You could, if you continue to cherry pick your figures and ignore statistical analysis.
Whilst there’s plenty of reasons to think that black people are treated worse by the police than others, there’s no evidence that more are being illegally killed.
And we’re back to people being lied to by those who should know better… I’m guessing you never bothered to learn any statistics.
I agree with this. We don’t need grand jury “shopping”, i.e. continuing to empanel grand juries until we get the result we like. That is not justice.
You can see that he already noted that the police are part of the problem:
I, for one, would not mind if the protesters were actually protesting a crime. This man was cleared by a Grand Jury, and cleared by the FBI. That the NAACP wants to keep pushing the issue with Officer Wilson is the problem. Move on, you were wrong here. Find an actual instance of police brutality to protest, and you will have my support 100%.
There is a practical reason, arising from a legal reason, that he can’t be indicted again.
You can’t convene a new grand jury to consider his case. Neither can the editors of “Mother Jones,” or The New York Times. The NAACP cannot convene a grand jury, nor can the Rev. Al Sharpton. Rachel Maddow cannot convene a grand jury.
Here is a complete list of people that could, legally, convene a new Missouri grand jury to look at the case again:
[ul]
[li]Robert McCulloch, Prosecuting Attorney for St. Louis County, Missouri[/li][li]Jay Nixon, Governor of Missouri [/li][li]Maura McShane, Presiding Judge of the 21st Judicial Circuit Court of Missouri[/li][/ul]
Which one do you believe will do so?
I missed your assignation of (partial) blame to the police for the disparities in shooting – my apologies. The figures aren’t cherry picked, though – the 21 times figure is the only one available. There’s so little data on police shootings, since departments aren’t required to keep such data (and very rarely actually volunteer) – with better data we’d have a better idea of the true disparities.
As to the statistics – in that other thread from a couple of months ago, you were the one shown to lack proper understanding, not I.
That, by the way, has been a point I’ve made repeatedly here. Most of the examples that are brought up are people either attacking or threatening the police, or waving guns around in public. Others consist of people being arrested for minor crimes they’ve actually committed, but which posters here (and presumably the protesters) think they should get away with. Often, the claim is that white and/or wealthy people get away with crime, so black and/or poor people should do as well - not a claim I can support.
Either the laws should be changed (for example, legalising drugs) if they’re inappropriate laws, or the rich white people breaking the law should also be punished. Criticising the police for doing their jobs, and attempting to protect themselves and others, which is what the vast majority of the complaints here are about, is not an acceptable solution. Especially when criticising the actual criminals for their actions results in accusations of racism, in an attempt to shut down debate.
The most obvious reform for the police would be body cameras. It’s sad that trust in the police is so low that they’re necessary, but the evidence from places they’ve been used is that complaints of police misconduct fall by something like an order of magnitude. Whether that’s because the police behave better, because people aren’t making false complaints, or both, it seems to help dramatically. The other thing that needs to happen is for the small number of cops who actually abuse their power to be sacked, and for the rest - including those such as Wilson where there’s no evidence of actual wrongdoing - to be respected by the communities they work for.
It’s your constant clinging to the lower estimate of the disparity of crimes committed that is cherry picking.
It was repeatedly claimed I was wrong by people who either didn’t read what my argument was, or didn’t understand it. To claim I was wrong would require assuming that the police only come into contact with young black men at the same rate as they do other people, a claim that goes against the premise of all the (largely correct) claims that black people are stopped more often.
The fallacy, ultimately, is believing that anything other than a proportionate increase to only one of many variables proves that something is wrong. It doesn’t.
There was no higher estimate. The 14 number comes from “some guy on the internet with no cite”. That’s not an estimate, that’s “some guy said…”. My numbers (6 to 9 times) came from government statistics.
It doesn’t prove that something is wrong. But here’s where you’re still misunderstanding statistics: whatever additional (or not) contact police have with black people would already be hard-wired into both numbers – into both the shooting numbers, and the crime numbers. It doesn’t make sense to only think that’s a factor for one of the disparities. If cops come into contact with black men more often, then that’s part of the explanation for both higher crime rates and higher shooting rates, but not for just one (and when there’s a massive difference in the disparities, not for this one).
Maybe there’s an explanation other than “cops are more jittery and more likely to pull the trigger for young black men, all other things being equal” for the 21-times disparity in shootings vs 6-to-9 times for crime. But it’s not additional contact between cops and young black men, since that would apply to both factors.
If you want to claim that, then you have to accept that the police aren’t disproportionately stopping and/or harassing young black men. Which you’re entitled to think, but it’s not an opinion that would be consistent with your other posts. Or, frankly, entirely consistent with reality.
Is your claim that the police are only stopping young black men at a rate proportional to the amount of crime they commit - that is, not harassing them any more than any other group - but killing them 2-3 times more often per stop than other groups? That’s the only way I can make sense of your claims, but it doesn’t seem entirely consistent with your belief that the police are harassing these people.
Wait, what?
Why can’t all of the following be true:
(1) Police have more contacts with black men than the underlying (largely unknowable) racial disparities in criminal activity would warrant; and
(2) The known statistics about race and crime are out of proportion to underlying racial disparities in criminal activity because the police do more policing of black men; and
(3) The use of police violence against black men is disproportionate to both (1) and (2).
… and the “21 times” number comes from tiny dataset that can in no way be shown to be representative of the whole, so the “real” number can be anything.
First, you need to define what you mean by a “small number”. Perhaps you could supply us with that number and permit us to decide if it is “small”. Unless you don’t actually have any such number, small or otherwise. Kinda what I’m thinking, at this point, a smokescreen pretending to be an argument.
The data set is pretty large, but it’s just a tiny proportion of all the data. America is big.
No, because it’s entirely possible that harassment plays a role in both disparities. Harassment can lead to more arrests as well as more shootings. Or it could be something else.
Right, so the “21 times” is meaningless.
No, that’s not how data works. The 21 times tells us something, but not the whole story. It has meaning, it just doesn’t have all the meaning. Until police departments release more data, this is the best information on any potential disparity in cop shootings.
“The best information” from a tiny portion of the whole is meaningless because it doesn’t tell you what the whole is. It tells you what happened in “hundreds of police departments” - out of about 17,000 in the United States. You have no idea whatsoever what the rate of crime is for the same population (blacks, 15 to 19 years old) compared to whites in the same police departments, so you have nothing to compare to at all. It is meaningless.
You keep using black/white terminology – “no idea”, “meaningless”, “nothing to compare to”… Wrong. We have some idea, it has some meaning, and we have something to compare it to. We don’t have a perfect idea and understanding, we don’t have all the meaning, and we don’t have a huge amount to compare it to.
To elaborate: How Many Police Kill Black Men? Without Database, We Can't Know | STLPR
Klinger [criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis] doesn’t mince words: “The ProPublica thing needs to be shut down. They cherry picked the three years that had the worst disparity instead of being honest about the whole picture"
…
"The ProPublica analysis is absolute garbage because it is based on the FBI’s supplemental homicide reports. I told them, don’t do it because the stats are horseshit.”
Hope the word “horseshit” is black/white enough?
Looking at the bigger, 15-year picture, Moskos found that black youths were nine times more likely than white youths to be killed by officers. Including Hispanics among whites cut the ratio to 5.5:1. Including victims of all ages reduced the ratio to 4:1. One reason that the three-year period cited by ProPublica gave such a high ratio is that only one non-Hispanic white was killed in 2010, skewing the figures.
That’s quite a bit closer to rate of crime ratios, wouldn’t you say? But funny enough you keep quoting the 21 times crap, and not what others found. Wonder if you have an agenda?
Boiled down, what? Are you denying that any unjust disparity exists, or only that it is exaggerated?