Police as we know them trace back to space patrols and Tammany Hall. This does not alter the fact that BLM activists killed the possibility for progress by making it all about race and driving away potential allies in the process.
I saw it from my conservative community. "That George Floyd thing was fucked up, but now people are rioting, vandalizing, burning buildings, and calling me guilty by association because of my skin color? That's fucked up, too, and maybe we need police to handle this kind of thing."
It was counterproductive at the key point when progress was possible. Police brutality is not a racial issue, or at least far from just a racial issue.
Once again, bullshit. If your 'progress' doesn't involve addressing the racist policing tactics that have driven the overwhelming majority of calls for accountability, then what the hell are you even addressing?
Waco and Ruby Ridge are about the only instances where race wasn't inextricably linked with the calls for accountability and that all seemed to disappear with the nitromethane and ammonium nitrate that got the Murrah Building.
If Waco and Ruby Ridge are the only counterexamples you can think of, perhaps you are not paying attention yourself?
I'm not saying racism does not exist or is not a problem or even isn't the motivation behind many laws and police abuse cases. I am saying it is not the root problem, and people who focus myopically on race to the exclusion of everything else to the point where they lash out against potential allies are shooting themselves in the foot.
Waco and Ruby Ridge are the only ones that generated much noise for accountability and they got muted with ANFO. Not saying it stopped with that but the bandwidth got mighty narrow.
Mind giving an example of 'where they lash out against potential allies'? I'm starting to suspect that at least part of the disparity in our views of all that is due to how shit gets spun in the media. I can't attest for anywhere else but that was not the case down at the square here in Louisville. Not that you could tell by watching the evening news but we had no control over that. It was solidarity in action and there was a lot of people who learned what that meant for the first time there. Race was definitely the dominant issue there but it was far from the only issue and they repeatedly emphasized this. In the years since many of the same people have turned out for other causes as well.
When the feds got done poking around here they confirmed just about everything we were saying about LMPD, not only in regards to race but also how they treated the mentally ill and women.