What Someone Wrote on This Cop's Box of Donuts is Causing Controversy
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The national debate over police brutality and race was reignited on Thursday — and this time it's all because of a phrase written on a box of donuts.
Flickr/joeymanley - flic.kr
It all started when a police officer in a community near Atlanta bought a box of donuts at a Krispy Kreme donut shop, but when he went to pick them up he found "Black Lives Matter" written on the box, according to the Associated Press. Krispy Kreme issued an apology, and the local police department told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the "behavior was egregious."
Blue Lives Matter - bluelivesmatter.blue
A debate about the box of donuts erupted on social media, and people on both sides had passionate opinions.
Some people were outraged that "Black Lives Matter" was written on the box.
Others were confused as to why stating that black lives deserve equal treatment would be so controversial.
The Blue Lives Matter website even made a post about the "Black Lives Matter" donut box, apparently including a picture of the box in question.
The post claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement is based on "misinformation and lies" which "spread a false narrative that police officers shoot black men because of the color of their skin."
The post concedes that black people are disproportionately shot by police more often than white people, but insists that the victims had done something to deserve it.
"The percentage of black males shot by law enforcement is disproportionate to the percentage of the population that is made up of black males, but to assume that this is evidence of racial bias, you’d have to expect that officer-involved shootings are random acts of violence, rather than prompted by an attack on somebody’s life," the post reads.
AP Image/Rolf Kremming - apimages.com
This is a difficult assumption to make, considering police themselves write the reports on police shootings, a focal point of accountability efforts and calls for increased use of officer body cameras.
ATTN: previously wrote about the common self defense argument of officers claiming to fear for their lives in police shootings cases, even in Walter Scott's death where video showed him running away from the officer.
Scott Davidson/Wikimedia - wikimedia.org
The Blue Lives Matter post also cites a New York Times article about a Harvard study as evidence that police bias doesn't exist, but the study actually found mixed results on police bias.
"A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police," wrote New York Times journalists Quoctrung Bui and Amanda Cox. "But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias."
The Blue Lives Matter post also assumes that the issue of police accountability is only an issue of "perceived injustices" against black people, not for all citizens.
"I just want to be clear that in many communities police do target black people," Michael Avery, professor emeritus at Suffolk Law School and former president of the National Police Accountability Project told ATTN: in August. "Black people are targeted and Black Lives Matter makes a lot of sense. Having said that it's also true that police beat up white people too."
