I think that disarming the police would improve things even with no changes to civilian gun laws in the US. The US obviously has a severe civilian gun problem, but things are nowhere near bad enough to justify the trigger-happy attitude of police. The danger police face is drastically overblown, and homicide is a tiny portion of the danger police face on the job (more police deaths are from traffic accidents, health conditions, and suicide).

Policing is also becoming a lot safer, despite the rhetoric that things are getting worse and police are increasingly “under attack.”

For starters, we could reinforce the Batson rule [1] and mandate that any jury selected must mirror the racial and sexual makeup of its community, +/- 10%.

Having to prove racial discrimination in jury selection is an absurdly high bar, and usually impossible.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky

I understand what you're going for, but I think this idea would just reinforce the imaginary walls we use to group humans. The underlying idea is that X-people understand X-people, where X is some arbitrary group, but non-X-people lack the perspective they need. For example, we consider people with black skin to be a group, but not people with blue eyes, or people who can curl their tongues. Let's just work our way toward thinking people are just people instead.

The problem is that juries without a minority on them absolutely find minorities guilty at a higher rate than when one or more minorities are on the jury.

As the thread below noted, it's not fair to have historical conditions that produced winners (white men, countries with colonies, etc) and then make things more equal by saying "That's all over" and failing to recognize the results of previous injustice that are still embedded in our lives.

I could have offered other suggestions. I specifically said 'juries that roughly reflect their communities in racial and sexual senses'. I don't feel that's an unreasonably burdensome ask in pursuit of Justice.

http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D13...

Sure, but let’s not pretend the last millennium didn’t happen or shape the present in critical ways.

How is that in any way relevant? How does that at all mean that black people better understand black people, or justify explicitly selecting a jury on the basis of something arbitrary like skin color?

So build a post-racial world by building up racial barriers and continuing the "other"-ness of people with different skin colors? I'm not trying to be a dick or strawman you, that's the only thing I can get from this comment.

Build a post racial world by acknowledging that racial barriers exist independently of your thoughts, seek to weaken them and repair ongoing harm. The most powerful group playing pretend isn’t going to fix a damned thing. Trying to pretend that everything is better now... please explain how you see this working?

Edit: Or just downvote and move on, that says something too.

Note about HN down voting: when replying to a post, the parent poster cannot down vote you. The down vote you were awarded came from another commenter.

At this time, this comment has positive karma. At any rate, complaining about down voting distracts from your very good point.

Fair enough, I’ll keep that in mind going forward. Thanks for taking the time to teach.

You might have difficulty empaneling juries if this were a requirement. What makes a good jury goes well beyond racial or sexual makeup. Also, in many places the jury pools don't match the community at large. This approach would therefore have the effect of jeopardizing the right to jury trial without really alleviating injustice.

A more fruitful approach might be to try to make the pools more balanced. Getting more community participation in the justice system seems like a very good thing at multiple levels.

I think we'd do better to, at least at first, start solving some of the reasons why our jury demographics are so skewed. Stronger protections for workers that need time off (there should be no work hardship exemption and employers should be forced to give jurors full pay for the duration of the trial) would be a good start to not discriminate against poorer people who can't take off from work without struggling financially or getting fired. Also, criminal convictions shouldn't disqualify someone after they've served their sentences. The current system disqualifies a disproportionate number of minorities and that leaves predominantly-white juries to convict even more minorities...a self-reinforcing cycle. Also, the SCotUS needs to recommit to the Batson doctrine to prevent prosecutors from dismissing minority jurors based on race.

A right to a trial by a racially biased jury isn't much of a right in my opinion.

I'm all for throwing people in jail if they don't want to serve on a jury.