Shortly after college I lived in The downtown area of a suburban town, now I live San Francisco. In the small town a cop would drive by every 30 min all night long. Sometimes the only thing driving by was the cop. The town had one Public murder in ten years. Here in SF I see the bus more often than a patrol car. Don’t under estimate white peoples ability to be scared about nothing.
It's far more than a swipe -- it's very relevant. If you look into the history of police, they started out as slavecatchers. Vigilantism quickly caught on and white folks were given implicit authority to question the origin, destination, and qualifications of any black person they happened to come across. You can follow the unbroken thread of this culture and attitude to today.
Police institutions today are a manifestation of the fragility of the white ego when confronted with black people with ambitions. They will ignore black folks who stay "in their place", i.e., don't leave their neighborhoods so white people don't see them. It is when black people attempt to assert socioeconomic mobility that the white folks quickly mobilize.
One of the impetuses for Brown v. Board of Education was that white administrators shut down the entire public school system so that "equality" was achieved in that both white and black students couldn't access public schools. Following vehement outcries from both black and white parents, they started handing out tax-funded vouchers to the white families only to attend private schools, which is how the charter school phenomenon became such a big idea. Betsy DeVos and her family are perpetuating this essentially segregationist system today, with tokenized and very public displays of "see it's not a racist system because sometimes black children win the lottery too!"
As we still operate in this society I had a kneejerk reaction and feel almost obligated to add a "not all white people" clause, which only reinforces the points made above.
Here are resources for the people who are reacting to the language I'm using:
