Original article from: USA Today
In the end, the case went down just as many criminal law experts predicted.
No homicide charges were filed against any of the three Louisville Metro Police officers who fired their weapons during the aborted March 13 search that ended in Breonna Taylor’s death.
LEFT VIEWPOINTS
The bigger issue related to Breonna Taylor’s death is that we aren’t getting to the root of the problem.
- Whether you are black, brown, or white, just by living in the United States of America, you are more than 30 times as likely to die via a police shooting.
- Being black increases your odds by another 2.5x.
- Systemic racism is a component of our nation’s socioeconomic failure.
- If we fail to address relative poverty, disproportionate school funding, and our arcane welfare system that traps people in poverty for generations, we will never fix this.
The United States has more than 30 times the number of killings by police than all of the countries shown in the above table. Whether you are black, brown, or white, just by living in the United States of America, you are more than 30 times as likely to die via a police shooting. Being black increases your odds by another 2.5x. Why?
This issue is bigger than police brutality or Donald Trump. Why are so many communities are broken? Why does the United States lead the world in the number of incarcerations?
Left, right, black, or white, we can all agree that these are problems. Where we diverge is when we begin to think about the cause. Conservatives typically acknowledge the problem, but they will blame culture, broken families, or a lack of religion as the cause. This is a copout. Worse, it prolongs the problems because it allows conservatives to wash their hands of responsibility. They can complain about progressive solutions while not doing anything to fix it.
If we drill down to the cause, we have to confront the fact that these are all socio-economic problems fueled by systemic racism.
Affluent communities don’t have these issues. The reason isn’t that affluent communities have people with better genes or a superior culture. It’s because affluent communities don’t have cops busting their door down in the middle of the night and shooting them six times. Affluent communities don’t have underfunded schools. Affluent communities aren’t afflicted with drug wars and gang violence.
Systemic racism is a component of our nation’s socioeconomic failure. This is not a push toward socialism; it’s an acknowledgment that our laws have a racist foundation, and our economy is built on those laws. Systemic racism from our past led to the segregated neighborhoods of our present. But even we strip race out of the picture, the United States has much higher percentages of police-involved shootings and incarcerations than other developed countries.
If we fail to address relative poverty, disproportionate school funding, and our arcane welfare system that traps people in poverty for generations, we will never fix this. And addressing poverty means considering ideas that conservatives can’t support: universal healthcare, UBI, and equitable school funding. This means the solution will not come from conservatism. Conservatism will only attempt to return to the status quo or even go backward. Solutions to the unrest in our country will only come from meaningful Progressive change.