It continues to boggle my mind when I see police shooting fleeing people—especially when multiple officers unload their weapons at once.
As you noted, in modern police culture, deadly force is justified not by any objective threat but by the officer’s perception of danger—“I feared for my life.” Critical theory in the 1990s emphasized that structural harm is invisible except from the standpoint of the harmed, while trauma studies elevated subjective experience—especially of speech, symbols, and microaggressions—as the primary evidence of injury. Since police culture is embedded in the wider culture—everyone’s watching the same revenge porn—why should we be surprised that the officer’s feelings now define the threshold of threat?
Perfectly said, we need a complete restructuring of criminal justice, it's not bad apples or certain policies, it's the culture and the system that created that culture.
I agree, but let's not stop with criminal justice. We need a complete restructing of a society based on violence, greed, guilt and victimhood. And we have stop exporting these things to the rest of the world via American 'soft power,' aka cultural imperialism.
It continues to boggle my mind when I see police shooting fleeing people—especially when multiple officers unload their weapons at once.
As you noted, in modern police culture, deadly force is justified not by any objective threat but by the officer’s perception of danger—“I feared for my life.” Critical theory in the 1990s emphasized that structural harm is invisible except from the standpoint of the harmed, while trauma studies elevated subjective experience—especially of speech, symbols, and microaggressions—as the primary evidence of injury. Since police culture is embedded in the wider culture—everyone’s watching the same revenge porn—why should we be surprised that the officer’s feelings now define the threshold of threat?
Perfectly said, we need a complete restructuring of criminal justice, it's not bad apples or certain policies, it's the culture and the system that created that culture.
I agree, but let's not stop with criminal justice. We need a complete restructing of a society based on violence, greed, guilt and victimhood. And we have stop exporting these things to the rest of the world via American 'soft power,' aka cultural imperialism.
And maybe some better movies too :)
Peace,
TP