<HTML>In a message dated 4/12/01 6:00:25 PM Mountain Daylight Time, noamish@home.com writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">I'd say the resulting double standard is racist, but the individual police officers who directly perform the actions that lead to these double standards usually are not.</BLOCKQUOTE> The results of inquiries into police behavior in LA, NYC, Des Moines, Chicago, and most southern cities seem to answer this assertion. <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> A police officer may, off-duty, be a full-on social materialist and realize that blacks commit more crimes because of the parralellism of race and class. </BLOCKQUOTE> What, exactly, are the odds of this?  The odds that a materialist would ever become a cop, or that a cop would ever become a materialist? That doesn't mean that on duty he will treat a potential danger as <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">"the exploited." That's not his job. The very fact that blacks are the exploited class makes them, from a police officer's standpoint, more dangerous. One of the deeper hip-hop expressions goes "don't hate the player, hate the game." Only by discussing and destroying the causes of racial inequality can you eliminate this double standard.</BLOCKQUOTE> I have heard anarchists, trotskyists, and liberals debate this question in bars, meeting halls, and while running from the cops.  The idea that we can divorce our feelings or strategies from the racist attitudes of cops is overly optimistic and ignores the fact that cops are taught a very specific ideology, in training and through cultural initiation.  Even non-white cops are taught to be white supremacists.   stannard</HTML>