“Black people” aren't an organization.

Police are (well, police departments are organizations), and those organizations act on behalf of the public.

Systemic police abuse for which there is no effective public accountability and systemic correction isn't the private acts of individual wrongdoers, it's violence by and with the at least tacit support of the public. That's why the focus exists: responsible citizenship.

I'm not sure I understand your comment correctly.

Are you saying that black communities should be reasonably crime-free before they can expect institutions not to systematically discriminate them and enact retributionless, extralegal violence upon them?

What I'm saying is that when black people kill more than ten times more black people than cops kill black people, somebody is not wrong to ask why the focus should only be on the cops.

Again, the focus isn't only on cops. There's plenty of time, effort, money, etc. spent on minimizing "normal" violence and crime. Society is quite capable of doing more than one thing at once, even if the media likes to focus.

You can't realistically claim that the focus isn't on the police right now.

And they're not even wrong. Policing in the US is in serious need of reform.

But you're doing the thing you're saying you're not doing. If we can do both things at once, then why shouldn't we do both things at once? Why are we dismissing people who want to do the other thing?

As far as I'm aware, none of the efforts to curb normal violence and crime ("Problem A") have declined. The only thing that's changed is that more people are joining the chorus to fix policing ("Problem B").

Nobody is going to dismiss you for wanting to fix Problem A. But that's a very different thing than intruding on conversations about Problem B to tell people to focus on Problem A instead.

The Black Lives Matter movement is explicitly about dealing with systemic racism and state violence against Black people. If you want to contribute to solving other issues (and there are many other issues), go for it, but I don't see what that has to do with Black Lives Matter.

AnthonyMouse says >"when black people kill more than ten times more black people than cops kill black people "<

It is worse than that: black people murder more than ten times more black people than all white people murder black people:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Again, how is that relevant? Are you saying that black people somehow deserve no protection by police because "they should get their house in order" first? (Whatever that should mean)

You bring up a good point: far more black people are killed by other black people than are killed by cops (white or black). But we don't hear about it, demonstrations are rare and news is non-existent.

It would be a significant improvement if black people quit killing their own. And it would save far, far more lives than were all police to never kill another black person. But it is completely the responsibility of blacks to quit killing other blacks.

And 40% of police officers inflict domestic violence on their families, yet we give them weapons, a license to use violence to back up their authority, and release them into the streets, where they can do... Pretty much anything they want, without legal or social consequences.

Without consequences is the important bit here.

Because one of those groups is a set of criminals that will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the other one of those groups is a set of government agents with a history of not being held accountable for their actions.

There's never been a lack of focus on intra-community violence. It's been the go-to "whataboutism" for ... ever. It's also not relevant to the question of why government authorities should be exempt from the consequences of violating the law.

> Because one of those groups is a set of criminals that will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the other one of those groups is a set of government agents with a history of not being held accountable for their actions.

You could say that about both groups. There is a cultural tradition in the relevant communities of not talking to the police, which causes disproportionately many of those murderers to get away with it, and the murder solve rate in the US isn't all that high to begin with.

You tend to get more murders in proportion to how much the perpetrators expect to get away with it, so the numbers are telling a story there.

> There's never been a lack of focus on intra-community violence. It's been the go-to "whataboutism" for ... ever.

Apparently not to a sufficient extent to actually address the problem. If you don't want people to keep pointing to it then get there to not be something to point to.

> It's also not relevant to the question of why government authorities should be exempt from the consequences of violating the law.

The officers in question are facing homicide charges, as it should be.

You're just begging the question in limiting it to government authorities. If Black Lives Matter then shouldn't all of them?

> There is a cultural tradition in the relevant communities of not talking to the police,

A direct consequence of the long history of police racism, abuse,and complicity of the police in abuse originating outside of the police.

So fixing the police is key to both sides of the problem.

Thank god this rubbish isn't how the legal system functions in any civilized country.

Who is talking about the legal system? This is the political system.

The political system doesn't work like this either. All governments and political bodies are capable of dealing with multiple issues simultaneously. As far as I'm aware, none will deny you your rights or restitution just because "hey look, some people who look like you have done bad things, too."

> All governments and political bodies are capable of dealing with multiple issues simultaneously.

If that were true there would be equally prominent protests and proposed legislation on both issues simultaneously.

> As far as I'm aware, none will deny you your rights or restitution just because "hey look you've done bad things, too."

You're talking about the legal system again.

In what way does being capable of considering multiple issues simultaneously require protest for all of these issues, or equal prominence for all of these issues? I have no idea what point you're trying to make, really.

> In what way does being capable of considering multiple issues simultaneously require protest for all of these issues, or equal prominence for all of these issues?

Because that's what considering means. It takes more than just declaring that something is under consideration while not really paying attention to it or doing anything about it.

We don't actually consider all issues at once equally. That's why it makes sense to question their relative importance.

You're assuming that care for every issue is expressed in the same way, and also that whether or not something makes front page news or gets people riled up is a fair measure of how much they care, as opposed to a measure of simply how flashy or exciting that issue is.

> that whether or not something makes front page news or gets people riled up is a fair measure of how much they care

That seems like a pretty good metric for whether the political system is grappling with something.

What metric are you proposing as an alternative? Does it show a different result?

The political system is always grappling with lots of things simultaneously. Some of those things will always be getting more publicity and arousing more anger than others at any point in time, but so what? That doesn't necessarily mean anyone's moving the needle on those issues to a higher degree than on other issues.

I'd put it like this: The insitutionalized legal and political system can address lots of things simultaneously. The public attention (news cycle etc) has strong limits how many topics it can consider simultaneously. The focus of public attention is also important because it influences the political system (democracy and all).

Currently the focus is on systemic racism and police violence. Trying to move focus to violence between blacks would absolutely take resources away from fighting racism (which is often the intention of those bringing up the topic).

What are the numbers? Ten times as many black people die from black-on-black homocide as police killings?

Even if it were just twice as many- I think it would be reasonable to wonder, if you were being utilitarian, what approach would save the most lives.

An uncharitable reading of your comment might interpret that fighting racism is so relatively important it's worth sacrifing some net black lives for it.

Is there any evidence that reducing the public's focus on fighting racism will increase its focus on fighting black-on-black crime, reducing poverty, reforming prisons, etc.?

I doubt it. Some issues are great for publicity, and others are much more difficult to get into the hyper-competitive limelight. In fact, I'd bet that there are spillover effects where attention and donations to other pro-Black causes increases while BLM is in the spotlight.

Maybe. I think one problem is the idea of racism itself, which has at least three meanings:

intent (i.e. if you want to genocide [race], you're a racist),

facts/beliefs (you could imagine someone with no hatred or ill-intent who believed things about e.g. population statistics- you might call those beliefs racist even if there was no 'racist intent' behind them)

And outcomes (something ends up disproportionately impacting one racial group, not necessarily with any racial animus involved at any point. You might call this structual racism).

If we had different words for these three things, I think it would make it a lot easier for people to agree to get stuff done. As it is, they all get mixed up- and an approach that assumes racism no.1 won't help 2 or 3, or might exarcerbate things. If I had to guess, I'd say a lot more of what's going on is 3 than 1, but I could be wrong.

(And calling 3 'structural racism' probably won't do the job, because it's that's too easily conflatable with 1, so a lot of people won't support it.)

I don't know. I'm personally interested to see what'll happen if more police precints get abandoned/burned down, and people set up more anarchist/warlord-controlled areas across the U.S.