It's not victim blaming to point out that engaging in criminal behavior, resisting arrest, attempting to flee or elude police and fighting with police is a major contributing factor to the vast majority of these incidents. While many of the suggestions you made are valid, you didn't mention anything about the other side's responsibilities and things they can and should do also: stop engaging in criminal behavior, stop resisting arrest or refusing to obey lawful commands of the police, stop running, stop brandishing weapons when engaging with law enforcement, stop resisting arrest, and realize that the court, not the street is where you should make your case if you feel you're being unlawfully arrested. This isn't a one-sided thing.
You quite literally just spelled out the definition of victim blaming. Here's the deal:
If police are in a situation where they're being fired upon or someone is attacking them with a deadly weapon, and those police respond with deadly force, virtually no one complains about police misconduct and everyone rallies around law enforcement.
In your comment you highlighted 6 areas to blame victims:
1) Criminal behavior
2) Resisting arrest
3) Attempting to flee
4) Fighting with police
5) Obey lawful commands
6) Brandishing weapons
Numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 almost never require excessive force, and certainly not deadly force. There's more gray area in number 4 and even more in number 6. Lumping in 1, 2, 3, and 5 as justification for a shooting is exactly part of the problem with police. For most of the country understanding this problem is elementary to American justice.
The problem with the Victim Blaming crowd is that when there are accusations of police misconduct there's a reflex to act like law enforcement are always in situations where excessive/deadly force is necessary--and when that runs counter to the facts as we're seeing clearly with Adam Toledo--the next step is to blame the victim
even further to a more personal degree (he was a gang member, dealt drugs, used drugs, had a record, where were the parents, etc) and other tropes with racist origins to excuse police misconduct.
Just in the last 2 pages of this thread on Toledo's shooting we have such comments as:
"But his nickname was Lil' Homicide."
"Mother was not mothering."
"Gangbanger."
"Sympathy goes to the officer."
"Not all heroes wear capes."
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
"Would've been killed by another gang member anyway."
Zero moderate voices in this thread are saying these things. It's exclusively right-wing posters. It makes you wonder why? If right-wingers wanted to stick to the defense that Chicago is dangerous and it was a difficult situation with Toledo dropping the gun at the last second, that's acceptable. But, they're taken it even further with the vilification of the victim. Again, why?
In many of these cases, the more personal the victim blaming gets the greater the relationship between police misconduct. In the year 2021, if you see a white person using the term "gangbanger" in regards to an incident it's a dead give away where their motivation is w/r/t police and shootings. Americans with empathy don't need to say these things if the facts of the case line up in favor of the police.
If anyone made those above comments and they worked for Notre Dame, they'd likely be fired (oh no cancel culture!).
And yet, the handful of posters who made them will complain about the media going overboard and that it's the media's fault that they're bringing race into it to stoke the fire when in reality you can't find a more politicizing event than excessive victim blaming after shootings. Thick irony. Police reform will continue to be impossible when such a large bloc of voters think victim blaming is okay (even encouraged, especially within police themselves) and that less victim blaming means those against it are the greatest victims of all.
