Tim,
Your problem is with absolutes. Do you think police in small towns that have a 95% black population, as well as 95% black police force, harass blacks? There's probably a wide variety of harassment levels, ranging from none to let's make stuff up to convict the black man, depending on the police department you check out. If you asked most people they'd say that if you find a pattern of harassment by a police department it should be investigated and eradicated, as happened with the Rampart division of the LAPD back in 1996. Right now the Fullerton police department is taking a lot of heat for the murder of a homeless man and an apparent pattern of corruption. And that applies to harassment of whites, blacks, or any other color or group. But when you make blanket statements about ALL police officers and/or departments you insult both. And those are the people that put their lives on the line every day to make your community safe for you to live in. It's disgusting to me, quite honestly.
You make reasonable points here. I think the reason I tend to use absolutes in this discussion is because
there are so many people here (and elsewhere) who reject the whole notion that blacks are, in general, treated differently by the police in this country. Of course there are exceptions, but it seems like every time an eception is raised, it is in order to discount the idea in the first place. I have yet to meet a single black person, or watch one on television, or read one, that has denied unequal treatment by police. This applies to blacks of all political convictions. It seems as if every teenage or adult black person in this country can relate some story about them being stopped, harrassed, made to answer questions which a white person would not. Of course this doesn't mean that all police do this, or that all police forces are equal. But I'm not going to discuss these nuances with you, until you're willing to accept my general premise that blacks are,
as a rule, not treated the same. Until you, and others here, are willing to accept that as reality, I find the use of absolutes for discussion purposes sadly appropriate.