We're doomed.
When even the folks at APS are so afraid that they will assent to the militarization of civilian law enforcement you know liberty is toast.
I can't believe you guys are OK with civilian law enforcement blowing up and burning down *expletive deleted*it, especially with the express purpose of killing somebody!
I have a lot of the same reservations and concerns. However, IMO, the whole thing is bitching about the end result "symptoms" of the problem. Nobody wants to look (at least really hard) at the actual root causes, which generally lies with our legislatures and courts. Those fights are a long boring tedious slog, and it's so much easier to point to succinct dramatic incidents instead. BLM is doing it, the "civil liberty" types here are doing it, and even the statist authoritarian "thin blue line" is doing it.
All of this is picayune complaining at how much water went under the bridge, when everyone on all sides has spent years ignoring the leaky dam that burst upstream.
The really crappy thing about all of this is that Dallas was about the worst city and police department to pick on to "protest" in this manner. For the most part, they were the one large city department that was doing it right. They deemphasized petty traffic enforcement that generally amounts to "warrant fishing" on the poor. Added transparency to use of force incidents. Attacked the "thin blue line" mentality that made the police close ranks to protect misconduct. And were training their officers in use-of-force and force continuum bi-monthly, so they could be more confident, and less likely to resort to deadly force out of fear or uncertainty.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/07/08/what-dallas-pd-does-right-and-why-doing-those-things-could-now-be-more-difficult/And as to BLM itself, the deaths and use of force incidents are also just a flashpoint that it's easy for people to rally around. The mistrust and disdain for the police goes much deeper. And this article/opinion piece from RedState, obviously NOT a bleeding heart outlet got me thinking.
http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/07/08/uncomfortable-reason-came-dallas-yesterday/And to expound on that... take Ferguson MO,
something like 60%+ of the residents there have some sort of warrant on them, or are in, on, or out of compliance with probation. What... the... hell...
They can't ALL be criminals that have actually taken part in mens rea crime. One can assume the majority of them must be prohibitum malum non-violent offenses, or even just a snowballing cycle of fines, tickets, and bench warrants that started with civil infractions. And I'll note that it's the Democrats/Left that predominantly governs almost every majority black/poor urban area in the United States. Intentionally or not, many of these places have set up a system where they divert state and federal welfare money as a revenue stream from their citizens through courts, fines, and arrests.
I can easily see how such a situation would make the residents want nothing to do with the police and give information about the "real crime", of which they're usually the victims of. If someone has a 60% chance of getting arrested just by giving their name to a police officer, even more than the "stop snitching" meme, why would any of them come forward to help the police about the "real crime" they suffer? Or why in the roughly 1/2 of use of force or police deaths that were "justified" that BLM is complaining about, they've got no willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to the police?
And to actually address this reality, I could easily seeing it be something that bi-partisan reforms that both the Left from a "social justice" standpoint could support, and that the Right from a "limited government" mentality they could back. But it's messy, it's complicated, and it takes time. Or it takes a large chunk of the public to get busy complaining about things that aren't as dramatic as police involved deaths, or arguing if a manually operated bomb-disposal robot blowing up a barricaded shooter heralds a new era of extrajudicial drone assassination.
This is what has me hacked off and somewhat dismissive about this thread and the "bomb debate".
The whole damn thing is just the outcome of years, decades, generations of "us vs. them" thinking, on the part of the BLM protestors, the police, the politicians/government, and the voters at large.