I looked at this thread, and unlike some other cases, it seems to just be dinging you for blanket picking out so many countries as "Middle East" in your response even if off at Gibraltar. While for some purposes the Asian part of Turkey is Middle East, when we refer to Middle East policy it's usually not included unless specifically the Syrian or Kurdish issues. (you wouldn't discuss Israeli technology as "Middle East", but Palestinian policy would be. Nor is the Syrian refugee problem in Europe usually characterized as "Middle East" it's Levant/Aegean, including Greece and other Balkan states before it gets to EU proper).

Under that context, i think the "racist" comment was chiding/tongue in cheek/only slightly serious re: anywhere Muslims exist (Detroit suburbs?), unlike other accusations (combined with justification & evidence, whether you agree or not) against rmrd for reverse racism 

NCD, I had lots of conversations after 4 seasons of The Wire, after reading Malcolm Gladwell's Talking with Strangers with insights into policing and the Sandra Bland harrassment/death, during the peaceful Take a Knee disrespected protest and trying to get Kap back, during and after the May 2020 black abuse trifecta and all during the riots destroying minority owned businesses and needed city infrastructure in general while getting some recognition of needed change. I remember posting about this secret detention center in Rahm's Chicago 6 years ago now. I've repeated numerous times the egregious case of police putting a suspect in the back of a van unsecured and whipsawing him to death, my own dealings with unfriendly police, countering misleading comments over defunding police.  And way too much over Trayvon Martin. 

I've been pretty consistent:

1) police need reform (discussions re the resistance of unions and Gladwell's "Kansas City" focused policing model, et al) - more community-focused, less militarization/occupation force feel, limits on abuse vs apprehending criminals (some additional use of mental care experts but practical limits to where & how they're effective). Better training vs punishment?

2) people do horrid things, esp in the ghettos or projects or however we call them now, so we still need the police - especially as murders of innocents skyrocket

3) policing is inherently a dickish difficult job, and it tends to attract power-hungry Ramboish people, which kind of sucks except often those are the physical go-getters that are able to do the difficult work, so aside from some less stereotyped balanced applicants, it's our basic mix, and the trick is to decide how much Ramboism is too extreme, how to limit the number of outrageous abusive cases plus shift the attitudes so normal encounters don't escalate as bad and de-escalate better (i.e. success is not just arrests, but also problems resolved or disbanded peacefully).

4) and the money for all this - much more, not less. (AA posted some huge costs on policing budget, and then we realized perhaps 1/3 was pensions, healthcare, etc, not just direct policing costs)

5) but discussions around all this tends to drift towards edge cases and wraps it in extremes - all the little darlings walking around minding their own business abused by the big bad police, just get rid of the police and especially black folk can go back to their peaceful existence.

6) except black folk overall recognize the necessary evil and have much the same position - more polite but effective police, keep the neighbors safe without abusing people too much. Keep the gangbangers and addicts and murderers under control, but don't make us all *too* much criminals.

7) and from the KC lesson, not every urban area is East St Louis, not every police encounter needs a SWAT team - more (but not too many)  differentiation/classes of encounters and appropriate response. Police got militarized with surplus Iraq equipment, which largely hasn't helped (but would have Jan 6)

But it's gotten crazy out there. Where you might expect a calm neighborhood a few years ago, now every suburban encounter has the chance of a gun as well. Mobile phones and wearable cameras are great, but they also overstate percentages and uploaded stoke the outrage *too* fast for reasonable controls, only ass-saving knee-jerk rash reaponses. And meanwhile, there's no video for the death of a 2-year-old by a stray bullet, no marching advocates. Better to be a junkie passing fake bills or a manic homicidal teenager with a knife than an innocent toddler or usually an old person. (there seems to be some crossover now, where an old white demented victim is added to concern of the woke crowd. But that will pass. Still, a mentally ill guy sleeping in the subway needs better handling than extreme manhandling or even death - but how to arrange such response with current funds, in this case mental health personnel if recognized quick enough, etc, is tricky)

Women tend to be more vulnerable. Aside from massage parlors, they suffer abuse in normal walks of life, including walking to their car, out at night, or encountering a drunk or high husband/partner at home, esp. but not only with a gun. But if you count up the recent news stories the last year, the primary concern would be being an Asian female in a massage parlor. See how that works? And the Orlando shooting got misplaced to be anti-gay when the guy was just looking for any (assumed to be straight) club to shoot up, just after a few missteps happened to pick a gay one. Does it help gays to feel that they were specifically the targets? Doubtful. Was the massage parlor killer "targeting Asians" - doubtful - he was likely targeting the "sleazy" women who fulfilled his religious conflicted desires. But Race and LGBT paranoia sells. Even the famous Matthew Shephard case was more about him selling meth/opioids and stealing his stash if money, not his sexual proclivities - but saying the truth destroys too many feel-bad narratives, so the fake story has persisted and made into movies and folklore, so it's truthy enough, and people can make policy to address faulty data. Brilliant, eh?

Huffpost (inheriting The Root editors recently) posted paeans to the "innocent" George Floyd and Mh'kia(sp?), perpetuating the myth that personal behavior has nothing to do with overwhelming black-victim abuse by police. Ignored in this framing is a) the substance of The Talk that every child of color gets to be careful and don't do certain things that might prompt abuse, b) the numbers of whites as victims or recipients depending of similar police response.

No, bad behavior doesn't warrant death, but it does increase the odds - especially if you're in a bad part of town, but as seen by recent Waffle House and airport lounge craziness, bizarre fights with possible murders can now happen anywhere. And since 2nd Amendment nuts have grown greatly since my childhood (and just average citizen crackers of whatever race with guns), expect it to get worse.

AA has been documenting much of the criminality and boy is there a lot to keep track of, balancing the much fewer police overreach cases we see - her effort helps restore some of the balance to our perception, countering the "Availability" effect in Kahnemann's excellent descriptions of psychological frameworks and general understanding.

So, do we have anything new and informative to add to all this?