Laws ARE the system. Otherwise there would be no "SYSTEM" for anyone to operate off of. Do you not get that you are talking in circles? A police department still has to obey the law... which is the system. The government that you place so much faith in and want to have MORE control over your life has to obey the law... which is the system.
And what are you gonna do about it if they don't? Add another thin blue line bumper sticker to your car? There's no shortage of cops who believe themselves to be above the law, and in a majority of examples where they aren't prosecuted, for all intents and purposes they prove themselves correct in that notion.
A pattern of behavior, good or bad, is not a SYSTEM. There are bad cops. There are ten good cops to every bad one. There are bad police departments, like the one in Minneapolis who had a black Chief of Police, a black Attorney General and most of the police officers were black. But, you aren't upset about THAT. Only when you can engage in ethnomasochism and say that it's the evil system of white people.
A system is comprised of teams of individuals first and foremost, this isn't nearly as abstract a concept as you're trying to make it out to be. If even only a single person representing a given system decides to act racist while on the clock, guess what, that's going to be perceived as systemic racism, and it can be legally classified as such.
Your fragility is showing again. Even most openly-racist institutions in the US are statistically unlikely to be 100% white, but that doesn't justify systemic discrimination any more than having a black friend justifies running around screaming the N-word in public all day.
No, you are arguing semantics. You want to remove the force and backing of the law from the equation. You are relying on semantics, since Moving the Goalpoast, Ad Hominem and Appeal to Irrelevant Authority already failed you as logical fallacies.
Per Foxi4's concurrence with my viewpoint: a discriminatory policy can be either spoken or unspoken, written or unwritten. It's not like you're the first person to try to put a positive spin on or provide cover for bias, and you won't be the last, but I'm not amused by your feigned ignorance. History is full of examples of morally bankrupt groups and individuals gaming systems to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of others, via "creative" interpretation of the law or just plain ignoring it. Willing to provide you plenty of modern-day examples on request, as well.
I wouldn’t call it a concurrence, exactly - my point of view sits exactly in the middle of yours and his position. Once again, I’m Polish, and Poland had a brief randez vous with socialism, which lead to the establishment of The Citizen’s Militia (ZOMO) which effectively functioned as the police force, in true communist fashion ran by “the people”. To be specific, it was ran by “the people” who would throw you in the back of the van, drive outside city limits and give you a taste of their (now illegal) rubber clubs if you happened to be wearing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, being in the wrong place at the wrong time and many other infractions, both real and imaginary. That wasn’t a decision made by a specific police officer, that was ZOMO the institution being shit and deserving hellfire. For that we have extraordinary evidence, so I’m keen on calling it systemic, even if no law outright stated that wearing a rock & roll t-shirt actually existed. Something something, propagation of western imperialism, blah blah. We have a saying, y’know - “there’s a paragraph on everyone”.
It's basically a rehash of the "a few bad apples" argument, but a whole lot of people seem to forget the second part of the phrase goes, "spoil the bunch." There are debates to be had about when exactly discrimination transitions from being individual to systemic, but for simplicity's sake I'll say it's when individuals within a system are no longer being held accountable for cultivating an atmosphere of discrimination.
Sure, "just following orders" isn't a valid excuse, but the lowest guy on the totem pole is still capable of having some influence on a system he's part of too. It's not always upper management causing all the issues, but issues that affect or reach them do tend to have the most visibility from within and without.
We’re talking about systemic discrimination, not a group of assholes who happen to go on patrol together and are collectively being a menace to the community, unbeknownst to the upper management. In order for it to be systemic, you must have a system, and a system is orderly and regulated. You have to have the “guy in charge” involved, by definition. That’s where I side with @WalterSlovotsky rather than you.
If the "guy in charge" is allowing for discrimination to run rampant on his watch, that's still systemic discrimination even if he's not actively endorsing it. It's because discriminatory practices can creep up on institutions passively that the solution has to be an active one.
They’re not physically in the copper’s car, how would they even know if nobody files complaints? That’s why body cams should be mandatory (even though statistically they actually *increase* the likelihood of escalation to violence as opposed to reducing because officers feel more justified in the presence of video evidence on their side). You have to be fair, they’re people too. Sure, they shouldn’t be ignorant when in a position of power, but some secrets are very well-kept. Details matter, this is a case-by-case thing.
I'm not sure a police chief who doesn't know the first thing about daily operations of his own department would be any better than a flat-out bigoted one, but ineptitude and bigotry do often go hand-in-hand. It's not a valid excuse either way, especially when we're talking about a military-style chain of command.
I disagree - you can’t be held liable for something you didn’t know about. That’s not systemic, that’s a bunch of rogue operators who are good at keeping their mouths shut and not leaving evidence behind. It might be reason to demote, but it’s not evidence of systemic racism. Lack of oversight, maybe, but systemic racism requires policy to be in place and adhered to.
True, but the evidence rarely shakes out that way. It's more often a case of looking the other direction by deliberate choice, and given the history of policing in this country, it's not surprising they're on a short leash as far as public opinion goes.
As before though, a policy can slowly become the norm even if it starts out as only being implied, and not written or spoken. If management is actively rooting it out, it may well never reach beyond one or two individuals, however.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
In order to set policy for an organisation ran by the government, one must be in a position to set policy in the first place - that requires a position of power supervising other government agents. If a higher up is not involved and has no knowledge of the events, you can’t possibly claim that it’s “systemic”. It has to be a system, as per the name, and systems are entrenched in rules. If nobody set the rules and the officers are just doing whatever they please, that’s an oversight problem, not systemic racism.
I'm not currently making a claim against anybody, but I'd hardly call what we're discussing here "extraordinary," either. It's exceedingly common.
Then the question becomes: how many "oversight problems" do we need to encounter before we can declare it a pattern worthy of a larger investigation? The nature of some people and institutions is that they'll keep on trying to pass the buck or feigning ignorance as long as you let them. Accountability always has to be allowed to catch up eventually, as it did with the federal investigation into MPD.
