The Police Are Victimized By Their Training — Paul Craig Roberts

July 18, 2016 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: |  Print This Article

The Police Are Victimized By Their Training
Paul Craig Roberts
It is too early to know if the shooting of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge are the beginnings of acts of retribution against police for their wanton murders of citizens. The saying is that “what goes around, comes around.” If police murders of citizens have provoked retribution, police and those who train them need to be honest and recognize that they have brought it upon themselves.
Killings by police have gone on too long. The killings are too gratuitous, and the police have largely escaped accountability for actions that, if committed by private citizens, would result in life imprisonment or the death penalty.
There has been no accountability, because the police unions and the white community rush to the defense of the police. In rare instances when prosecutors bring charges, as in the case of Freddie Gray, the police are not convicted.
Presstitutes treat killings by police as acts of racism, and that is the way the public sees them. This infuriates black communities even more as the indifference of whites to the murders is regarded as racist acceptance of the murder of black people.
In actual fact, police kill more whites than blacks, and often black police are involved in the killings of blacks. For example, of the six police responsible for Freddie Gray’s death, three are black. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/18/us/brian-rice-freddie-gray-verdict/index.html

The different attitude between whites and blacks to killings by police is explained by the fact that whites assume that police seldom, if ever, behave inappropriately, whereas blacks have witnessed many killings by police and subsequent lack of concern by white communities other than concern that blacks will riot in protest. To blacks it looks like racism. To whites it looks like justice.
As I reported, killings and violent abuse of the public by the police can be explained by the change in their training. The police or many of them are being trained to react as a military occupying a hostile population. An occupying force is taught to protect itself, not the public. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/07/11/police-murder-because-they-are-trained-to-murder-paul-craig-roberts/
This training works for the Israeli army occupying Palestine, but it does not work on the streets and in the homes of the United States. The Israeli methods have clearly failed for the American public and, if Dallas and Baton Rouge are the beginning stages of retribution, also for the police.

 

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.