With that particular word choice, you could not have made the argument for having police be a part of their communities any better. The police are not the military, and the further officers are from having social, cultural, financial etc ties with the neighborhood they're supposed to protect and serve, the more this kind of enemy characterization pervades their thinking. That being said, using "fact" is probably too strong a word for whether specifically residency requirement reduces incidence of unarmed black men getting killed by the police (because I haven't looked up the primary source data either), but I certainly have my suspicions of how tied to the community all the officers involved in incidents from Garner to Floyd were.
I said enemy because when someone plants a car bomb under your car parked in the driveway, they quite literally ARE the enemy. That wasnt a general statement about how police view members of the community. I meant that word very literally.
EDIT: perhaps I wasnt clear in my post that you quoted. These were Iraqi policemen living in the community they served who were killed. Not American solidiers.
"While the fiscal reasons are compelling in and of themselves, I see an even more serious concern for bringing back the full residency requirement. In far too many Philadelphia neighborhoods, the police department feels more like an occupying army than those who are called to serve. This feeling has only intensified in recent months in the wake of the devastating Plain View Project where racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, and other hateful social media posts by Philadelphia law enforcement were made public. Those posts suggest a contempt from officers toward people they are sworn to protect and make residents feel more alienated as a result.
Let’s be honest: A residency requirement alone will not eradicate such behavior. There is certainly much more work to be done. However, this is a step in the right direction.
When officers patrol the city they live in, they will better understand the culture of the place and its people. Culture is not something that can be learned popping in and out. Culture is in everything, even the very air that we breathe. One must live here to fully appreciate and learn Philadelphia’s unique character. Officers who live in the city will better understand the distinct personalities of the various neighborhoods. More importantly, they will treat citizens as neighbors, not strangers. This will not only improve community/police relations — this will save lives.
Listen, I get it. It’s America and we love the freedom to do what we want — especially to select where we live. As a pastor in a national denomination, I have been subject to a different form of residency requirements. In six of the seven congregations I’ve served across the nation, I have moved into those cities. I was not always excited about that decision at first. But afterward, I learned how much it benefited my ministry by being a part of the community full-time (not just dropping in to preach and run). I learned to love each of those places, and more importantly, I loved the people in them. In spiritual terms, we call that experience incarnation. It is the belief that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
This is what we want from our police department. A force for good that dwells among us, not an occupying force that hovers over us.
"
No, what I'm getting at is exactly what I said. Officers should not treat their beat like they're an occupying force each time they get a call, and they're less inclined to do so if theyre actually invested socially and financially in the cities they police.
I’m for some discipline of those 2 cops - but I’m not sure that falls under brutality when they have no idea what he’s about to do and seems like he was looking for trouble.
This will always be a cop's best excuse. "Better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6"
A 75 year old is no menace to an armed cop. Until our police mentality changes from a "save my life at all costs" to a "save a citizens life at all costs" police brutality and corruption will remain rampant.
No, what I'm getting at is exactly what I said. Officers should not treat their beat like they're an occupying force each time they get a call, and they're less inclined to do so if theyre actually invested socially and financially in the cities they police.
Having cops live in the live in the poorest neighborhoods (many of which are overrepresented by subsidized housing) doesn't address the primary problem with law enforcement in America: the citizens living in those neighborhoods, and many in more affluent areas, increasingly don’t want to be policed - in any form. Look at the “abolish the police” signs populating the BLM and Antifa rallies. Notice the actions of the Minneapolis City Counsel as they pledge to disband the police in response to their constituent’s demands. Pay attention to the Mayors of NYC and LA as they promise to strip funding from their police forces. These are called clues. 1/6 of America wants to defund the police in a recent YouGov poll of 1000+ - stunning.
The citizens have demanded fewer cops; fewer cops is what they will get. Take a long, hard look at Baltimore after Freddie Gray to get an idea of how this will go down. In his 1996 interview with Oprah, Prince famously said that he will always live in MN because the cold “keeps the bad people away.” Well, Minneapolis is going to put that theory to the test.
I said enemy because when someone plants a car bomb under your car parked in the driveway, they quite literally ARE the enemy. That wasnt a general statement about how police view members of the community. I meant that word very literally.
EDIT: perhaps I wasnt clear in my post that you quoted. These were Iraqi policemen living in the community they served who were killed. Not American solidiers.
I got the context of what you said. I'm pointing out that that justified line of war-like enemy thinking has been carried over and perverted into an unjustified militarization of our domestic police, both in their philosophy toward the people and their armaments.
Also, for everyone jumping straight to the most outlandish hyperbolic example, the residency requirement is to live in the same city or zip code, not literally in the same housing project as the most violent gang in town.
Having cops live in the live in the poorest neighborhoods (many of which are overrepresented by subsidized housing) doesn't address the primary problem with law enforcement in America: the citizens living in those neighborhoods, and many in more affluent areas, increasingly don’t want to be policed - in any form. Look at the “abolish the police” signs populating the BLM and Antifa rallies. Notice the actions of the Minneapolis City Counsel as they pledge to disband the police in response to their constituent’s demands. Pay attention to the Mayors of NYC and LA as they promise to strip funding from their police forces. These are called clues. 1/6 of America wants to defund the police in a recent YouGov poll of 1000+ - stunning.
The citizens have demanded fewer cops; fewer cops is what they will get. Take a long, hard look at Baltimore after Freddie Gray to get an idea of how this will go down. In his 1996 interview with Oprah, Prince famously said that he will always live in MN because the cold “keeps the bad people away.” Well, Minneapolis is going to put that theory to the test.
Totally abolishing the police is as irrational a response as continuing the status quo of them essentially being able to act with impunity.
It is interesting though that there are areas where the police have totally failed to get crime under control in any meaningful way, so much so that they insist on living 45 minutes away from such places, and yet they think their practices, funding, and hiring/firing shouldn't be subject to review.
Totally abolishing the police is as irrational a response as continuing the status quo of them essentially being able to act with impunity.
It is interesting though that there are areas where the police have totally failed to get crime under control in any meaningful way, so much so that they insist on living 45 minutes away from such places, and yet they think their practices, funding, and hiring/firing shouldn't be subject to review.
This will always be a cop's best excuse. "Better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6"
A 75 year old is no menace to an armed cop. Until our police mentality changes from a "save my life at all costs" to a "save a citizens life at all costs" police brutality and corruption will remain rampant.
True (in retrospect). Hard not to be paranoid as a cop in a country where everyone can conceal carry if you have a pulse though. Not saying he deserved to be shoved but he did look insane (not upset). And I doubt the cop meant to shove him down (More like back off so I can see what you are doing with your hands better).
Absolutely. I’m sure that when you were a cop, you lived in perpetual fear of being murdered by licensed concealed carry holders...all of whom have passed additional layers of background checks and are by definition NOT career felons. Being shot by these marauders is the second highest reason for cops being killed in America - right behind being carried away by the Rodents of Unusual Size.
Totally abolishing the police is as irrational a response as continuing the status quo of them essentially being able to act with impunity.
It is interesting though that there are areas where the police have totally failed to get crime under control in any meaningful way, so much so that they insist on living 45 minutes away from such places, and yet they think their practices, funding, and hiring/firing shouldn't be subject to review.
There is no “status quo” in policing just like there isn’t one in medicine. The nature of the police-community relationship is always changing just like the nature of the patient-physician relationship. The reason why the police-community relationship is continuing its downward spiral that has been going on for generations is because the black community continues to become more impoverished RELATIVE to other communities, and by community I’m not talking about geographic boundaries. Keep in mind that the places spiraling the fastest (places Baltimore, East St. Louis, Detroit, and even Minneapolis) are lead by African Americans. Break the poverty cycle in the black community that is perpetuated by higher rates of illegitimacy, addiction (although the whites are saying “hold my beer on this one of late), and lower rates of addiction and you will solve the epidemic of police brutality to the extent that it exists. More importantly, you will solve the real epidemic of young black males murdering other young black males roughly 16,000 times each year - a problem that easily eclipses police murdering blacks which happens less than 20 times each year.
Finally, that FiveThirtyEight article that you cited only looked at the 75 largest police agencies in America. It is nowhere close to being representative of the country where police do tend live within their jurisdictions. It also fails to discuss one of the most significant dynamics influencing were police, teachers, fire fighters, and even less remunerated physicians choose to live - cost of living. That includes the full spectrum of which ethic groups are most likely to be married, have dual earner incomes, cost of transportation, etc.
Absolutely. I’m sure that when you were a cop, you lived in perpetual fear of being murdered by licensed concealed carry holders...all of whom have passed additional layers of background checks and are by definition NOT career felons. Being shot by these marauders is the second highest reason for cops being killed in America - right behind being carried away by the Rodents of Unusual Size.
There is no “status quo” in policing just like there isn’t one in medicine. The nature of the police-community relationship is always changing just like the nature of the patient-physician relationship. The reason why the police-community relationship is continuing its downward spiral that has been going on for generations is because the black community continues to become more impoverished RELATIVE to other communities, and by community I’m not talking about geographic boundaries. Keep in mind that the places spiraling the fastest (places Baltimore, East St. Louis, Detroit, and even Minneapolis) are lead by African Americans
Finally, that FiveThirtyEight article that you cited only looked at the 75 largest police agencies in America. It is nowhere close to being representative of the country where police do tend live within their jurisdictions. It also fails to discuss one of the most significant dynamics influencing were police, teachers, fire fighters, and even less remunerated physicians choose to live - cost of living. That includes the full spectrum of which ethic groups are most likely to be married, have dual earner incomes, cost of transportation, etc.
At a broader level there absolutely is a status quo in policing just like there is a kind of status quo in medicine (aka "standard of care" was not just invented out of thin air). The status quo in policing all over America has been one in which qualified immunity has been the prevailing doctrine under which police operate. Therefore, officers have essentially never been found to have much culpability for gross misconduct or crimes up until the last few years when literal video of police committing crimes became available.
The issue of the police-community relationship is obviously more complex than just the residency requirement, but thinking that having officers become more and more financially, socially, and culturally disconnected from the communities they police will not contribute to the incidence of fatal shootings seems absurd on its face. Poverty absolutely is another contributing factor, so tell me how it helps the crime problem to have civil servants with good-paying jobs all leave the areas in which tax revenue is needed the most?
And if you followed my posts, you would've seen that I advocated a carrot vs the stick. If COL is prohibitive in many of these cities, pay them more and/or subsidize their housing.
You've bought into the fabricated reality that the police are combatants operating in a dangerous war zone, with lethal enemies everywhere. They're not. There aren't.
Attacks on police are a great media story, but if the false narrative -- that policing is getting more dangerous -- continues to spread it will have a significant effect on how police do their jobs --- making them more fearful than they already are, with increasingly deadly results for the...
1887! That was two years after Buffard "Mad Dog" Tannin and his gang were rampaging and terrorizing lawmen in Hill Valley!
Police work isn't as dangerous as they pretend it is. It's not just the loggers and oil rig workers and deadliest catch Alaska crab fishermen ... cops just aren't getting hurt or killed in huge numbers. They're not. Construction workers, electricians, mechanics, miners, agricultural workers, steel workers, truck drivers (double the fatality rate per 100K), garbage collectors (3x the fatality rate), roofers (4x), pilots (5x), fishermen (6x), loggers (8x).
Extra fun fact: Taken as a group, concealed carry permit holders commit fewer crimes than off duty police officers do. And it's not even close:
Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 16.5 per 100,000 officers. Among permit holders in Florida and Texas, the rate is only 2.4 per 100,000. That is just 1/7th of the rate for police officers.
During President Obama’s administration, the number of concealed handgun permits has soared to over 14.5 million – a 215% increase since 2007. Among the finding
papers.ssrn.com
Roll that around in your head for a second before believing the blue line propaganda.
The first time I saw the news clip of the 75 year old Buffalo man get shoved, fall, and "bleed from the head", my initial reaction was emotional--sadness, disgust, horror, disbelief that some officers walked past... I still have some of those emotions. But I didn't stop with what the news showed me, I looked deeper myself because I still want to know and understand more. That 75 year old is a professional protestor who carried a helmet but did not wear it, and waved his cell phone at the officer's belt. Was that in order to signal Antifa as to the location of the police (it is supposedly a known maneuver)? He breached their personal space and basically made contact with the officer, a big no no. Did that warrant a shove? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Then what happened? The man walking backwards fell. At first, I assumed that he was thrown off balance by the shove, but do we know that for a fact? I don't think we know that for a fact. Then, if you can find a close up picture of the man's head as he lay bleeding on the ground, look at it. What do you see? Where is the "blood" coming from? The back of his head? Nope. His ear? Yep. What else do you see? Was he wearing a mask? Yep. Could this have obstructed a tube that ran from his mouth to his ear, which when bitten produced the "blood" flow? Look at the picture, what do you see?
Some of you will laugh and mock me. I'm not 100% convinced that he didn't fall due to the shove and actually bleed (so profusely so quickly from the ear, though, doesn't seem medically accurate to me), and I'm not 100% convinced that he didn't stage the entire encounter. There is not a single spot of blood on the sidewalk where the back of his head ""hit" the pavement. If you slammed your head on pavement hard enough to cause hemorrhaging out of your ear, you'd think there'd be blood from that impact or an abrasion on the back of his head, right? I don't know what actually happened. But I'm not willing to just watch a news clip once or twice and assume that what I'm being told by the media is at all complete or accurate information. There are people who are professional provocateurs who have an agenda to push. The media most certainly has an agenda to push. That is why I question everything. When things just don't seem to make logical sense to the average person, that is when you must question everything and dig deeper yourself. You may not come up with the final answer, but at least you will see that there is a whole lot of grey area to what we are being fed.
Lots of illogical things with the George Floyd situation, too. Lots of "Why...?" "Why....?" "Why....?" questions when you watch that entire scenario play out. But I won't say anything more about that now.
Absolutely. I’m sure that when you were a cop, you lived in perpetual fear of being murdered by licensed concealed carry holders...all of whom have passed additional layers of background checks and are by definition NOT career felons. Being shot by these marauders is the second highest reason for cops being killed in America - right behind being carried away by the Rodents of Unusual Size.
I wasn’t saying the risk is being shot by a legal concealed carry Citizen. Just saying with the number of guns in this country and the ease of obtaining one (legally or illegally) along with the lack of culture of gun safety/responsibility I can understand why cops are paranoid.
It’s not about the laws or gun control. Just an observation that I’d be much more paranoid as a cop in the USA vs, say Japan.
I wasn’t saying the risk is being shot by a legal concealed carry Citizen. Just saying with the number of guns in this country and the ease of obtaining one (legally or illegally) along with the lack of culture of gun safety/responsibility I can understand why cops are paranoid.
It’s not about the laws or gun control. Just an observation that I’d be much more paranoid as a cop in the USA vs, say Japan.
To save lives, cops must be taught to think beyond the gun belt.
www.theatlantic.com
Their training is all about being paranoid. The results are unavoidable. We need to refocus police training away from the people they patrol being the enemy.
All unions protect their wrongdoers. Teachers unions make it hard to fire bad teachers. Nursing unions ... hoo boy. Unjustifiable tooth and nail defense of the incompetent is the unavoidable flip side to the good things unions do.
That doesn't mean that removing the ability for the worker class to organize, collectively bargain, strike etc is a good thing. Unless you're a robber baron or own a coal town.
All unions protect their wrongdoers. Teachers unions make it hard to fire bad teachers. Nursing unions ... hoo boy. Unjustifiable tooth and nail defense of the incompetent is the unavoidable flip side to the good things unions do.
That doesn't mean that removing the ability for the worker class to organize, collectively bargain, strike etc is a good thing. Unless you're a robber baron or own a coal town.
But imo police unions are notoriously the worst. It's been reported by media across the political spectrum that police unions actively stopped essential reforms which means police brutality continues to only get worse. Eliminating the unions and increasing the wages (and also pushing for more deeper measures to fundamentally change police culture) are needed to push for reforms. Collective bargaining can be decided in the midst of reforms since i'm sure democrats remain union friendly.
Cops are more willing to look out for each other, including the evil sociopath ones, than protecting the communities. That needs to change
The first time I saw the news clip of the 75 year old Buffalo man get shoved, fall, and "bleed from the head", my initial reaction was emotional--sadness, disgust, horror, disbelief that some officers walked past... I still have some of those emotions. But I didn't stop with what the news showed me, I looked deeper myself because I still want to know and understand more. That 75 year old is a professional protestor who carried a helmet but did not wear it, and waved his cell phone at the officer's belt. Was that in order to signal Antifa as to the location of the police (it is supposedly a known maneuver)? He breached their personal space and basically made contact with the officer, a big no no. Did that warrant a shove? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Then what happened? The man walking backwards fell. At first, I assumed that he was thrown off balance by the shove, but do we know that for a fact? I don't think we know that for a fact. Then, if you can find a close up picture of the man's head as he lay bleeding on the ground, look at it. What do you see? Where is the "blood" coming from? The back of his head? Nope. His ear? Yep. What else do you see? Was he wearing a mask? Yep. Could this have obstructed a tube that ran from his mouth to his ear, which when bitten produced the "blood" flow? Look at the picture, what do you see?
Some of you will laugh and mock me. I'm not 100% convinced that he didn't fall due to the shove and actually bleed (so profusely so quickly from the ear, though, doesn't seem medically accurate to me), and I'm not 100% convinced that he didn't stage the entire encounter. There is not a single spot of blood on the sidewalk where the back of his head ""hit" the pavement. If you slammed your head on pavement hard enough to cause hemorrhaging out of your ear, you'd think there'd be blood from that impact or an abrasion on the back of his head, right? I don't know what actually happened. But I'm not willing to just watch a news clip once or twice and assume that what I'm being told by the media is at all complete or accurate information. There are people who are professional provocateurs who have an agenda to push. The media most certainly has an agenda to push. That is why I question everything. When things just don't seem to make logical sense to the average person, that is when you must question everything and dig deeper yourself. You may not come up with the final answer, but at least you will see that there is a whole lot of grey area to what we are being fed.
Lots of illogical things with the George Floyd situation, too. Lots of "Why...?" "Why....?" "Why....?" questions when you watch that entire scenario play out. But I won't say anything more about that now.
Just what exactly is the point you're trying to make here?
That a 75 year old should be doing ... what ... with his time? Working? Playing bingo at the retirement home?
That he deliberately didn't wear a helmet because he wanted to get his head bumped? That protesters should wear body armor and other protective gear to protect themselves from the police?
Clearly this old man was an imminent threat and deserved to get steamrolled by a courageous cop with a third his years and four times his muscle mass who feared for his life.
But imo police unions are notoriously the worst. It's been reported by media across the political spectrum that police unions actively stopped essential reforms which means police brutality continues to only get worse. Eliminating the unions and increasing the wages (and also pushing for more deeper measures to fundamentally change police culture) are needed to push for reforms. Collective bargaining can be decided in the midst of reforms since i'm sure democrats remain union friendly.
Cops are more willing to look out for each other, including the evil sociopath ones, than protecting the communities. That needs to change
I don't disagree with the idea that they tend to be more "us vs them" than other unions. Also, their enemy is us whereas the teachers' enemy is the school district administration, which shades the situtation some.
I'm just saying all unions have their dark side, and the solution isn't crushing unions, because there's an even darker side to that.
My high school health teacher was a 70-something year old guy who was the senior-most teacher in the district. He "taught" by passing out a trifold flyer on DUIs or STDs or the dangers of steroids or how sinful girls got pregnant or whatever at the beginning of each class, and enforcing silence for the next 50 minutes so we could read it. He was also the drivers ed teacher with a habit of falling asleep during drives, which was fine with us because at least when the man old bastard was passed out unconscious he wasn't being a dick.
No volume of complaints could dislodge him. I wonder if he's still there, 30 years later, proving that mean senior citizens fuel their engines with cruelty ...
To save lives, cops must be taught to think beyond the gun belt.
www.theatlantic.com
Their training is all about being paranoid. The results are unavoidable. We need to refocus police training away from the people they patrol being the enemy.
One of the best explanations of where we are at and how we got here for all the people who have never been a cop but have a lot of opinions on how to “fix” policing.
Citizens and taxpayers who literally give authority to and pay the salaries of a force which not-uncommonly violates the rights of said citizens aren't allowed to have opinions?
Is it accidental or are you purposely trying to sound like a proto-fascist?
Just what exactly is the point you're trying to make here? My point is that I do not know with 100% certainty what occurred, and neither does anyone else. There are a lot of people who *think* they know what occurred. But there are other people, like myself, who have unanswered questions about what we were shown on the news. The video certainly stirs up an emotional reaction (from myself included). That's for certain. But I have questions. Maybe you or one of the others can answer them:
1) Why was the guy approaching the procession of marching officers? What was his purpose? His need? What would cause him to walk towards the procession after hours of spirited protesting, at a time that had now passed curfew? What was he doing? Can you think of any logical answer? (I am not saying he didn't have a right to do so, I'm just trying to figure out his motivation.)
2) If you bring a helmet to a protest, why are you not wearing the helmet? If you bring the helmet, you must believe that you *could* be in harm's way at some point, right? Danger from the cops? So, why did he let his guard down as he approached the procession? At the time when he was behaving in probably the most forward, assertive way within the officers' personal space? (He may have a helmet for protection from other protestors, too. If he goes to these things often, he knows that they are not always peaceful. Again, he took the helmet off while still at the protest)
3) Why did he wave his cell phone at one officer's radio, then the next officer's radio? What logical explanation can you give me for him doing this gesture? I couldn't think of any. Then I read that it is a common thing for provocateurs to use their cell phones to track the police location to communicate to other Antifa, or to skim the radio which can actually jam the frequencies and render them useless. I had never heard of this before, but that explanation makes the most sense to me so far. You have any other explanations to offer me?
4) Camera angle shows a forward arm movement/push from 2 officers, then the man (who is walking backwards) appears to lose his balance and fall backwards. It could be that the force knocked him down. It could be that the provocateur fell down on purpose to put on a show. You mention his age and fragility. Big bad policeman picks on old frail man. Yeah, that's the first thing that I thought, too. You've got the visual of dozens of uniformed officers marching and one lone little old man being injured. I will say, whether it was real or staged, it did make for an emotional reaction. Could that have been the purpose? Would you have had the same emotional reaction if the protester was younger or more muscular? Probably not. Casting is important.
5) I'd like a medical explanation for the injuries and bleeding seen in the video. We hear an audible "thud" when the man falls. Was that the helmet hitting the sidewalk? Was that the man's head? There is immediate and profuse bleeding *from the man's right ear* (not from the back of the man's head. In fact, if you look at a close up pic, there is no blood beneath the man's head.) I would earnestly like a medical explanation of what type of injury would cause such quick and heavy bleeding from the ear. Yes, head trauma can cause bleeding from ears, but in your medical opinion, would it be that quick and that voluminous? Especially with no sign of trauma to the back of the head? I am totally honest when I say I would like a reasonable medical explanation. If I get one, then maybe I could move on and accept what we were told.
That a 75 year old should be doing ... what ... with his time? Working? Playing bingo at the retirement home? After reading your high school retrospective about how a 70 year old man should not have been your health teacher or driver's ed instructor, (if it were just about his teaching skills, you never would have mentioned his age, right?) I don't really think that you should be asking me the above question. I'm not the one hung up with the guy's age.
That he deliberately didn't wear a helmet because he wanted to get his head bumped? Yeah, I amopen to the possibility that this guy (who is somebody who travels around to be a protest agitator), owns a helmet because he is a provocateur at protests. IMO, your garden variety guy who shows up at a protest neither owns or thinks to bring a helmet to a protest. The fact that the guy had a helmet makes me think he's been around the protest-block a few times. With that, I think he may have been there with a nefarious motive. That protesters should wear body armor and other protective gear to protect themselves from the police?
Clearly this old man was an imminent threat and deserved to get steamrolled by a courageous cop with a third his years and four times his muscle mass who feared for his life. I'm just trying to figure out if he was steamrolled or not. Nobody who is peacefully protesting deserved to be steamrolled. I would have preferred it if the officers did not make a forward arm movement/push the man, if that's what made him lose his balance and fall. I'm just as upset by actual police brutality as the next guy is, but I also do not *assume* that the protestor was a little old innocent gentleman. And I wonder if he didn't put on a good show for all of us, including fake blood via a tube hidden by his mask bought from his local theatre supply company.
Chevy Chase. Dick Van Dyk3. 75 yo Buffalo protester.
What do they have in common? All three are:
Old.
Liberal.
Democrat.
Masters of pratfalling.
Do the math and open your eyes, people. The only logical conclusion is that the 75 yo "protester" is actually a highly skilled antifa super soldier crisis actor.
Citizens and taxpayers who literally give authority to and pay the salaries of a force which not-uncommonly violates the rights of said citizens aren't allowed to have opinions?
Is it accidental or are you purposely trying to sound like a proto-fascist?
Where did I say you were not allowed to have an opinion? I don’t recall telling anyone to STFU unless they had a badge. I simply posted a video with the real stats on policing in the black neighborhoods so that people could have an informed opinion.
Well, here are those stats. There are roughly 7000 black men murdered in the US each year. Shockingly, virtually none of them were unarmed citizens killed by cops. Of the roughly 900 lethal force encounters against blacks each year, only a small handful are unarmed, and most of those were violent suspects. In fact, there are typically less than 20 unarmed black men killed by cops each year, and roughly 80% of those were situations where a violent felon was committing an aggravated battery against a cop just like Michael Brown of “hands up; don’t shoot” fame. That means that cops are 18X more likely to be murdered by an armed black male than unarmed black males are to be murdered by the cops. If we look at aggravated assaults (battery), the stats are even stronger in favor of the police with cops being 25X more likely to be assaulted than to commit assault on an black citizen.
In other words, the average black citizen has no greater friend than the the average police officer. The numbers do not support the notion of systemic racism in American law enforcement resulting in the widespread murder of blacks. It’s a lie meant to detract from the real problem that is violence within black communities.
We know what happens when there is good community policing coupled with a cooperative citizens who are willing to report crime and work with cops - murder rates fall. We also know what happens when cops are afraid to do their jobs and disengage from their communities, it’s called the Freddy Gray Effect - murder rates go up. The BLM movement will go down in history as one of the most lethal hoaxes of the modern era perpetuated on a minority community.
Where did I say you were not allowed to have an opinion? I don’t recall telling anyone to STFU unless they had a badge. I simply posted a video with the real stats on policing in the black neighborhoods so that people could have an informed opinion.
Love it....you make a smug quip implying one has to be a cop to have a worthwhile opinion about police and then pretend you didn’t say anything when the absurdity of that statement is pointed out to you.
Well, here are those stats. There are roughly 7000 black men murdered in the US each year. Shockingly, virtually none of them were unarmed citizens killed by cops. Of the roughly 900 lethal force encounters against blacks each year, only a small handful are unarmed, and most of those were violent suspects. In fact, there are typically less than 20 unarmed black men killed by cops each year, and roughly 80% of those were situations where a violent felon was committing an aggravated battery against a cop just like Michael Brown of “hands up; don’t shoot” fame. That means that cops are 18X more likely to be murdered by an armed black male than unarmed black males are to be murdered by the cops. If we look at aggravated assaults (battery), the stats are even stronger in favor of the police with cops being 25X more likely to be assaulted than to commit assault on an black citizen.
Good god, please post the primary source for this data, because these are some Mickey Mouse stats you’re posting here whose misleading nature would be hilarious if they weren’t so tragic. Not to mention we all know how much cops like classify all behavior at each encounter as violent or aggressive or as assaulting an officer or resisting arrest no matter how benign or cooperative the suspect is.
Even if that “18x” figure is true, if you could step away from your propaganda for one second you’d realize that an apples to apples comparison of black vs other race police encounters is what’s relevant, not the nominal figure. I’m sure overall cops are also more likely to be killed by an armed white male than an unarmed white male is to be killed by cops, but that is a trivial point that speaks nothing at all to the point protesters are currently making. Your “18x” line has the same rhetorical punch as pointing out that a firefighter is more likely to die in a house that’s on fire.
------- Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex
Abstract
We use data on police-involved deaths to estimate how the risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States varies across social groups. We estimate the lifetime and age-specific risks of being killed by police by race and sex. We also provide estimates of the proportion of all deaths accounted for by police use of force. We find that African American men and women, American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latino men face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. We find that Latina women and Asian/Pacific Islander men and women face lower risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. Risk is highest for black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.
Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups...
www.pnas.org
------- Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement
Findings From the National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States, 2009–2012
Results:
Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims. Fatality rates among military veterans/active duty service members were 1.4 times greater than among their civilian counterparts. Four case subtypes were examined based on themes that emerged in incident narratives: about 22% of cases were mental health related; 18% were suspected “suicide by cop” incidents, with white victims more likely than black or Hispanic victims to die in these circumstances; 14% involved intimate partner violence; and about 6% were unintentional deaths due to LE action. Another 53% of cases were unclassified and did not fall into a coded subtype. Regression analyses identified victim and incident characteristics associated with each case subtype and unclassified cases.
...
Given racial disparities in victimization identified in the full sample, additional analyses were conducted to examine differences in selected incident characteristics by race for cases involving white, black, and Hispanic victimsg (Table 8). Black victims were significantly more likely to be unarmed than white or Hispanic victims. Black victims were also significantly less likely than whites to have posed an immediate threat to LE. White victims were significantly more likely than black victims to be killed in incidents related to mental health or substance-induced disruptive behaviors and more likely than black or Hispanic victims to be involved in potential “suicide by cop” incidents. Hispanic victims were also more likely than black victims to be involved in a potential “suicide by cop” incident. Incidents involving black and Hispanic victims were more likely than those involving white victims to have at least one black LE officer involved in the fatal injury.
Several high-profile cases in the U.S. have drawn public attention to the use of lethal force by law enforcement (LE), yet research on such fatalities is limited. Using data from a public health surveillance system, this study examined the ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
-------
" Researchers have used various approaches to try to determine the best benchmarks for the data, such as looking at the arrest rates where the shootings occurred or factoring in the context of encounters that end in a shooting. Did the suspect have a weapon? Were officers or another civilian being threatened? In a 2017 study3, for example, Nix determined that black people fatally shot by the police were twice as likely as white people to be unarmed. Those findings align with many studies published since 2015 suggesting that racial biases do influence police shootings. "
Black adults are about five times as likely as whites to say they’ve been unfairly stopped by police because of their race or ethnicity.
www.pewresearch.org
-------
In other words, the average black citizen has no greater friend than the the average police officer. The numbers do not support the notion of systemic racism in American law enforcement resulting in the widespread murder of blacks. It’s a lie meant to detract from the real problem that is violence within black communities.
We know what happens when there is good community policing coupled with a cooperative citizens who are willing to report crime and work with cops - murder rates fall. We also know what happens when cops are afraid to do their jobs and disengage from their communities, it’s called the Freddy Gray Effect - murder rates go up. The BLM movement will go down in history as one of the most lethal hoaxes of the modern era perpetuated on a minority community.
THOMSON: You know, it really started with being able to build culture as opposed to change culture, and we were able to create an organization wherein the identity of the officer was that of a guardian and not a warrior. I was able to change the entire performance metric system within the organization that did not measure a police officer's performance by the number of arrests that they made, but rather, what were the outcomes as opposed to the outputs? When I drove down city streets, I wanted to see little kids riding their bicycles in front of their homes, and I wanted to see people sitting on their front steps.
We changed the entire structure of the organization. We changed the entire reward system within the organization, and we put them out there in - on street corners and said, we don't want you to lock anybody up. We don't want you to write any tickets. We want you to be out here and talk to the people. Let them get to know you, and you get to know them.
No. A union with any power would be lethal to good order and discipline. We have to do what we're told, even if those orders are potentially (or even assuredly) hazardous to our health. "Unlawful orders" must not be obeyed, though in practice there can be a fuzzy line between what's unlawful and lawful, and refusing an unlawful order is easier said than done.
Along those lines, we voluntarily give up a number of civil rights while in the military. For example, 1st Amendment rights to speech (and by extension, assembly). Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) states
UCMJ Article 88 said:
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
This is difficult for a guy like me, who enjoys arguing about politics. There are things I would like to say and positions I would like to explicitly take, that I can't. At times I worry that my inability to make certain statements is interpreted as tacit support for things I don't. You may have noticed the line in my .sig that explicitly notes that I am not a spokesperson for the military.
The intent of course is to keep the military firmly in civilian control - we don't want a country where the military endorses any particular political candidates or parties, or wields any political power, either openly or covertly. We can vote, donate to candidates, express political opinions, but we're not permitted to speak in a way that explicitly or implicitly puts our position or office behind those words. I could not attend a protest in uniform, as the mere presence of a uniformed member of the military implies something. We have to be exceptionally careful in what we say in person or on social media, because even if we keep our opinions separate from our jobs, other people who know we're in the military may interpret our words as an official position of the military. Any written communications that identify us as members of the military must include a disclaimer noting that the opinions expressed are personal and not those of the Department of Defense.
As a crazy cinematic submarine commander once noted prior to a mutiny, we're here to defend democracy, not practice it.
So - there isn't and can never be a union for the military. 🙂
The police can't go on strike. Certain public services related to safety are not legally "strikeable" ... off duty police can march and protest, but they can't just leave a city uncovered.
There are some gray areas. Just because a strike isn't "legal" doesn't mean the people can't actually walk off the job. Air traffic controllers went on strike in the 80s, though that clever plan didn't work out the way they intended. The main difference is that civilians who illegally strike can just get fired; a member of the military who tried would be court martialed, otherwise punished, or (in a time of war) potentially shot.
The stats come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Law Enforcement > Use of Force) and were laid out for you in the video, but multiple sources can tell you how many blacks are murdered in America (roughly 7000/yr) how many are killed by police (roughly 900/year), and how many were unarmed when they were killed (usually less than 20). Those are not Mickey Mouse stats. Those are the actual numbers. My post about your “worthwhile opinion” has to do with the fact that you do not seem to understand that we are talking about less than 20 unarmed blacks being killed each year, and generally less than 10 (4 in 2018) of those are deemed unjustified. That is because it is very possible to be unarmed yet still behave in a way that makes the police justified in killing you. You have taken care of someone who was nearly beaten to death, right?
Contrast that with the roughly 60 cops who are killed/yr (disproportionally by black offenders) and you quickly see where the 18X comes from that was also laid out for you in the video that I provided as well as this WSJ article:
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
Finally, nobody is debating the fact that blacks are more likely to be killed than whites by the police. That too is obvious. What we are debating is whether or not that disparity is because black men commit violent crimes at a much higher rate than their peers, or if there is some systemic racism in policing. The Cesario paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings) is pretty good evidence that it is the former:
Concerns that White officers might disproportionately fatally shoot racial minorities can have powerful effects on police legitimacy (31). By using a comprehensive database of FOIS during 2015, officer race, sex, or experience did not predict the race of a person fatally shot beyond relationships explained by county demographics. On the other hand, race-specific violent crime strongly predicted the race of a civilian fatally shot by police, explaining over 40% of the variance in civilian race. These results bolster claims to take into account violent crime rates when examining fatal police shootings (20).
We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime. While racial disparity did vary by type of shooting, no one type of shooting showed significant anti-Black or -Hispanic disparity. The uncertainty around these estimates highlights the need for more data before drawing conclusions about disparities in specific types of shootings.
In other words, that data does not support a hypothesis that blacks are being disproportionately murdered by the police due to racism; the disparity that you see can be reasonably explained by the intensity of crime within the black community and the increased likelihood of black males to commit violent felonies. Blacks are being disproportionately murdered by other blacks, and black violent felons are disproportionately killed by cops while they disproportionately commit violent crimes.
I’ll grant you that racism still exits in policing just like every other profession. I’m just not willing to say that it is a significant factor in the horrible burden of violent death in the black community given the available data. However, I will support most good faith efforts to increase or improve on the data we have.
Here is a great case study for anyone who doesn’t understand how an officer can be justified in killing an unarmed black man and it had nothing to do with systemic racism. In fact, the deceased was not just unarmed, he was completely NAKED when when he was killed:
While I hate discussing case reports on issues of policy, I feel that it is appropriate for this topic since the shootings of unarmed blacks are so rare (less than 20 per year) that each individual case can be discussed on its merits.
So, watch the bodycam video and tell me if the Police Chief in Richmond (who happens to be black) was somehow wrong when he walked the members of city council through the video in a point-by-point fashion on how his officer was justified in shooting the man not once but TWICE in the torso. Maybe @vector2 can explain to us how this officer should have reacted if pulling the trigger was the the wrong decision, and what might have happened if the deceased has been successful at disarming the officer on a busy highway.
Here is a great case study for anyone who doesn’t understand how an officer can be justified in killing an unarmed black man and it had nothing to do with systemic racism. In fact, the deceased was not just unarmed, he was completely NAKED when when he was killed:
While I hate discussing case reports on issues of policy, I feel that it is appropriate for this topic since the shootings of unarmed blacks are so rare (less than 20 per year) that each individual case can be discussed on its merits.
So, watch the bodycam video and tell me if the Police Chief in Richmond (who happens to be black) was somehow wrong when he walked the members of city council through the video in a point-by-point fashion on how his officer was justified in shooting the man not once but TWICE in the torso. Maybe @vector2 can explain to us how this officer should have reacted if pulling the trigger was the the wrong decision, and what might have happened if the deceased has been successful at disarming the officer on a busy highway.
I would like to know how police in the UK would have handled this situation. Clearly he was mentally unstable of possibly high on something. Is there any way of calming him down, detaining him without using deadly force? Then getting him shipped off to a hospital? Do you see no other way? I see calling for backup and assistance as being a very valid option. Tranquilizer guns, like they use on animals? I mean, if they can put down big ass animals down without killing them, can they not do that to humans??
I realize the irony of suggesting they treat him like an animal, but in this case, we have to look at the fact that treating mentally unstable patients with deadly force is not the only way. Open up your mind a little. Let me look at how they do this overseas, because I doubt mental illness and drug use are only an American thing.
I am not a BLM spokesperson, but I am a black person. And yes, I am well aware of the violence that exists in the inner city among mostly predominantly black neighborhoods. And yes, our young black men are dying at too high a rate at the hands of other young black men. But that is a whole other discussion that has so many other contributing factors that are a discussion for another day.
@ShockIndex, I am going to use your numbers above, the 9 blacks and the 19 whites. That's a 1:2 ratio. For every one black they kill, they are killing two whites. We make up 13% of the population. While non Hispanic whites make up 60% of the population (70% for all Whites).
So every black person, there are what, about 4.5 non Hispanic Whites. ( please someone correct my math if I am doing it wrong. It's been a minute)
For every black unarmed person that is killed, there should be an equivalent of 4.5 Whites that are killed. However, what do your numbers show? 1:2.
So however miniscule those total numbers are, (9 versus 19), in comparison to the total population, you can see that something is causing Cops to kill Blacks at a much higher rate than Whites in comparison to their general population.
The reason that BLM is crying out and protesting, joined by plenty of Caucasians, is because of the above disparities. Those 9 black people were somebody's kid, sibling, aunt/uncle, grandchild. We should be outraged because the deaths at the hands of cops should never happen. That number should be zero, be it white or black. But for some reason, people like you seem to be OK with this. The police are supposed to deescalate situations and protect its citizens, not go to war with them. They should not be taught to shoot to kill anytime they are met with a threat. They should be taught to maybe wound, incapacitate without killing, talk to people and approach them without guns drawn? There has to be other ways.
There are plenty of black men out there who haven't been killed but have been mistreated by cops simply because of their race. Pulled over because they "look like" a perpetrator, are driving a nice car, removed from their vehicle, searched, humiliated, having their heads pushed against patrol cars, pavement, when they are innocent. And are let go. Or had evidence planted and arrested over that. . Does that make it OK, since they weren't killed? There are reports out there if you looked showing that since police are most often patrolling the bad neighborhoods, which are overwhelming poor and black, they tend to be biased against most/all young black men because of the type of the young black men they arrest who are involved in drugs and crime. It leads to unconscious bias at best and at worst racism against black men/people. Never mind growing up in a country where black men in general are portrayed as the violent kind all over the media. Yes, there are plenty of them that are, just like there are plenty of Whites that are. But again, there are a whole host of other issues that lead to violence than just black race. The biggest ones are poverty and ignorance largely brought on by centuries of racism and marginalization. Again, another discussion for another day.
If we can't even agree to have equal schooling from a young age in this country for everyone, including the poor inner city kids and the poor coal worker's kids in the Appalachias, then we will continue to have these discussions. And let's not get started with the war on crime and who is affected most by that. We have been unknowingly brainwashed and biased from a very young age.
Listen to the NPR piece about Camden. Read about it. What happened there? Why did the murder rate decrease once the police got more involved in the community and start treating the community as part of their own? Instead of constantly going into a "war zone" mentality?
BLM is not a myth.
"The average black man has no greater friend than a police officer," that is a myth.
I would like to know how police in the UK would have handled this situation. Clearly he was mentally unstable of possibly high on something. Is there any way of calming him down, detaining him without using deadly force? Then getting him shipped off to a hospital? Do you see no other way? I see calling for backup and assistance as being a very valid option. Tranquilizer guns, like they use on animals? I mean, if they can put down big ass animals down without killing them, can they not do that to humans??
I realize the irony of suggesting they treat him like an animal, but in this case, we have to look at the fact that treating mentally unstable patients with deadly force is not the only way. Open up your mind a little. Let me look at how they do this overseas, because I doubt mental illness and drug use are only an American thing.
You posed a thoughtful question. Most American police do have less than lethal options at their disposal such as pepper spray and the TASER. Neither is anywhere close to 100% effective, and in this case a TASER was actually deployed but failed to stop the suspect. It was the yellow device that deployed a clicking sound. The TASER’s failure is what caused the officer to use lethal force when the suspect threatened to kill the officer and tussle for his gun.
I’m not aware of any police agency allowing their officers to deploy ketamine or versed, nor do I think that those pharmacologic options, if available, would have worked in the 3 seconds that it took the suspect to close the distance on this officer and fight for his gun.
However, I’d like to know if you or anyone else think this black suspect, who was high on stimulants and THC, was killed by a black cop due to systemic racism. If not, let’s move on to the next case as there is publicly available video footage or eye witness testimony from black witnesses in over half of the 19 unarmed blacks who were killed by the police last year.
The real question here is, why does law enforcement approach all of these situations armed. No gun, no death, no chance the man takes it. But I guess that's a whole other discussion...
@ShockIndex, I am going to use your numbers above, the 9 blacks and the 19 whites. That's a 1:2 ratio. For every one black they kill, they are killing two whites. We make up 13% of the population. While non Hispanic whites make up 60% of the population (70% for all Whites).
So every black person, there are what, about 4.5 non Hispanic Whites. ( please someone correct my math if I am doing it wrong. It's been a minute) For every black unarmed person that is killed, there should be an equivalent of 4.5 Whites that are killed. However, what do your numbers show? 1:2.
What I bolded goes to the heart of our disagreement. You think that the numbers of blacks and whites killed should reflect the proportions of the population, but that does not account for the intensity of violent crime within a community that drives policing.
That is to say, police are deployed to the areas where violent crimes occur, not necessarily to areas of population density. If more people are being killed in black neighborhoods, then more cops will be sent to saturate those neighborhoods. I suspect that you know where I’m going with this, but it should be intuitively obvious that more cops in black neighborhoods means more police encounters with the public...including lethal encounters.
If you want cops to stop killing blacks at a much higher rate than whites, simply stop having them police high intensity crime areas at a higher rate. That is effectively what happened in Baltimore after Freddy Gray and St. Louis after Michael Brown. How is that working out for those cities?
Before crying foul, understand that what I describe as effective policing is being done by black police chiefs at the behest of minority dominated city councils across the country.
We probably agree on one important point - poverty is driving crime. I would never support the notion that simply being black makes you inherently more likely to be a criminal. I will say that being black made you more likely to have experienced poverty. If you have practical solutions to fix the poverty issue, then I’m all ears. Let’s stop protesting the cops and make it happen.
The stats come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Law Enforcement > Use of Force) and were laid out for you in the video, but multiple sources can tell you how many blacks are murdered in America (roughly 7000/yr) how many are killed by police (roughly 900/year), and how many were unarmed when they were killed (usually less than 20). Those are not Mickey Mouse stats. Those are the actual numbers. My post about your “worthwhile opinion” has to do with the fact that you do not seem to understand that we are talking about less than 20 unarmed blacks being killed each year, and generally less than 10 (4 in 2018) of those are deemed unjustified. That is because it is very possible to be unarmed yet still behave in a way that makes the police justified in killing you. You have taken care of someone who was nearly beaten to death, right?
Contrast that with the roughly 60 cops who are killed/yr (disproportionally by black offenders) and you quickly see where the 18X comes from that was also laid out for you in the video that I provided as well as this WSJ article:
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
I'll repeat it again for you. Your appeal to raw numbers, i.e. (it was ONLY "20") is completely besides the point that those in favor of police reform are trying to make. It's as dumb as when the president says COVID ONLY killed 100,000 vs 1-2 mil so mission accomplished. There is a civil and moral issue that stands completely separate from how many tickmarks you want to put in ledger, but it's not surprising that many don't get that. It's also notable that you're highlighting the nominal figures from 2019 instead of 2015- without also highlighting that the rate decline in the last few years could be an anomaly given the sample size or perhaps the fact that something in 2014 sparked the impetus to reform police tactics. Furthermore, you should stop leaning so heavily on how nominally 'few' people have been killed by police when:
--------------------------------------------- The Washington Post began tracking the shootings after Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo. A Post investigation found that the FBI’s tracking system undercounted fatal police shootings by about half, because of the fact that reporting by police departments is voluntary and many departments fail to do so. The ongoing Post project relies on news accounts, social media postings and police a reports.
The ongoing Post project has found that police have shot and killed 3,309 people since 2015, or more than twice as many fatal shootings per year as the average reported by the FBI. Of those killed, 231, or 7 percent, were not armed with guns, knives or other objects that could be used as weapons at the time of the shootings, according to the data.
The actual numbers you posted aren't the Mickey Mouse part (although they might be since only counting fatalities likely significantly undercounts instances of non-fatal inappropriate force)- it's the interpretation of the statistics to make disingenuous points like the WSJ author did. Do you acknowledge that a police officer is also more likely to get killed by an armed white male than an unarmed white male is by a police officer? If the answer is yes, then you'll finally understand the disingenuousness of trying to use the "18x" figure to rhetorically show how the poor widdle heavily armed police officers are the ones for whom we should reallly be afraid.
Finally, nobody is debating the fact that blacks are more likely to be killed than whites by the police. That too is obvious. What we are debating is whether or not that disparity is because black men commit violent crimes at a much higher rate than their peers, or if there is some systemic racism in policing. The Cesario paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings) is pretty good evidence that it is the former:
Concerns that White officers might disproportionately fatally shoot racial minorities can have powerful effects on police legitimacy (31). By using a comprehensive database of FOIS during 2015, officer race, sex, or experience did not predict the race of a person fatally shot beyond relationships explained by county demographics. On the other hand, race-specific violent crime strongly predicted the race of a civilian fatally shot by police, explaining over 40% of the variance in civilian race. These results bolster claims to take into account violent crime rates when examining fatal police shootings (20).
We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime. While racial disparity did vary by type of shooting, no one type of shooting showed significant anti-Black or -Hispanic disparity. The uncertainty around these estimates highlights the need for more data before drawing conclusions about disparities in specific types of shootings.
In other words, that data does not support a hypothesis that blacks are being disproportionately murdered by the police due to racism; the disparity that you see can be reasonably explained by the intensity of crime within the black community and the increased likelihood of black males to commit violent felonies. Blacks are being disproportionately murdered by other blacks, and black violent felons are disproportionately killed by cops while they disproportionately commit violent crimes.
I’ll grant you that racism still exits in policing just like every other profession. I’m just not willing to say that it is a significant factor in the horrible burden of violent death in the black community given the available data. However, I will support most good faith efforts to increase or improve on the data we have.
1. It takes only one year into account: 2015
2. Much of their data makes no goddamn sense at all
Just look at this table:
That table shows that 'black civilian armed' has a lower odds ratio than 'black civilian unarmed.' I mean, if that's what this study was actually demonstrating it would certainly help my thesis but not even I think the result from that table is a reflection of reality. More likely, what it shows is the problem with using multivariate regression from a limited data set to retroactively answer the authors' question of "What factors predict the race of a person fatally shot by police?”
In fact, after I saw that table, I realized that someone had actually written a letter to the editor about the study:
---------------------------------------------
"
A recent PNAS article reports “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across [fatal] shootings” by police officers (ref. 1, p. 15877). This claim is based on the results of a regression model that suggested “a person fatally shot by police was 6.67 times less likely (odds ratio [OR] = 0.15 [0.09, 0.27]) to be Black than White” (ref. 1, p. 15880). The article also claims the results “do not depend on which predictors are used” (ref. 1, p. 15881). These claims are misleading because the reported results apply only to a subset of victims and do not control for the fact that we would expect a higher number of White victims simply because the majority of US citizens are White.
The published odds ratio of 0.15 is based on a regression model that made the intercept correspond to a county with 4 times more White (50%) than Black (12%) citizens. In addition, the intercept of the model corresponds to a country where White homicide rates equal 1) Black homicide rates and 2) Hispanic homicide rates and where victims are 3) average age (36.71 y) and White and Black victims are equally likely to 4) have mental health problems, 5) be suicidal, 6) be armed, and 7) attack an officer. We found that including suicidal as a predictor had the strongest effect on the intercept, which doubled the odds of the victim being White (OR = 0.24 vs. 0.49). In contrast, adjusting only for differences in Black and White homicide rates left the intercept unchanged (OR = 0.48 vs. 49). Thus, the main contribution of the regression analysis is to show that that the odds of a victim being White double when the percentage of suicidal victims increases from 11% in the actual population to 50% in a hypothetical population. The fact that older suicidal victims are disproportionally more likely to be White shows that not all victims of lethal use of force are violent criminals.
Although use of force with citizens who suffer from mental health problems is an important issue, another important issue is use of force for young, unarmed, mentally healthy (nonsuicidal) men. To examine racial disparities in this group, we specified an alternative model that focused on young (age 20 y), unarmed male victims that showed no signs of mental health problems and were not suicidal in a county with equal proportions of Black and White citizens. The intercept of this model suggested that victims with these characteristics are 13.67 times more likely to be Black than White, 95% confidence interval = 6.65, 28.13 (Racial Disparity in Fatal Use of Force).
The stark contrast between the published finding and our finding contradicts Johnson et al.’s (1) claims that their results hold across subgroups of victims. Contrary to this claim, their data are entirely consistent with the public perception that young male victims of fatal use of force are disproportionally Black. Importantly, neither the original finding nor our finding addresses the causes of racial disparities among victims of deadly use of force. Our results merely confirm other recent findings that racial disparities exist and that they are particularly large for young males (2).
There is widespread concern about racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings and that these disparities reflect discrimination by White officers. Existing databases of fatal shootings lack information about officers, and past analytic approaches have made it difficult to assess the...
www.pnas.org
---------------------------------------------
Another bonus letter to the editor highlighting the Cesario study's inaccuracy. This one wasn't published unfortunately but it explains the statistical problem in simple terms.
---------------------------------------------
But say for a moment you didn't just cherry-pick one study that had serious methodological problems, let's see what the preponderance of the evidence shows (or at least skews toward):
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A 2018 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that black and Hispanic men were far more likely to be killed by police than white men.[102] A 2019 study by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that while there are no racial differences in lethal use of police force, blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to experience non-lethal use of force.[103] A 2019 paper by Princeton University political scientists disputed the findings by Fryer, saying that if police had a higher threshold for stopping whites, this might mean that the whites, Hispanics and blacks in Fryer's data are not similar.[104] Reports by the Department of Justice have also found that police officers in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, systemically stop, search (in some cases strip-searching) and harass black residents.[105][106] A January 2017 report by the DOJ also found that the Chicago Police Department had "unconstitutionally engaged in a pattern of excessive and deadly force" and that police "have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color."[14] A 2018 study found that police officers more likely to use lethal force on blacks.[107] A 2019 study in the Journal of Politics found that police officers were more likely to use lethal force on blacks, but that this "most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force."[108] A 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that blacks and American Indian/Alaska indigenous people are more likely to be killed by police than whites, and that Latino men are more likely to be killed than white men.[109] According to the study, "for young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death."[109] A separate Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study found that there were no racial disparities in police shootings by white police;[110] the findings of the study were disputed by Princeton University scholars who argued that the study's method and dataset made it impossible for the authors to reach that conclusion.[111][112] Following the criticism by the Princeton scholars, the authors of the original PNAS study corrected their significance statement to read, "As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority."[113] A study by Texas A&M University economists, which rectified some problems of selection bias identified in the literature above, found that white police officers were more likely to use force and guns than black police, and that white officers were five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly black neighborhoods.[114] A 2020 American Political Science Review study estimated that 39% of uses of force by police against blacks and Hispanics in New York City was racially discriminatory.[115] A 2020 study in the journal Nature found that black drivers were stopped more often than white drivers, and that the threshold by which police decided to search black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for whites (judging by the rate at which contraband was found in searches).[12]
Analysis of more than 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina showed that blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be pulled over by police for traffic stops, and that blacks were more likely to be searched following the stop. There were no significant difference in the likelihood that Hispanics would be pulled over, but Hispanics were much more likely to be searched following a traffic stop than whites. When the study controlled for searches in high-crime areas, it still found that police disproportionately targeted black individuals. These racial disparities were particularly pronounced for young men. The study found that whites who were searched were more likely to carry contraband than blacks and Hispanics.[127][128]
A 2018 study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies found that law enforcement officers in Texas who could charge shoplifters with two types of crimes (one more serious, one less so) due to a vaguely worded statute were more likely to charge blacks and Hispanics with the more serious crime.[129]
A 2019 study, which made use of a dataset of the racial makeup of every U.S. sheriff over a 25-year period, found that "ratio of Black‐to‐White arrests is significantly higher under White sheriffs" and that the effects appear to be "driven by arrests for less‐serious offenses and by targeting Black crime types."[130]
And just think, this is all before we've even approached the inarguable systemic racism that is a part of the criminal justice system once the offenders are actually booked, tried, and sentenced.
In regard to those who like using "black-on-black crime" as some kind of argument or rhetorical device:
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As we noted earlier, commentators routinely refer to eruptions of violence in minority, disadvantaged neighborhoods as the black-onblack violence problem. We acknowledge that this designation is undeniably statistically accurate, given that most interpersonal violence involves victims and offenders of the same race. However, this higher-level statistical view can blind us to the details of the specific problems and dynamics that drive these statistics.
Seldom are crimes involving whites described as white-on-white violence. Use of this vernacular to describe blacks’ victimization of other blacks has several important consequences. First, a singular focus on a rudimentary race-based dyad characterizing black offending and victimization has the potential to devalue black life while overshadowing the importance of harmful social conditions, such as concentrated neighborhood disadvantage and low collective efficacy (Sampson, 2012) that collectively produce crime. Second, casual use of the black-on-black violence classification may lead segments of the public to implicitly assume that blacks are more tolerant of crime and disorder and do not share the moral standards of mainstream society.
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Police executives, politicians and political commentators need to refrain from using overly simplistic descriptions — such as “black-on-black” violence — when describing outbreaks of serious criminal violence in black neighborhoods. Because the police represent the most visible face of government and have primary responsibility for maintaining public safety in all neighborhoods, police executives in particular should avoid framing urban violence problems in this way. Inappropriate use of such phrases can inadvertently promote inappropriate policing activities in black neighborhoods, which in turn erode the community’s trust and confidence in the police and inhibit cooperation with them. Disadvantaged neighborhoods that suffer from serious violence need and benefit from focused police attention. Black residents clearly want police in their neighborhoods. However, they want the police to know the community, treat residents with respect and dignity, prevent future outbreaks of violence rather than merely respond to incidents, and engage with them in appropriately focused rather than indiscriminate policing strategies.
Careful analysis can lead to clarity in describing urban violence patterns and can thus improve police-minority community relations in at least two important ways. First, police executives can better frame and communicate to constituents the true nature of serious violent crime problems. Second, careful analysis can lead to the development and implementation of effective and appropriately focused crime reduction strategies. The type of analysis conducted in Boston, described above, is well within the reach of most urban police departments.
You posed a thoughtful question. Most American police do have less than lethal options at their disposal such as pepper spray and the TASER. Neither is anywhere close to 100% effective, and in this case a TASER was actually deployed but failed to stop the suspect. It was the yellow device that deployed a clicking sound. The TASER’s failure is what caused the officer to use lethal force when the suspect threatened to kill the officer and tussle for his gun.
I’m not aware of any police agency allowing their officers to deploy ketamine or versed, nor do I think that those pharmacologic options, if available, would have worked in the 3 seconds that it took the suspect to close the distance on this officer and fight for his gun.
However, I’d like to know if you or anyone else think this black suspect, who was high on stimulants and THC, was killed by a black cop due to systemic racism. If not, let’s move on to the next case as there is publicly available video footage or eye witness testimony from black witnesses in over half of the 19 unarmed blacks who were killed by the police last year.
Black cops can be complicit in treating black suspects differently. So yes, they can be in essence racist to other black men i.e suspects. There are articles out there. Do a google search.
This is because of what they see when they patrol the highly violent areas that are mostly black. Implicit bias. They end up suspecting the worst in the young black men they come around.
When I first came to this country and the first ten fifteen years or so, I too was racist and brainwashed towards African Americans. Not embarrassed to say because I became more educated and learned some sociology and started hanging around more black folk.
ive never seen so many long posts from every poster before.
I support the current movement against police brutality. There is no excuse for police brutality like what happened to George. police in this country also has way too much power and immunity and there needs to be an adjustment. I look forward to see what changes will be made in different areas of the country.
However, i believe these types of events will keep happening, hopefully with less frequency
