I'll explain.
Ever since I was about 15 years old, police have treated me like a suspect. I have been stopped, patted down, searched and generally harassed in the vast majority of my interactions with police.
On one occasion, I was walking from a friend's house back to mine and I watched a cop do a u-turn in the middle of a highway to pull up and start questioning me. I have been pulled over because it "looked like the air in your rear passenger tire is low" and I had two units behind me with cops peeking into my car while they ran my information.
Just about six months ago I was pulled over for "excessive lane changing". I asked the officer if he saw that I changed lanes to get around someone who was turning and that I had to return to that lane because approximately a quarter of a mile later, I was going to making my own turn. He responded that he had been following me for a few miles and I had made other lane changes. I was on my way home from work and I had things to do. I signaled before every lane change and I did nothing dangerous or reckless. It was a pretextual stop.
About two years ago, I was stopped while riding my bicycle. The officer who stopped me is someone that I have known since elementary school. When he saw that it was me, his demeanor was nice and friendly. I can only imagine how he would have acted if I had been a stranger.
In every one of those encounters, had I reached too quickly for my wallet, I would have likely ended up dead.
My experiences are not unique and these are not the worst. A lot of the black, brown and increasingly poor white guys with whom I grew up have had similar things happen.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that the antipathy that police officers experience is primarily of their own making.
This isn't the first account I've heard of this. I personally haven't been targeted, but every interaction with a LEO seems to be shit. Where I am being treated as a criminal by default. I had a traffic stop a few months ago and the LEO had their hand on their gun while having the conversation. WTF.
I've also had a few DWBs (Driving While Black, which is ironic cause my friends tell me I drive like an old grandma, adhere to the speed limit etc). Keep in mind that the only ticket I’ve ever gotten was for 42 MPH in a 35 MPH Zone, and the cop lied, I was doing 37 MPH. Also, the cop kept me there an hour while he run my license and repeatedly asked me questions from his car over a bullhorn (‘what do you do’ etc) to humiliate me.
DWB in Boston Metro area was a frequent occurence for me until a blockbuster Boston Globe/Northeastern University study in 2003 showed how prevalent it was and forcing change. The funny thing, Boston Globe profiled one cop over 2 months and showed how he tended to give white drivers warnings but gave black drivers tickets for lesser infractions, and his excuse was essentially that ‘blacks gave him attitude’.
http://www.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/tickets/010603.sh...
An officer's pattern in two months might not reflect a career's work. But one patrolman's decisions shed some light on how gaps in ticketing can emerge.
At his speed trap on VFW Parkway in West Roxbury on Monday, April 2, 2001, Officer William G. Knecht wasn't guessing the speeds of cars headed toward him. He had the newest instrument for clocking motorists, a LIDAR gun. But his day was filled with moments of leniency and of toughness.
At 9:30 a.m., Knecht wrote a $115 ticket to a 35-year-old black woman from Boston, for going 14 m.p.h. over in a 35 zone. Five minutes later, the officer clocked at the same speed an 80-year-old white man from Medfield, and gave him a written warning.
The next day, Tuesday, back on the VFW Parkway, Knecht warned a 33-year-old white woman from Boston at 9:25 a.m., after he clocked her driving 16 m.p.h. over in a 35 m.p.h. zone.
Exactly 25 minutes later, Knecht ticketed a 28-year-old black man, also from Boston, though he was driving slower -- 15 m.p.h. over in the 35 m.p.h. zone.
In the two months studied, Knecht wrote 105 citations. He ticketed 84 percent of the minority speeders, and 72 percent of the whites. He ticketed men and women equally. And the older the driver, the more leniency Knecht showed, especially if the older driver was white.
...
"There are always mitigating circumstances in a stop," Knecht said in an interview. "Anything could be said or could happen. Attitudes, people talking back to you. The circumstances change with each individual driver. But for most cops I know, race has nothing to do with it.”
So in order to buy Officer Knecht assumptions we have to assume that every black person he stopped gave him attitude (which any black person with any sense of self-preservation would not be likely to do).
We also had a disconcerting incident in Brookline MA (2004). My wife (fiancee at the time), who is white lived there, and we were once walking hand in hand. A cop car drove by, and then pulled a sharp tire screeching U-turn and came right up to us, almost onto the sidewalk. The white cop looks at my wife and asks ‘Are you OK?’. She says yes, and the cop fixes me with a glare that could have killed, and then roared off in disgust. We were gob-smacked, but not really surprised.
Not all my cop interactions have been bad (I was rear ended on Wellington Circle in Everett and the MA State Trooper who responded and sorted out everything was incredibly efficient and polite), but that has been the exception. When dealing with cops, I know that anything I do/say (or even the initial stop) is colored by race. What would be simple assertiveness from someone white of my same socioeconomic status would be seen as being uncooperative/suspicious coming from me. As a black person, I cannot operate under the mistaken assumption that the cops are actually there for my safety/benefit.
One time, I was speeding and got a ticket for it but the cop was really cool about it. I was in Cadiz county Ohio and I was doing 75MPH. I was in a 65 zone and then it dropped to 55 and I failed to notice the sign. A cop clocked me doing 75 and started following me. He waiting until two miles later to pull me over where the speed limit was back at 65MPH. He was very professional about the whole thing and I have no complaints about him.
Unfortunately, not every interaction goes well.
I know that I have these and I suspect that you do too. Little verbal clues that I drop to indicate to the officer that I know what's going on but I'm not going to say it overtly and give him a reason to pretend to be offended at the suggestion.
A few examples: When a cop asks "Do you know why I pulled you over?", I say "I have a pretty good idea, officer but I am not going to say it out loud."
"Where are you headed?" gets met with "I'm on my way to obey the law, officer."
They also like to ask "Do you have any drugs in the car?" and my response is always "No more than you do, officer."
When asked for my license, "I need to reach into my right front pocket to retrieve my wallet, officer." and I wait until he indicates that I should reach for it.
I have found these to be responses that deescalate the situation.
They're not direct challenges to his authority so he doesn't feel threatened and they allow me to get through the interaction with my sense of dignity intact. I know what's happening and just as importantly, he now knows that I know.
By chance, is your wife blonde? I have found that I get a more negative reaction if I am in the company of a blonde woman.
I don't know how you come to this conclusion from the data you're citing.
You seem to be claiming that LEOs kill more people because more people attack LEOs with guns; i.e. you're arguing that LEOs kill more people in self-defense. But you're far from proving that point.
In fact, the easiest way to prove this point would be to have data on police shootings: if every officer had body-cam footage of every time they fired in self-defense, your argument would be proven. Yet the majority of police officers are resistant to wearing body cams. If LEOs are really firing in defense of self or others, why are they so opposed to proving it?
One could make the opposite argument: that people who use guns against LEOs are doing so in self-defense. The fuck-the-police attitude is equally explained by this: if the police are murdering your fathers, brothers, and friends, of course you're going to thing "fuck the police". And this would explain why LEOs in the US are so resistant to body cams: if they are the aggressors in these situations, then they aren't going to want footage showing their crimes.
I think that the evidence better supports the latter argument. But of course, we're short on evidence: we're a long way from proving either point. This is why we need more evidence. If, as you claim, LEOs are acting in self-defense, the evidence will only exonerate them.