Obvious jack-booted anti-American thuggery.
God forbid she get away with 14 bucks worth of Walmart crap.
She didn’t even have the stuff anymore.
Walmart employees stopped Garner when she stepped outside the store, reclaimed the items, denied her attempts to pay for them and called the police.
Seems like it’s not just the police who were assholes in this story.
This was the day after a federal judge ordered them to stop using chemical deterrents and to stop harassing journalists.
Don’t 2nd Amendment nuts claim they have theirs to protect all the other amendments from the government or some shit?
That’s not quite correct. Annually, the police actually shoot significantly more white people than black people. The racial disparity in police shootings only becomes apparent when one corrects for the relative percentages of black and white people in the general population. Therefore, I can easily find one white person killed for every black person. In fact, I can find more than one.
Of course, as I explained in post 1337, there’s reason to believe that the racial disparity in police shootings which appears when one corrects for population actually disappears again when one further corrects for the differing likelihoods of black citizens and white citizens encountering the police in the first place.
However, the reason I brought up the cases of Tony Timpa, Duncan Lemp, and others wasn’t to argue against the existence of a racial disparity in police shootings. It was to correct what I see as an extremely widespread misconception; that what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor simply cannot happen to a white man in America. In that limited capacity, I think the anecdotes serve a useful purpose. Furthermore, I think that if incidents of police brutality against white, Hispanic, and Asian citizens were more widely reported on, it would allow everyone to better contextualize the phenomenon of police brutality as a whole, which can only be helpful.
The sentencing disparity between black and white offenders is definitely real, and speaks clearly to the existence of systemic racism. To be clear, I’m not arguing that systemic racism isn’t real. I’m arguing that there’s reason to believe that systemic racism doesn’t manifest itself specifically in a racial disparity in police shootings.
However, all the available evidence I’ve seen indicates that black men factually commit more crimes than any other racial group. As I mentioned in post 1392, the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2018 indicated that 35% of the victims of non-fatal violent crime reported that their assailant was black. Meanwhile, the crime statistics compiled by the FBI for the same year showed that 33% of people arrested for non-fatal violent crimes were also black.
If cops were going out of their way to pin crimes on innocent black men, then the figure from the NVCS would likely be significantly lower than the figure on the FBI’s report. Instead, the reverse is true. The fact that the FBI’s catalogue of the race of arrestees tracks so closely with the racial descriptions given by victims to the NVCS is strong evidence that the arrest figures are accurate. Therefore, we have good reason to believe that black men do commit more non-fatal violent crimes than any other racial group. Moreover, data compiled by numerous law enforcement organizations and independent bodies clearly indicates that black men also commit significantly more fatal violent crime (homicide, manslaughter etc…) than any other racial group.
To point this out isn’t racist, nor is it indicative of subconscious bias. I freely admit that I may not have all the relevant information (although I sincerely believe I do), but my opinion is based on data. And the data seems to be pretty strong, IMO.
Now, if I’d inferred from these figures that black people were innately more prone to violence, then that certainly would be indicative of subconscious bias. However, I made no such inference. Personally, I don’t believe the disproportionate levels of violent crime committed by (and, largely, inflicted upon) black people is indicative of any sort of inherent defect. Nor do I believe, as some conservatives do, that it’s attributable to “black culture” (a term so vague as to be meaningless). I believe it’s a consequence of urbanization and poverty; two things which, no matter where you are in the world, always correlate strongly with violent crime. These two factors, in turn, have their roots in redlining and other systemically racist policies of the past.
I think Akaj made a good point in post 1397 when he said:
This seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me.
My understanding is that the data is collected independently by the Bureau of Justice. Also, it would, I think, be very difficult for cops to tamper with the data because it only concerns incidents where the race of the offender has been confirmed by the victim of the crime, who, obviously, has no incentive to lie.
which says
Checked their credentials? So, if you do not have credentials, will you be arrested for illegal reporting?
Collected. From other law enforcement agencies. Entered into systems by cops. Some of of whom lie easier than breathing.
Did you see from last week the county that is dismissing 400 convictions because a cop (white) was stealing dope from evidence and illegally pulling drivers (mostly not white) over and planting it on them over 3 years? And that this was not the first time we have seen this? Those arrests and convictions were part of the data that the Feds collected.
I don’t think that’s how it works. My understanding is that the organizers of the survey contact crime victims separately. They don’t rely on information entered into systems by cops. Here’s a more in-depth explanation of how it works: NCVS
I did see that story, and it’s appalling. And I’m sure those overturned convictions form part of some dataset somewhere which will need to be corrected. However, they don’t form part of the specific FBI dataset I referenced in post 1406. That was the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR) which catalogues non-fatal violent crimes. It doesn’t record instances of drug possession.
I don’t think this tells the entire story. While, in absolute numbers, police shoot more white people per year than they do black people, when you correct for the relative percentages of black people and white people in the general population, a clear racial disparity emerges. However, as the study I referenced in post 1337 points out, this disparity disappears when one further corrects for the differing likelihoods of black citizens and white citizens encountering the police in the first place.
This isn’t to say that cops treat black and white citizens equally in every respect. Far from it. Indeed, the same study also shows that cops are more likely to exercise non-fatal force (handcuffs, pepper spray etc…) against black citizens than white. It may seem commonsensical to infer that a racial disparity in the exercise of non-fatal force would be reflected in a similar racial disparity in the exercise of fatal force as well. However, the data doesn’t seem to bear that out.
That certainly wasn’t the argument I intended to advance. As I said in post 1394, I believe that a significant driving factor (perhaps the significant driving factor) in the wave of protests following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor was the notion that what happened to them simply cannot happen to a white man in America. This notion is false, as the cases of Tony Timpa and Duncan Lemp clearly demonstrate. I cited those cases strictly as evidence that what happened to Floyd and Taylor had also happened to white men, not to argue that they happened to white men with the same frequency.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Are you talking about cases where a black person and a white person are involved in the same crime, and the black person gets shot while the white person gets arrested? Because, if so, I’ve not actually heard of any cases like that. Then again, my knowledge of such things is far from encyclopedic. If you could give me an example of what you’re referring to I’d appreciate it. Thanks.
They are not overturned. They are in the process of being dismissed. Who knows how long that process will last.
I got a fiver that says the cop who did this will not spend much time jail, particularly if compared to the people who he framed. I would LOVE to be wrong about that.
OK, someone is gonna have to help me out here. To my uneducated view, this is not an analysis of crime data, but only a survey. 240K interviews, 160K unique people, 95K households. (which I don’t understand either, How can there be nearly twice as many people as households? They interviewed multiple people from the same household?) I don’t know how they determine an 'eligible household". And if the respondents are representative of the population, then they talked with a LOT more white people than black people.
So, they are talking to be people who may or may not be crime victims and how they perceived those experiences. In short, I really don’t see the point.
A day after Brown’s arrest, two inmates told jail staff that Brown was hiding drugs in her body
Gonna call bullshit here. Either these inmates are slimy unreliable snitches whose words are worthless, or they said what the jailers told them to say, or they did not actually exist at all.
Seriously, she was just brought into the jail, and strip searched, She suddenly has a drug pipeline? The very next day?
Nope. Shenanigans. They were just fucking with her.
Why can’t they have both?
I’m talking about – just off the top of my head – cases like this:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/us/minnesota-oeltjenbruns-arrest-hammer-mask-dispute/index.html
Where – almost without needing to delve into the specifics of each situation – it’s not unreasonable to perceive that a black person in each of these situations just might have ended up getting killed by Law Enforcement.
Or, at the very least, that the treatment sure looks egregiously disparate based on race.
The Burger King story seems pretty weak. I think it best if we stay away from anecdotes; in a country with 330m residents we can probably find an anecdote for anything. What’s important is the aggregate; for that we have strong evidence of racial bias.
But my post speaks to the perception that’s created in the public in some of these high-profile, highly-publicized cases.
Which is distinct from the statistics, but may be having an outsized influence on the debate.
ETA: I’d be willing to bet that the “Burger King story” doesn’t seem ‘weak’ to an endless number of people of color in this country. That’s really my point.
Make him pay.
He personally needs to be presented with a bill for all of the court time and court costs, the DAs’ time, the public defenders’ time, private defense attorney’s bills, bail bond fees, lost wages for any work that anyone missed defending themselves, additional lost wages for any time spent incarcerated, all jail/prison costs, (also any fines that any one of his victims may have incurred). And anything else I haven’t thought of off the top of my head.
Right now, his victims and the people of the commonwealth of Virginia are paying the financial costs of his crap. If he had to pay for it himself, if other cops saw he had to pay for it himself (if they, too were personally fined along with him for their part in this), I believe some of them might think twice.
I agree that it certainly looks egregiously disparate. But I think that, in this case, looks are deceiving. A lot of people (not necessarily anyone here, but certainly in wider society) seem to have gotten it into their heads that, as far as the police are concerned, while no pretext is too trivial to justify shooting a black man, a white man can do whatever he wants and still get treated with kid gloves. I believe this is a grave misconception, and I attribute its pervasiveness to two factors.
The first is simply that the media focuses very strongly on cases where unarmed black men are killed by cops and dangerous white men are taken in without incident, but barely spends any time covering cases where unarmed white men are killed by cops and dangerous black men are taken in without incident. This lopsided reporting, which is pure cherry-picking, is then amplified on social media, exacerbating the problem.
It’s trivially easy to devise a narrative which creates the opposite impression. We just need to pick different examples. For instance, last Saturday there was a mass shooting in Austin TX in which three people died and another was wounded. Just yesterday, the perpetrator, a black man - a black man who, incidentally, is also a child molester - was arrested without incident. Meanwhile, an unarmed white man gets shot dead in a hotel corridor by a cop wielding a gun with “You’re Fucked” written on it, and not only does the cop get away with it, he gets to retire on a full pension (this is the Daniel Shaver case I referenced earlier.)
This same weekend, another mass shooting happened in a bar in Wisconsin. Three people died and several more were injured. The perpetrator, a black man, was arrested without incident. Meanwhile a white man can’t even go to the corner store without being gunned down by a paranoid cop (this is the Dillon Taylor case which wolf11469 referenced in post 1395).
There was yet a third mass shooting this weekend, this time in Omaha, and again the perpetrator was both (a) black, and (b) taken alive without incident. Meanwhile, a mentally ill white man - who was naked save for a pair of swim trunks, so obviously unarmed - was shot dead by a cop on his own doorstep. This, despite the fact that the man’s family was there and were offering to restrain him themselves (This is the case of Channing Spivey)
Imagine if the news media went out of their way to amplify the distinctions between these cases, and those distinctions were then further amplified on social media. It’d be understandable if people formed a misimpression that cops deliberately go easier on blacks than whites, but it wouldn’t be an accurate reflection of reality.
The second reason I think this misconception is so pervasive is that I’ve observed a marked tendency, especially among liberals, to treat the police force as though it were one creature with half a million heads. I’ve seen people say things like “The cops shot Daunte Wright but bought Dylann Roof a cheeseburger” while appearing completely oblivious to the fact that these two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
If the cops as a whole are consistently being judged by the actions of their worst members, and if the national news media only really pays significant attention when those members brutalize black men, and never when they brutalize people of any other race, then it becomes much easier for people to think the way that, say, Dylann Roof was treated has something to do with the way Daunte Wright was treated, even though that’s obviously not true.
For these reasons, I think the existence of this apparent racial disparity between the way certain black and white suspects are treated by the cops is exceedingly weak evidence for the proposition that systemic racism manifests itself in police shootings. The fact that the vast majority of violent offenders, of all races, are arrested without incident, while examples of non-black citizens being unlawfully killed by police are scarcely reported on makes it more likely, in my view, that the apparent disparity is a mirage arising from news media’s focus on specific cases at the expense of others.