What is the root cause of police brutality?

Are police the sole problem?

I don't think that it can be stressed enough that there are proximate and root causes. When it comes to unjustified police killings, usually, the police aren't the root cause.

It's rather odd for people to be taking about systemic racism along with noble calls for justice with cops being the center of the issue for most people.

What most activists are getting right is that there is a systemic problem. What activists are getting wrong too often is focusing on the proximate causes rather than the root cause, which is the criminal justice system as a whole.

We talk about justice; but, who the hell should actually be in jail? Who should we actually be punishing while seeking justice?

It's not just about Floyd and Taylor etc.

Does anybody know the name Richard Paey? His story is similar to Breonna Taylor's though less tragic being that he survived. He's been in a wheelchair since 1985. In 2004, cops stormed his home in a no-knock raid for having too much pain medication. He served prison time for possession with intent to sell, a charge of which he was innocent, and the prosecutor on his case made it clear that he simply refuses to fail to rack up convictions.

Would Paey have justice if we arrested the cops? How about the overzealous prosecutor? In his case, I'd let them all go free if we could just punish all of the assholes who have been pushing the damn war on drugs. The cops never would have interacted with Paey or Taylor or many of the thousands of people who have been arrested if it weren't for people like Kamala Harris, not to mention Reagan Republicans and almost every other popular politician except for the likes of Ron Paul.

Harris alone sent 1,500 people to prison for marijuana. The people who are pushing the war on drugs, the people in government who have expanded our law books to the point that most of us commit three felonies a day without knowing it have far more blood on their hands than any cop.

This isn't to give cops a pass. Cops, for the most part, don't get to say, "I didn't sign up for this shit." Yeah, you did. If you're willing to raid a house with guns drawn because the guy has too much pain medicine, that's what you signed up for. If it isn't, you can quit.

Still, if you want justice, arresting the cops who killed innocent people is only scratching the surface. You want justice? Throw 99% of politicians out of office. Don't give me any bullshit about how you'll put up with Harris and Biden to get rid of Trump; it's people like you who are enabling the system which is the root cause of all of this injustice and death.

You're not going to see justice by shouting at cops in the streets. You'll see more justice by attacking the problem at its root: the government itself.