Here’s the perspective of a former white supremacist, about his frequent encounters with the police during his teens and early 20s,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/06/i-was-bad-guy-my-whiteness-meant-i-was-never-threat/
I was a violent, white-power skinhead for eight years of my youth during the 1980s and 1990s in Chicago. In those days, encounters with police were commonplace for me. Cops frequently harassed me for getting in fights and pushed me around when I made their shift more difficult. They threatened to make me take my dirty business elsewhere. They weren’t wrong. Though I feared getting locked up for the violence I was involved with and promoting, not once did I fear that my life was in danger. Why? Even though I was a “bad guy,” I was a white man in America.
It was simply outside of his sphere of understanding that, rather than cautioning him or even arresting him, an officer might decide to inflict some “street justice” upon him, or that he would be “misunderstood” to be posing a danger to officer safety merely by virtue of his haircut, tattoos and choice of clothes. As he indicates, he at times received comments from officers that were supportive of his racism.
We can picture scenarios in which white people have to respond to police who are responding to calls that suggest that they may be trying to break into their own homes or cars, but do we picture the possibility that after confirming ownership the officer might arrest a white person for not being sufficiently polite or deferential during the encounter? We can picture white people being pulled over by the police on thin or pretextual cause, but can we picture it happening to somebody who is plainly middle class, half a dozen or more times in a year? We can picture white people who are jogging at an odd time or in an odd place being briefly questioned by the police, but can we picture it happening on a regular basis for people jogging in their own neighborhoods during the daytime? We can picture a potentially unpleasant exchange with an officious security officer or self-appointed neighborhood watchman but, if met with violence or gunfire from such a person, can we picture the police shrugging it off, “It looks like self-defense to me”?
Whether one can rationalize discriminatory policing, policing that is intended to target and inconvenience law-abiding persons, that is intended to be oppressive of people who commit trivial offenses, based upon the notion that their skin color matches a demographic that is statistically more likely to be associated with crime – whether we deem such an approach “race-based” or “racist” – the net effect is to significantly increase the number of police encounters (which inherently means the number of encounters in which things can go wrong), and to create and exacerbate a bad relationship between the police and the policed. It’s all the worse when the heavy-handed tactics endorsed by somebody like cop-worshipper and bootlicker Heather MacDonald have been proved ineffective at actually reducing crime, and where (as indicated by the lack of a call for similar measures, for example, to reduce traffic offenses) the impetus for recommending those tactics is the race of the targeted population as opposed to where the offenses occur.
