The most unusual point he makes is that plenty of police shootings of unarmed whites occur every year. Nobody much notices or appears to care, it isn’t part of an on-going race narrative.
He identifies three factors which exacerbate the situation. First, that the U.S. is a huge country population-wise, the third most populous in the world. Therefore lots of everything happens here because there are so many people doing - good and bad - what people do.
Second, he writes “America is a gun country” which makes the life of police here different from that almost anywhere else. Most places police do not expect to encounter armed citizens, “That’s not true in America, where a cop gets shot almost every day.” With police looking for guns every time they stop someone, mistaking other things - a wallet or phone - for a handgun will be more frequent.
Third, these days everyone has a cell phone, which means everyone has a movie camera in their pocket. Whatever goes down now can be on the evening news tonight. See Hughes’ conclusion:
Combine all three of these observations and one arrives at a grim conclusion: as long as we have a non-zero rate of deadly shootings (a virtual certainty), and as long as some shootings are filmed and go viral (also a virtual certainty), then we may live in perpetual fear of urban unrest for the foreseeable future.Another good reason to live, work, and shop in non-urban places, not that another reason is in any way needed.
