Typo looks up, confused, as the wooosh soars beyond him…
Where I disagree with you is not so much your analysis of the details, but your seeming refusal to take a step back and look at the issue on a macro level.
The way the laws are set up, there are times when it is legal for a policeman to kill a civilian. That’s absolutely necessary, as you have pointed out many times, policemen have the right to self defense. And given how difficult “Self Defense” is to rigorously and precisely define and prove in all situations, and given human imperfection, there are inevitably going to be cases in which policeman kills a civilian and the circumstances “seem fishy”, the self defense is not clear cut, etc. And in some of those situations the cop might be found guilty, and in some they might not.
All of which is pretty much inevitable, it’s hard to imagine a reasonable set of laws and regulations in which the above were not the case.
So imagine a society which had a basically reasonable set of laws as above… but in this society a fairly high percentage of cops are prejudiced against red-haired people. Some are mildly prejudiced, some are severely prejudiced, but they’re not monsters – they’re not going out in the morning deliberately and premeditatedly hoping to get to kill some reddies – they’re just people with prejudices.
What’s going to happen?
Well, lots of cops will interact with lots of people in lots of situations. And in those situations which involve interactions between cops and red-haired-people, the cops (or at least some of the cops) are going to start out more fearful, more on edge, more confrontational, more angry. Some of these interactions will only go one possible way… if someone pulls a gun and starts shooting at the cop with no provocation, then someone is going to die. If someone is super-insanely-polite and sits quietly in their car and keeps their hands in plain sight at all times, almost certainly no one is going to die. But there will still be some number of these interactions, small in ratio but significant in total number, in which the choices the cops make end up leading to a violent confrontation, and sometimes death.
It’s very important to note that in many of these situations, the cops will have acted fully within their legal rights. And in even more of these situations, the cops will have acted fully within their legal rights as far as any court can determine.
Nonetheless, someone living in this society and paying attention to youtube will realize that a hugely disproportionate number of redheads are being killed by cops. Sure, many/most of those encounters are ones in which the redhead did not act in some platonic ideal perfect fashion… but the suspicion is that if a non-readheaded-suspect had acted in a similar imperfect fashion the response would not have been as instant and as lethal.
So, in a society like that (PURELY hypothetically, obviously), is there something wrong? Is it reasonable for the NAARH to complain about how cops treat them? Is that complaint still reasonable even if the vast majority of incidents that get publicized do NOT involve some totally innocent angel?
No, someone with their back turned to a policeman can still be an imminent danger to someone else, in which case the policeman is justified in shooting them. Beyond that, you’ll have to check the specific rules on self defence. In some states, such as Florida (which for obvious reasons is the one who’s self defence laws everyone probably knows well by now), if one is entitled to use force in self defence, that entitlement remains until the aggressor clearly communicates that they are no longer a threat, and it’s not obvious that turning one’s back necessarily does that.
For example, if someone is shooting at you, and turns their back to reload, it would be absurd to suggest that they are no longer a threat, and you would not be allowed to shoot them.
[citation needed]
If there is a problem, then it lies with the laws and not with the cops actions. But, if we assume the laws are reasonable, then no, there’s no problem.
The problem is that you are defining “mistreatment” far too broadly, to include the police doing their jobs. If the police see one black guy and one white guy jaywalking and only arrest one of them, he has not been mistreated. Even if, on every single occasion, the guy of the same race is arrested, not one of them has been mistreated. Because they were committing a crime, and arrest is a risk you take when you do that.
The correct response to that situation is not to argue that blacks are being treated badly, but to argue for either white jaywalkers to arrested, or for jaywalking to be legalised.
Same with the use of force. Either it’s legal, in which case accept it or get the law changed, or it’s not, in which case the offenders need to be punished. The problem is, the investigations keep finding that the use of force is legal, so no-one’s being mistreated.
That you consider a criminal being arrested, or someone resisting arrest being injured, as mistreatment is part of the problem. If, as you suggest, black people in general consider that mistreatment then they are wrong. Those things are fair and predictable results of their actions.
So what about when a white and a black person don’t break the law, but the black person gets arrested regardless?
[quote=“Gary_Kumquat, post:3886, topic:700942”]
So what about when a white and a black person don’t break the law, but the black person gets arrested regardless?
[/QUOTE]Is that the same video that was discussed earlier, where it turned out that the incidents happened in completely different jurisdictions? I agree that no-one should be arrested for legally carrying a gun, but that’s hardly something that only happens to black people.
I think this is an utterly ridiculous statement – this exact tactic has been used to oppress black people in the past. Laws were drawn up and only applied to blacks – are you seriously arguing that those blacks who were arrested (usually for things like walking down the street at night or other totally mundane and harmless activities) and sometimes brutalized were not mistreated?
Except that in your scenario, blacks are being treated badly. This happened in America in many places, and many blacks were arrested for completely pointless reasons except that they were black.
Sometimes the investigations are wrong. 100 years ago, there’s no way the police and the justice system were trustworthy in investigating wrongdoing against black people among themselves – they’re still not 100% trustworthy, and they still might have biases in some circumstances.
Are you seriously arguing that if someone resists arrest they can’t be mistreated? That once someone resists arrest the cops can do anything to them at all and it’s not mistreatment? That’s insane, if that’s what you’re saying. I’m certainly not saying that all black people arrested, or all black people injured are mistreated, but some of them are, and it is still a significant problem in America.
You’re still arguing against straw-men, rather than my posts. The actions of black people are entirely irrelevant to the question of police mistreatment of black people. They are very relevant to the question of police treatment (not mistreatment) of black people – and that is a worthy discussion. But I’m not talking about that – I’m just talking about mistreatment, which exists and is a significant problem. Black people collectively aren’t making it up – they are really being treated unfairly in a significant number of instances. I trust that black people are as honest and accurate in assessing the treatment of black people in America as they have always been – and, as a group, they’ve always been by far the most honest and accurate source for such information.
No black person (or any other) has ever been responsible in any way for being lynched. No black person (or any other) has ever been responsible in any way for being mistreated by police. Lynching and mistreatment are never justified.
So do you believe police mistreatment of black people exists as a significant problem in America, or do you believe that for the first time in American history most black Americans are either dishonest or inaccurate about the treatment of black Americans? If you accept that it exists as a significant problem in America (and we’re just talking about mistreatment – when cops actually behave wrongly and badly), then do you agree that it’s never the fault of a black person who is mistreated? That such mistreatment is only the fault of the mistreaters?
So there are plenty of situations in which a cop has discretion as to how to act. For instance, maybe in a particular jurisdiction, a cop has the right to pull someone over for a tail light being out. At that point, the cop can legally do two things:
(1) Give the driver a verbal warning
(2) Issue the driver a ticket
and, quasi-legally, the cop can also
(3) Claim that the driver was acting suspicious, which is going to be pretty much impossible to disprove after the fact, and then demand that the driver leave the vehicle, and then search the vehicle for evidence of other crimes
Now, any of these 3 is, at least in some situations, reasonable. There would probably be times when a cop would see someone with a taillight out, stop them, and then immediately realize that this person was acting super-duper-suspicious, and sure enough, they have illegal drugs in the trunk or whatever. And probably other times when the cop honestly and reasonably suspected something like that, but there didn’t turn out to be. So having (3) as an option is not necessarily outrageous or some indictment of the system… but of course it is clearly something that is open for abuse.
So what’s the problem? Well, what if it turns out that for white drivers, cops do (1) 70% of the time, (2) 25% of the time and (3) 5% of the time, but for black drivers it’s 20%, 60%, 20%.
No laws are being broken. No one individual incident is automatically proof of anything. But is that a problem? Do you think that that’s just a perfectly healthy status quo?
Not to be nitpicky here, but the police never arrest criminals. They arrest suspects.
And if they are NOT shooting at you and they turn their back, would you presume they have a weapon and they are loading it? By assuming the worst case scenario and saying it is “absurd” to do otherwise, you’re simply inviting bad shootings.
It doesn’t seem to matter to you. This is my cite.
No, you wouldn’t presume that. I don’t know where you got that idea from, but it’s not from any of my posts.
I have never said this to a single poster in my entire posting history, read all of it if you want to confirm.
…Oh fuck you…
You are talking about things that happened decades ago, and are irrelevant to what’s happening today. But if such laws exist, the correct response is to change the laws, not complain about them being enforced.
No, they’re not. They are being treated correctly according to the law. Again, if the law is wrong, change it.
Your constant talk about how things were 100 years ago, and your refusal to acknowledge that things are so different in every way now as to be unrecognisable, is frankly mind-boggling, and I actually can’t understand why you keep doing it. Obviously sometimes investigations get it wrong, but what is happening in this thread, and more widely in the media, is the evidence becoming public, clearly showing that the police made a legally correct decision, and them still being criticised for it. That’s not the investigation getting it wrong.
No, that’s nothing like what I’m arguing. I’m saying the police have a right, and a responsibility, to use force to arrest those who resist.
But you are defining “mistreatment” so broadly as to include a vast amount of cases where the police are acting how they are supposed to act, based on the law. If the police arrest someone who is, in fact, breaking the law, that person has not been treated unfairly by the police, no matter what is done to anyone else who breaks that law, or any other law. Yes, of course there needs to be protection against laws that specifically target a particular race or other group, but those protections have existed for decades.
There is no legal behaviour by the police, or anyone else, that is even remotely comparable to lynching.
I believe that it exists as a problem, but for whatever reason this thread is filled with examples that are not mistreatment. Someone who attacks a cop, or ignores his instructions and instead reaches for a gun, or who resists arrest and requires restraining, is not being mistreated if they are injured or killed as a proportionate response to those actions. In those cases, the person responsible is the person who was injured or killed, no-one else.
An actual example of mistreatment was people being stopped and searched just because they were black, not because of any suspicious behaviour. But that was banned. It’s at that level that mistreatment happens, when innocent people are targeted.
And I don’t believe that this is the first time in history that black Americans have been dishonest or inaccurate about their treatment. Have you stopped beating your wife?
Not with your absurdly broad description of “mistreatment”, no. When “mistreatment” consists of being arrested for crimes actually committed then clearly the person arrested bears some responsibility.
And before you harp on about lynching again, that was never a legal response to someone being a criminal. Arrest always was and is.
One way to tell if it is a problem or not is to look at what proportion of the searches find something. If it’s the same proportion for black and white people, then there’s no obvious problem. If, like with stop and search, more black people are being stopped but less are found to be doing something wrong, then there is a problem.
Another way to tell, hopefully, will be the increased use of body cameras, so if someone is stopped it will be easier to judge if their behaviour was suspicious after the fact, rather than just relying on what people report.
So, my answer is that, based solely on your statistics, it’s impossible to know whether there’s a problem.
In that case, you’re talking only about the small subset of worst case scenarios and not making a general statement on police encounters with civilians. Our justifiable concerns are with police encounters with civilians that end in the civilian being killed or injured where there was no threat or reasonable presumption of threat to the officer or anyone else. Oh, look, someone is running away from a traffic stop. Better shoot him 5 or 6 times in the back, just to be safe.
Steophan thinks it is ok for police to racially enforce minor laws, and no one has any business complaining if they do.
Just so everyone is clear what position they are debating.
And when and where has that happened, since no examples of such a thing occurring have been cited in this thread so far?
Well, Walter Scott comes to mind, in case you haven’t been following the news (I’ll hazard a guess it’s been mentioned in this thread once or twice and would be quite surprised if it had not). But for the happenstance video recording, would you believe Michael Slager’s account of a struggle over the taser? When Scott was 15 to 20 feet away and running, what “imminent” threat did he pose to Slager or anyone else?
Michael Slager has been charged with murder, so it seems that the prosecutor and grand jury, far from wanting to protect the police, have investigated and found that there is a good chance that he’ll be convicted. We’ll see the totality of the evidence at the trial, but this certainly isn’t a case of police misconduct being swept under the rug.