or other parties.