I'm not defending the officers, their judgement was clearly flawed when they chose to open fire as having been discharged the taser would only have been usable as a contact weapon so they could have just as easily closed in and used pepper spray to restrain him. But when you look at how incidents like this are being covered in the media it seems like there is a narrative in place to say that in America cops are racist. Yes, what happened to both Brooks and George Floyd was tragic, but so was what happened to Tony Tempa who died after being cuffed and pinned on the ground by Dallas police officers for almost 14 minutes, or Justine Damond who was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer who already had 3 formal complaints against him as well as being sued by a woman he allegedly assaulted whilst on duty.
There are over 300,000 police officers across America (or there were, if the current reports about officers resigning or taking early retirement are even half accurate then that number is going to be drastically reduced) and they have somewhere between 3 and 5 million interactions with the general public each year. With that many interactions, if there as institutional racism with in the force then wouldn't if follow that there would be far more cases like Brooks and Floyd appearing in the media.
There has always been a bias in the media with certain outlets being either on the left or right of the spectrum but it's become far more overt and toxic over the last few years and that is going a long way to fuelling the feelings of discontent that lead to the riots and protests we have seen once something occurs that has lit the blue touch paper. Even over here if you look at the news concerning the protests they tend to gloss over the fact that around 40 officers have been injured, some severely, during the BLM protests but seem to have no problem in going straight to right wing yobs causing damage and injuring people. I have no doubts that there have been right wing knuckle draggers doing just that but until there is an acceptance that this has happened on both sides and responsibility is taken I can't see this improving any.
Personally as far as the police themselves are concerned I think a large part of the problem is down to training and having a single large national academy that is regularly assessed and audited could go a long way towards fixing that issue.
