Two obstacles to ending police violence that don’t get anywhere near enough attention: the scourge of police unions—which behave more like organized crime families than labor organizations; and the sociopathic quackery of William Lewinski—who tells cops and courts across the country that science says they are dead if they don’t shoot first and fast.
Addenda
-
My introduction to the mind of William Lewinski can be found in my coverage of the public inquest into the police killing of James Jahar Perez, in which he touted thinking in terms of “action beats reaction” over the public’s “romantic notions of right and wrong”.
-
You will note that in later portions of his testimony, he did all he could to avoid questions of racism influencing whom officers would believe to be an imminent threat, going so far as to claim that even among civilians race’s impact upon thinking that people of color are more threatening is “not statistically significant”.
-
Interestingly, in that second part Lewinski states in the face of repeated questioning on how race or ethnicity factors into police violence that his Force Science Institute is awaiting funding to study that issue. This was in 2004; I wonder if they ever did.