When is the outlook ever good?

I spent two years, not daily or even weekly, but often enough, sitting in a car in downtown Clayton, Missouri (St. Louis County, so one of the several hundred municipalities that surround the city), waiting for my wife to get off work so I could drive her home (I was in seminary at the time in nearby Webster Groves, MO).  I took to noticing when the police pulled a car over for a traffic violation (never a high speed chase, sirens roaring, lights flashing.  I'd just look around and there was a cop leaning in the window of a car.).  I began to see a pattern:  the cop was always white, the driver was always black.

Mind you, there weren't that many blacks driving the streets of Clayton.  They sort of stuck out there. (St. Louis city and county separated from each other way back when.  The county de facto segregated, and the city is where most of the African-Americans live.  Seeing blacks in the city of St. Louis is no surprise.  In the county, they tend to stand out.).  But every time a car was stopped, the driver was black.  At first I thought it was just me noticing, the way I now drive a black car and suddenly every car on the road is black.  It was always a common color, but now I notice.  I'd come to some awareness of the way blacks are treated in America:  one of my professors, a gentle, soft-spoken, kind man, broke my heart telling me in flat, professional tones, how he was always followed by store clerks in the department stores.  They latched on to him when he entered their department, and followed him until he left.  I learned about other indignities of being black, mostly from a fellow student who taught me much about what it means to be black in America.  So when I noticed the first black driver/white cop, I start keeping an informal count.  I soon found that there weren't that many traffic stops, but they always involved a black driver and a white cop.

So this:

"You get this meme of, 'Blacks are shot two times, two and a half times more,' and everybody just goes, 'Oh, yeah,'" Yates said. "They're not making sense here. You have to come into contact with law enforcement for that to occur.

...is utter bullshit.  You don't have to "come into contact with law enforcement."  If you're black in America, law enforcement will come into contact with you.  I know, we've all learned that by now, with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and just too damned many people, we've all finally had enough.  Will, except, clearly not ALL of us.  Some of us are still protecting our identity as "I'm not a racist (but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one!)."

There are already stories of angry white people driving cars into protestors and even shooting them, only to be apprehended peacefully and easily by police, with no further gunfire or life-threatening choke holds or other physical altercations.  Gee, is that because black people are "violent"?  If so, then why are most of the groups being blamed for trying to incite violence in the protest white racist groups?

NEW - Despite Trump administration assertions that antifa has hijacked protests sparked by death of George Floyd, new federal intelligence points to white supremacists & other would-be domestic terrorists - makes little mention of antifa https://t.co/AoRKCbn4aB @JoshMargolin

— John Santucci (@Santucci) June 10, 2020

Somehow these people don't have as much violent "contact with law enforcement" as blacks do.  Why is that?  Maybe the same reason violence receded in the protest marches as the violence of the police receded?

I know, I know, preaching to the choir.  But it gets worse, because apparently the police are entitled to shoot blacks on the street, summary judgment style, because every crime merits the death penalty where blacks are involved.  But rejoice, because while they could (should?) do that, police show restraint!

"All of the research says we're shooting African-Americans about 24% less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed."

So, has this guy lost his job yet?  A Texas State University employee called the George Floyd protestors "monkeys" and lost her job; but this is Oklahoma:

TPD Capt. Richard Meulenberg said Tuesday afternoon Chief Wendell Franklin was not yet aware of Yates' remarks on the show, and Franklin would determine whether TPD condones what Yates said.

"Everybody's got a right to their opinion. Obviously, he being a major with the Tulsa Police Department, it carries some weight that he has his opinion, and we'll have to just kind of go through this. I mean, I can't speak upon the thing that he talked about here because I don't have the data. I can't refute or substantiate what it is that he said here," Meulenberg said.

Meulenberg said under TPD policy, Yates, a division commander, had latitude to communicate with the public in various forms, including through a radio show or podcast.

"Is he speaking for himself? Or is he speaking for the department? The way I interpret what he has said is that he is speaking for himself," Meulenberg said.

I'd say Yates has job security, wouldn't you?