I agree, Ben. This killing was atrocious and outrageous, but I have seen enough reports and videos of bad cops doing bad things to people to not be convinced that there was a racial motive behind the cops' actions. I'm not saying they were totally unbiased, but IMHO the motive was at least as much just cops being on a power trip and exercising their aw-thaw-rih-tay because they could, and it may or may not have mattered that the victim happened to be black. I'll go out on a limb and hypothesize that this wasn't the first time that cop used (and abused) that knee on the neck trick. Officer Derek Chauvin appears to have been a terrible example of a police officer, with numerous complaints about him stretching back at least ten or fifteen years. I'm not prepared to accept that all those complaints involved black people, and that he never abused his authority against whites.
Unfortunately, because of the current political climate, even suggesting that this incident wasn't 100 percent racism is, in itself, decried as racist.
What's really needed is to get the police out of the paramilitary business and back into the peace officer business. That would be a good start.
