I would not be surprised. The “unable to turn off the ‘super autorotation Drill Sergeant mentality” thing is a major problem in policing, given the large number of veterans recruited to police work. I’m not arguing, in saying that, that it’s evil to be a vetaran, but I think the police need to start screening out the excessively rigid and hypervigilant types, the ones who literally go to Def Con 1 over nothing. And while the issue here isn’t exclusively race, there is an interaction between hypervigilance, profiling and paranoia, a space in which there is a default assumption that a person with black or brown skin HAS to be treated as massive more dangerous than a white person behaving in exactly the same way-

Here’s an example: Have you ever seen YouTube clips in which a rural white guy is pulled over by a state trooper or a sheriff’s deputy and his ensuing freakout goes on for five, ten, sometimes twenty minutes, as the trooper stands by watching impassively. doing nothing. The clip usually ends with the cop quitely handing the rural white guy a ticket, sometimes politely informing him of when he needs to pay the fine or show up in court to contest the ticket. With that, the deputy or trooper drives away, leaving the rural white guy fuming, possibly still raging, but unharmed.

Have you noticed that they never post clips like that when it’s a black driver? There’s a reason for that- no black driver could do even 10% of what those rural whites do to cops when they “blow a gasket”- and not only is that the case black people often get killed with they’re doing all they can to cooperate with the cops.

Philando Castile, for example was shot for following the cops demands that he reach into his pocket and pull out his id- he had TOLD the cop his gun-the one he had a legal right to carry- was in the same pocket and he both therefore had no alternative but to reach into the same pocket to get the id the cop was demanding- the cop would have shot him if he’d refused to reach into that pocket.

This assumption that black people are an inherent danger to the police has to be addressed there’s a space that is created by the interaction between that and the personality types brought into policing by the military-to-police pipeline that causes a lot of avoidable deaths.