My own guess is that Officer Adam Coy has a militarized, police state mentality, especially when it comes to black and brown, low-income people, as an aspect of the police, generally speaking, being an instrument of white supremacy and classism.
Increasingly cops treat fellow citizens as if we were enemy combatants or suspect civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Given the ongoing extreme concentration of economic power in the US, it’s not so far-fetched to inquire into the extent to which the police increasingly function as enforcers of a type of domestic colonialism.
Because of racism and white privilege, it seems many white folk don’t realize how a police state is an emerging threat to a free and open society, because historically police harassment, torture, violence and murder against community members has disproportionately affected people of color and low-income people, as well as outcasts such as transgender people.
Black folk certainly have gotten the worst of police violence, though historically police have brutalized various other groups when they threaten the political or economic power structure. Consider police, private security, and US military violence against white coal miners or other white participants in labor struggle.
Beyond the spiritual ugliness of racism and its ethic imcompatibility with humanism, hopefully more white people recognize that racist police violence and white supremacy in general are toxic to our own self-interest if we want to have a politically and economically free and open multiracial society, as the US increasingly becomes a non-white-majority nation that is no longer the main global power.
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