I think we can see this kind of policing in effect with that young army officer who was stopped and pepper sprayed last December. Video of the incident has just been released after the army officer filed a lawsuit.

In the video from the very beginning of the stop, he appeared nervous, anxious to the point of being fearful. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but he was conditioned to be afraid because of his life experiences and probably because of constant news reports he’s seen of cops abusing Black men.

He told the cops he was afraid of them to try to explain his reluctance to comply with commands he knew they didn’t have a legal right to make.

But instead of de-escalating, the cops keyed in on his fear as something to be suspicious of. In the video, it seems like the more afraid he got, the more suspicious they became.

They pepper sprayed him, dragged him out of his truck, and beat him.

Then they let him go, because he hadn’t even committed a traffic violation let alone a crime. The cops' suspicions were completely ungrounded, even though this guy was probably displaying all the suspicion markers they had been taught to look for.

It’s hard for me to believe that standard police training doesn’t take into account the fact that Black people are very afraid of the police. Whoever designed the training, whoever put the material together to decide what kind of actions are suspicious, did a terrible job.

Whether the people who designed that material are just clueless or whether they are racist is kind of beside the point. The training, the police system itself, is horrendously racist.