CorruptUser wrote:It is entirely plausible to have policies that adversely affect certain ethnicities while reducing death rates *cough*druglaws*cough*, but that's not the point. The point is that it's not the number of dead that's the problem but the psychological effect of racist deaths (aka hate crimes) that is.
Honestly, deaths are deaths. Racism is obviously not a plus, but if cops claim this wrongfully murdered chap wasn't killed because of racism, but because of something else, does it really matter? The psychological effect of a wrongful killing on a family appears pretty severe regardless of details.
I don't feel that, in general, making policies more racist is going to increase average safety. Drug laws...I'm gonna go with nope. Yeah, I might not be feeling the primary impact as directly as others, but it's extremely doubtful that it helps me in any way. Added violence, even not directed at me, can spill over. There's all the endless costs, both direct and indirect, from jail time to police attitudes towards violence. The costs may be unequally distributed, but just about everyone gets costs, not benefits.
A program oriented at reducing wrongful deaths is probably going to be more helpful than some anti-racism campaign. The latter can be pencil-whipped pretty easily, because of course police will attempt to use whatever criteria is handy to claim progress when the metric is at all ambiguous. The former will intrinsically help the latter. After all, an incident of racism that DOESN'T kill the victim is generally superior to one that does. At a minimum, it leaves a survivor who may seek recompense or justice.
Ultimately, I don't think you can fix US policing without attempting to significantly reduce the rate at which they kill people. This probably includes even a number of scenarios considered good shoots today. If police were actually motivated to say, use a taser instead of gun(rather than as a compliance tool), then deploying tasers might be advantageous. But, yknow, the motivation has to come first. Deploying the tool without the motivation fixes precisely nothing.