Charlotte

[zoogs]

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/21/12999366/keith-lamont-scott-north-carolina-police-shooting

Historian Heather Ann Thompson explained the simmering anger that boiled over into violence over the first couple nights:

In short, Charlotte is one of the wealthiest cities in the country, but this prosperity hasn't touched overwhelmingly black West and Northeast Charlotte and it is one of the most heavily policed. And the police don't spend much energy policing throwing people up against cars on a regular basis to search them for drugs in overwhelmingly white South Charlotte.

And the excessive and aggressive policing of only Charlotte's poorest and blackest neighborhoods leads there, as it does in every other city in the country, to the killing of citizens by the police. It has led there, as it has elsewhere to outrage.

As historians have told me, this is what leads to urban uprisings and riots. It's typically not just one event it's a confluence of factors, some of which may not be readily apparent to observers. "People participate in this type of event for a real reason," Darnell Hunt, a UCLA professor who's studied the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, said. "It's not just people taking advantage. It's not just anger and frustration at the immediate or proximate cause. It's always some underlying issues."

If we could all just go back to the comfort of our above-average privilege lives largely untouched by police brutality...

Maybe we'd all agree that no empathy should be given for those who don't have this option -- unless they agree to accept their station in perpetuity and shut up about it all.

Hopefully, we can understand that things don't boil over without having simmered for a long time.