<i>...at root an issue of social class rather than race directly.</i><p>I agree with much of the rest of your comment, and in the past I would have agreed with this as well. However, police are not inherent to the human condition. (We haven&#x27;t always had police, and with luck we&#x27;ll be rid of them soonish.) When police were created, it was largely for basically racist purposes, even if the &quot;races&quot; under consideration in many locales were &quot;Irish&quot; and &quot;Italian&quot;. (Further south, however...) People would have objected to a police force imposed on everyone, so the trick was to impose it mostly on those who didn&#x27;t control the public purse or the courts.<p>A society that relies on relentless, capricious violence to compel large swathes of the population to accept their assigned roles is not pareto-optimal. We will improve when we change our laws with the goal of reducing the necessity of policing.