Frequency is not evidence of a system being in place. There are traffic accidents on the road every single day, but I guarantee you that they’re not planned ahead of schedule or part of a designed system. They’re completely incidental, despite their frequency.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.
That depends. Are you trying to find racism or incompetence? People see patterns in all sorts of things, that doesn’t make astrology a science. In order to prove that you’re dealing with a systemic problem, you must necessarily prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that agents of the government acted in an unacceptable fashion because they were *told to do so*, and not just on one occasion, but as part of an established policy in the organisation. You have to prove those actions were routine as opposed to incidental. That’s a very high bar, yes, but a necessary one if you want to fulfil the requirements of the definition. If you don’t want to fulfil those requirements, you’re welcome to deal in conjecture, but don’t expect universal acknowledgment of your claims.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.
EDIT: There’s a reason why this matters. If a problem is systemic then one can point it out and fight it. If a problem is incidental then it’s just a “guy”, you get rid of “the guy” and the problem vanishes. Your line of reasoning throws the baby out with the bath water - you might be trying to fight problems that don’t actually exist, at least not in the system. The system might be perfectly fine as it is, it’s “the guy” that’s the problem, and any adjustments to the system might be completely unnecessary or even detrimental. In order to fight something, you have to identify what you’re actually up against.
Last edited by Foxi4,