Upon reading Mike Rowe's response to a question he received from one of his fans, I want to state that this is by far the best response to the debate, I have seen so far.
Born both as a visible minority and born into poverty, I was raised to respect authority figures, even if I felt that their point is wrong, as there are always methods to show your disapproval of the authority figures, in your life, and society that are legal. Disrespecting or insulting authority figures do not get your point across, and even less will have them see your point of view, they will only see the disrespect that is being portrayed. Now the second side of this argument, is that "Well I won't respect the cops, until the cops, respect us", but a level of respect still must be given to them as without them on the street doing their job, the costs to society would be massively higher.
In reality cops do not want to arrest or shoot people, they really want to make sure people are safe, they are really more likely to let minor crimes go, as this means they don't have to do the paperwork that come along with this, and then the potential of off-hour time that would have to be spent at court. In reality like, the rest of us, they would prefer to be home with family and friends. If a police officer asks you to stop, it's so much easier to stop, and to be polite then to run and face more severe penalties, then if you stop. In some cases the officer may just give you a warning and tell you to go.
Now if you are being arrested, one of the biggest mistakes is resisting or fleeing the arrest, or attacking the officer, this is more likely to get you hurt or even killed. If you feel that the arrest isn't valid, or even the detainment is invalid, there is multiple methods of resolution to this, that are more impactful then a physical confrontation. There's the media, upper management of the police, police's internal affairs, local government, state government, federal government, state law enforcement, federal law enforcement, civil court. More importantly if you do not resist arrest, and you can prove it is unjustified and biased the civil direction has the benefit of financial gains, but this can completely disappear once you resist the arrest, as you are now committing a crime, hence your arrest is not biased anymore.
The only methods to improve the society, is to level the societies playing field. By improving education, health care and salaries to the lower and middle classes, and by reducing the vast chasm between the upper 1% and the rest of the 99% of society. So many politicians these days believe that if they give tax breaks to business and the top 1% of all money makers that there will be more money floating around the economy. But this is not even close to being true, or many countries would have not have deficits at all, as the top 1% would be putting a great deal of money back into the economy to cover the deficits. The group that does cover the majority of society is the middle income, they are the ones that buys the majority of the products, pays most of the interest because of loans and mortgages. But in reality 80% of the workforce has seen negligible salary increases since the 1970's, but the top 20% has continued to receive increases.
