I cant imagine anyone that is actually engaging their brain looking at those three cases and say that those men are dead because of racist cops. And yet...here we are. (trimmed quote as to not take up whole page quoting post)
Thank you for the thought-out reply. I'm glad we have arrived here, because I agree in some ways with your post. Especially in these three cases, there is a valid reason for police involvement. Any time you are violent with a police officer, such as the case with Mike Brown and the recent case in Missouri, there is justification of a police officer involved shooting. Regarding the Garner case, I believe the case is a bit more complicated than that, but you could argue that racism didn't play a role.
I understand that frustration: cops have to make tough decisions each day and it's sometimes unfair to put them under a microscope. What would you do if a giant guy was charging at you after punching you in the face a few times? I don't know. I get that.
Where I diverge with you is that the riots/protests/unrest/anger comes from these cases. These cases are the figurative straws that have piled on over time, and are starting to really cause the camel's knees to buckle. Let's not also forget, during this same time period:
-Tamir Rice was killed after apparently pointing a toy gun at passerbys.
-John Crawford was killed while walking around a Walmart with a toy gun
-Levar Jones was shot when an officer asked him for his ID and he went into the dash to get it.
I'm sure there are others, but 5 of those incidents (Rice, Crawford, Jones, Brown, and Garner acquittal) happened within a short period of time. To me, the most unfortunate part of it all is that it is centered around Mike Brown - because the details in that case are shady at best, and there is a weak argument for police brutality or racism. However, when the story first came out, the details were insane - this ****ing guy was just walking down the road and he got shot after running away from a confrontation with the cops that he didn't start!
Civil unrest doesn't occur because one guy got shot. It's an accumulation of feelings over the course of years. It is unfortunate that it was a case like the Mike Brown case that caused it to boil over, and not the Tamir Rice, John Crawford, or Levar Jones cases that directly ensued. But even though the unrest semi-centers around a dubious case, the numbers of deaths and arrests show where the cause is coming from:
Trends in Mortality Due to Legal Intervention in the United States, 1979 Through 1997
When mortality was stratified by race and sex (in legal police interventions), death rates of Black males on average were 4.7 times those of White males from 1979 to 1988 and averaged 3.2 times higher from 1988 to 1997 (ranges = 3.4–6.7 times and 2.6–5.0 times, respectively).
Now the above statistic comes with the caveat that the death rate nearly matches the intervention rate of each:
In support of this explanation, deaths due to legal intervention exhibit a distribution by race (63% White, 34% Black) similar to that of all US arrests (67% White, 31% Black).
So blacks are slightly more likely to die during an intervention than whites, but what are the odds of police intervention?
Racial gap in U.S. arrest rates: 'Staggering disparity'
Blacks are more likely than others to be arrested in almost every city for almost every type of crime. Nationwide, black people are arrested at higher rates for crimes as serious as murder and assault, and as minor as loitering and marijuana possession.
Arrest rates are lopsided almost everywhere. Only 173 of the 3,538 police departments USA TODAY examined arrested black people at a rate equal to or lower than other racial groups.
So if rates of death during intervention are relatively equal across races, then perhaps the issue is just police intervention by race. Now, unless you truly think that black people are just breaking the law at ridiculously higher rates than all other races (in some areas up to 9x the arrest rates of others), then there must be some sort of profiling and institutional racism that is occurring. Personally, I think these statistics bode well for one major reason:
It shows that this is an institutional problem - not a case-by-case "the officer is racist" problem.