Steering clear of Facebook for a few days
I heard on the radio this morning that Los Angeles Police shot a man. He was fighting them. They got him down, he popped back up, and they wrestled him down again. From the audio recorded just before the shots were fired, it sounds like one officer lost his gun. Whether he had it out and dropped it, or his holster failed, or the suspect grabbed it out of the holster, nobody can really say yet. At any rate, the officer yelled that he'd lost his gun and that the suspect had the gun--again, whether he grabbed it off the cop's belt or picked it up off the ground isn't clear, but doesn't really matter. They told the suspect repeatedly to drop the officer's gun. He didn't. So they deployed a Taser. It's unclear whether the probes hit the suspect, or whether they had any effect if they did hit him. There was a shot--we don't know at this point whether it was an officer or the suspect--and then three shots at the suspect. The suspect is dead now.
And I just know that if I open Facebook today, there's going to be a hundred-and-one stupid memes on there claiming "irrefutable evidence" that LAPD "murdered a homeless man because he's black." They'll conjure up every stereotype and bit of misinformation that's ever been spread about police officers, and launch a barrage of angry invective against anyone who dares to disagree with them. And since I'm generally the only person they know who 1) isn't a FOX-watching idiot who will dismiss them as "commie faggots" (or some misspelling thereof), 2) whom they haven't already unfriended on Facebook, and 3) who would dare to refrain from jumping on their cop-hating, lynch-mob bandwagon, that barrage is going to be concentrated in my direction, and people will get worked up enough to say all the ugly things they normally try to refrain from saying. And I just don't need that today.
Moreover, LAPD does have an egregious history of racism against blacks, both in the general public and among their own officers. (Anybody remember Chris Dorner's manifesto? "The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse.") If the investigation shows that no officer actually lost his gun and one of them just said that for the beneift of the audio recorder, I won't be shocked. (To be clear, I'm not saying I expect this to be the case, because I don't. I simply wouldn't file this possibility away in the realm of the unthinkable, because I have read of LAPD officers back in the 1980s saying stuff like "The goddam nigger dropped his knife before I could shoot him.") If the investigation finds that one or more officers are guilty of wrongdoing, I'm not gonna cry for them. And if the investigation finds that they didn't, I know that doesn't necessarily settle the matter, given that LAPD has a history of covering for racist officers who use excessive force. However, just because it has happened before doesn't mean that it happens every single time, and just because it's not certain that an internal investigation would come to an honest conclusion, it's no more certain that it would come to a dishonest one.
The trouble is that most of the people I know on Facebook are completely incapable of exercising that kind of impartial suspension of judgement when it comes to police officers. Say anything to that bunch about the IMF, the Fed, the World Bank, or the Democratic Party, and they'll dismiss you as a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. But take the same kind of biased accusations, loose associations, and shaky evidence that are normally used against those groups and use them instead to indict The Patriarchy or The White Supremacy Establishment, and these people won't challenge a word of it. I don't like seeing that, but I also don't want to put myself in the position of playing public defender for LAPD. All the more so if they're actually guilty.
So I think I may just avoid that place until the next big distraction comes out. There'll be a photo of some singer's naughty bits or a controversy over what color an article of clothing is, and this'll be as forgotten as the name of that guy who sang that song on that one show back in, y'know, a long time ago. Unless some chucklehead comes out with a cell phone video where the suspect is clearly trying to kill the officers but the narrator's saying, "See? They hasslin' him for NO REASON! Oh, they just tazed him! They tazed him for bein' black! Oh, man, they just shot him, and he was just lying on the ground not doin' nothin'!" and his words will be the gospel truth to that same bunch on Facebook for the next two months while we watch the L.A. Riots part VI.