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I claim in casual interactions all the time that we clearly left schools, etc, closed for way too long in 2020-21 and, depending where you live, 2022. Generally, everyone agrees that stuff was way too strict, especially for kids - certainly, I am not ostracized for this. Although lockdowns were not necessarily a clear "woke" position, they were very much the prevailing dogma.
It is also now very possible to criticize Black Lives Matter with the benefit of hindsight; it accomplished nothing, and the leaders of the movement seem to have predictably used it to enrich themselves. You could probably even critique the movement on its merits (e.g., it is probably true that American police resort to lethal force too quickly, but it is much less clear that they are particularly racist about it).
Even though I never thought the shooting of Michael Brown was racially motivated, around the time of that shooting I probably would have agreed with you on this point. I'm no longer so sure. Comparisons between police shootings in the US and peer nations (with the intent of demonstrating how trigger-happy American cops are) are hopelessly confounded by the fact that the US is an objectively more violent country, with an unusually large black underclass. If I recall correctly, even the difference in per capita police killings between the US and Canada is not half as large as progressives would have us believe.
Bodycams did a lot to dissuade this incorrect notion. We have literal video proof that the overwhelming majority of the time the police shoot a suspect, it's because the suspect pulled a gun or knife. There was never any such epidemic of police being quick to shoot people.
Just spitballing, but:
Do the bodycams perhaps affect the behavior of policemen?
Was there perhaps an epidemic of bodycams suffering unfortunate damage and the footage becoming unrecoverable in cases of violence?
Most likely not. The rate of justified-vs-unjustified shootings is about the same before and after bodycams. Moreover, there are still plenty of policemen who commit unjustified shootings knowing full well they are being recorded.
No? To my knowledge there have been vanishingly few cases of this, if it has ever happened.
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