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Valuable lessons were learned, but not the ones that the mother thought would be learned.
* She learned that millions of Black people haven't been "making it all up" about police mistreatment
* She learned why US Black folk almost never call the police, for any reason
* Her son learned that his own mom is not safe. Her lack of understanding of US racism makes her dangerous
* She's probably going to learn that this does not meet the definition of police misconduct
@mekkaokereke I’d love your (and others!) take on a related situation I had recently. Driving home with the family, entering a roundabout in our neighborhood and a Tesla from the oncoming side missed it, jumped the whole thing, hit a cement light pole and jumped itself 15 feet in the air. Visible airbag deployment, massive damage.
@mekkaokereke We pull off, tell my son to call 911 and report it in. A few minutes later, black dude stops. Immediately starts telling me I should ask the driver (young white woman) if she wanted me to call and I was “harassing her by making an unwanted call”. She was dazed, not making a ton of sense. I ask her and she says “it’s ok, yeah” but not assertively (she was absolutely showing signs of a concussion or impairment).
What’s your read? Was I wrong? If not, advice on deescalating?
These are the tough questions that I wish we didn't have to struggle with as a country. And yes, that is a legitimately tough question. There's no clear answer.
The calculus we have to do is: Is the probability of a police officer making this situation better, greater than the probability of a police officer making it worse?
Often after an accident, people are concussed,
Which means they will be slow to follow commands. With the wrong US cop, this can be fatal.
@mekkaokereke @jshirley
I have an additional question from the perspective of a non American: why would the police show up as a result of an emergency call for a traffic accident? Shouldn't it be an ambulance that shows up rather than a police car? Or am I misunderstanding how emergency services work in the US?
@swelljoe@mas.to@brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley in a lot of places police are considered a "first responder" for any 911 call. If there's a police unit closer than an ambulance or firetruck, you get police first, even if they have no training for the problem they're responding to. In America there's bipartisan agreement that police are superheroes who should be invited to every stressful situation, just in case someone needs to be shot or beaten.
@swelljoe Thus the rallying cry of “Defund the police”, as shorthand for “Stop dumping truckloads of tax dollars on cops and then expecting them to deal with every possible type of emergency, many of which they aren’t trained or suited for, and therefore apply violence when counterproductive.”
@brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley and, the worst thing about it is police don't want that job. They want the budget, of course, but they don't want to be a mental health responder, they just want to be the violent arm of the state. They don't want to be EMTs or fire fighters. They don't want to help people in dangerous drug situations. But, they'll take the money and respond to all of those things as crime. They're unwilling and unable to help, but by golly they're gonna cash that check.
@brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley I obviously don't like cops, but even my facebook friends from when I was a kid who became cops complain all the time about the stress of those kinds of calls. They don't want to be there, even though they want to be seen as helpful in every situation. There's a running theme of "we didn't sign up to be drug counselors". Then why are police unions insisting police should take the budget of every other first responder?
@swelljoe @brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley this reply sounds 
% correct to me. People in the US worhship the police, even though it doesn’t look that way online, we’re deeply entrenched in our adoration of the police.
@krismicinski @brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley water is invisible to fish. Cities spend 35-50% of their budget on police. The solution to every problem has to be "police" because there's no budget left for anything else.
@swelljoe @krismicinski @brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley By how much would you have to reduce the police budget to effectively bankrupt them? IE, leave only enough to pay the fines and judgments against the police but stop doing any police things?