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Comment by grb423 | Hacker News Reader

I wish left, right and center could come together just this once to urge young black men to not fight with police. If you feel their authority is unjustified or they are punks then you really need to handle that politically. The police are duly authorized by the state however flawed and racist that state may be, to use deadly force. The are armed with government-issued, free firearms. Fighting with them leads to your death. If that isn't your goal, i.e., martyrdom for political gain then it's a bad idea. Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law.

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> I wish left, right and center could come together just this once to urge young black men to not fight with police.

I don't understand why you are saying this like young black men are chomping at the bit to fight with police, or like there are people advocating that young black men pick fights with cops. What are you on about here??

> Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law.

What we saw, twice, this week, was young black men submitting to lawful orders and being killed for it.

How about we urge cops to stop extrajudicial killings? How about we urge the federal government to define an escalation strategy for police that doesn't violate international law?

Your insistence in making 'young black men' the problem here paints you as racist, whether or not you think you are.

> Your insistence in making 'young black men' the problem here paints you as racist, whether or not you think you are.

I agree. But at the same time, doesn't the insistence to frame the problem as one of violence specifically against blacks - as opposed to one of those in power misusing force against anyone they're supposed to be "serving and protecting" - make the whole discussion racist?

It's become politically unacceptable for any African-American men to be killed by police. Given that the US is a violent country with a lot of guns and aggressive police, and African-Americans are a marginalized, systemically disadvantaged underclass, this is a recipe to bring a racially divided nation to the brink of civil conflict.

The Dallas attack on police, carried out by a trained soldier, looks right out of a textbook on guerilla war. I think it would be quite easy for organized paramilitary groups to make many US cities ungovernable, particularly with so many veterans around.

The Black Lives Matter movement makes more sense through the lens of other ethnic separatist movements, such as Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. It might sound shocking, but if they regard any white law enforcement or government as illegitimate, their demands seem to imply separatism and African-American nationalism, in the vein of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.

But what ends up happening is that this puts police officers at a serious information asymmetry disadvantage from random encounters. That's the root cause of the violence.

There was a recent Frontline, "Policing the Police" about Newark. The TL;DR was "We need more 'intelligence'" which had an ominous, Big Brother tone but in the face of politically charged deaths, which is worse?

I just hope your last paragraph is wrong. This especially because the reaction to it will probably make things worse. But I have to say it looks insightful.

All this being said, Las Vegas has made measurable progress: http://qz.com/565011/how-one-of-the-largest-police-forces-in...

there's a country founded on black separatism: liberia. how's that going for them?

Liberia was founded by a coalition of white abolitionists and slave owners as a racist mechanism to deport freed slaves. There's no question of that happening again; African-Americans have as much of a claim to American soil as anyone else, more so if anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society

> Fighting with them leads to your death.

Apparently, complying with them does as well. Or, are you unaware of the fatal shooting streamed live on Facebook from two nights ago?

I imagine yours is not an uncommon belief, that the main problem is that young black men are insufficiently compliant. However, I find it almost unfathomable that 'once you cut through everything else' that that is the root of the problem. Really it even resembles a baiting sort of comment.

Thanks, white guy. That's super helpful. I'm sure 'not fighting with police' has never occured to young black men before.

> Lets urge the young black men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law.

How much experience have you had with the justice system? can you describe the resources you used to handle grviences with it on a political basis?

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