Still doesn’t mean anything. It may be that there was no exhonorating evidence, such as a 2nd videotape. It may be that some of those have not yet gone to trial. It may be that those 150 were rabble-rousing, but not politically motivated at all (This is New York, remember). It may be any one of a million other things. To take this number as evidence of liberal wrongdoing shows that no lessons from this thread have been learned at all.
If you can prove that each one of those 150 is positively guilty of liberal brownshirting, then maybe your math will have a point. Until then, thank you, come again.
This is something I’d like to see Bricker address. The court system seems to be built on a foundation of truth telling. We make witnesses put their hands on our most holy tome. We have “rules of evidence” in which we consider one untruth to be equivelent to pathological and habitual lying. And yet the very people sworn to uphold this system can tamper with evidence with impunity?
Well, you make a good point. Most of the 1800 or so protestors seem to have had their charges dismissed, and you cite a couple of cases demonstrating that.
I can certainly see how you might think that. And I will apologize, if it means anything, to the 1600 or so whose charges have been dismissed, or who were acquitted after trial.
In my own defense, I did say “apparently” illegal tactics.
And, on the other hand…
So it is not exactly true that the absolute innocence of these folks has been established (not that this is necessary under our system).
It is possible, however, that now that the convention is over, as is the election, the Manhattan DA has decided not to allocate the resources necessary to convict so large a group of people, who, even if they were guilty (which they must be presumed not to be), committed fairly minor offenses. Their protests also could be considered to shade off into First Amendment issues, and become even more sticky for that reason.
But you are entirely correct that the absolute number of arrests tends to exaggerate the number of disruptive incidents that can be proven in open court.
You referred, however, to a “sweeping generalization” that I made, and consider (apparently) that the dismissal of the large majority of the arrests disproves my point. Perhaps, but I think it is still debateable.
So it apparently cannot be said that all the arrests were based on testimony that was contradicted by videotape, or that all the arrested were factually innocent.
But based on the new evidence available (and thank you for that), suppose I amend my post as follows:
Certainly a disproportion of 360-to-1 is quite substantial. But a disproportion of 32-to-1, although much smaller, is still pretty marked.
And this is assuming that the 91% acquittal rate that seems to apply to the RNC protestors does not apply to the DNC ones. If it did, the proportion of illegality doesn’t change at all.
So, while you are certainly correct that most of the RNC arrests cannot be considered as evidence of brownshirt behavior by liberals, a rather large disproportion still exists, and may even be unchanged.
So I am afraid that, while my point is no longer overwhelming, although diminished, it still stands. Illegal protest tactics at the respective conventions still seem to show that liberal illegality outnumbers conservative illegality by more than thirty-to-one.
Better than 360, but not, in my view, enough to invalidate my point.
Completely off topic, but bite me. It ain’t in New York where families are shooting each other over their kids’ dating like so many mobile-home Montagues. It ain’t in New York where the guy secretly living in your closet beats you to death. It ain’t in New York where a kid wanders into his school and starts picking people off. Betcha my area had fewer crimes per capita, and in particular crimes related to “rabble-rousing” than yours did despite that hundreds of thousands of people come to my area every year for the specific purpose of carousing.
On topic, I object to the characterization of people who are not actually rounding people up and carting them off to places from which they will not return as “brownshirts.” It devalues the victims of the actual brownshirts.
I was going to say “consider yourself bitten”, but decided I wasn’t that hungry. I wasn’t asserting that New York led the world in violent crimes per capita. I was asserting that in a city with such a huge population, more overall arrests are likely. East Pudunk, Montana may have more bizarre murders per capita, but you’ll never work up a good rally there like you can in a place with a population of 8 million. And a big rally is more likely to generate arrests.
And if you want to compare our areas for total number of arrests during, say, a presidential convention, look to the OP.
[QUOTE=Twin]
I’m not sure what this whole thing proves. If 91% of the convictions were ended with not guilty, that still leaves 9% that weren’t./QUOTE]
Er, no. Given that the police and/or DA’s office have been caught red-handed at evidence tampering, any convictions in these cases are utterly tainted.
Aw, Manny, calm down. It’s entirely possible that some of 'em were rabble rousing unrelated to the RNC. I mean, those guys at, what is it, on Broadway and 33rdish, the “Only the black man is a real jew” guys? We get plenty of rabble rousers every day.
And, of course, they’d gravitate to where the people were. I saw counterprotestors, I saw, what was it, those loonies on the right who were trying to break up Dem protests? Saw some of them get busted, that was funny.
So even that 9 percent can’t be all that firm. This is the greatest city in the world… and the craziest.
I think the point here is that in a city the size of New York, you would be more likely to have ~150 convictions for rabble-rousing in total regardless of the per capita crime rate. That’s why you all have Spider-man.
Well, first of all, i’m sorry that this thread has suffered from a diversion over my attitude towards Shodan, exemplified by:
and
and also
This is the secnod time in about a week that i’ve had people take me to task for doing stuff IN THE PIT that is actually extremely mild by Pit standards. I’m not sure what it is that causes people to take offence at some very mild insults. Maybe it’s the fact that i often try to make reasoned arguments even in the Pit, and that my insults come in the midst of a post that is, for the most part, rational and rather amicably argued.
I mean, i could go all out if that made people feel better. If i had titled the thread “Hey, Shodan, you piece of shit,” and spent the whole thing abusing him, some people might have defended him and some people might have defended me, but no-one would even have batted an eyelid at my language or the fact that i was insulting someone.
Let me be clear about something. Yes, i insulted Shodan in the OP. This is the Pit, and that’s part of its raison d’etre. I insulted him for the reasons i outlined in my OP. But i was telling the truth when i said that it wasn’t specifically a pitting of him as an individual; it was a pitting of:
a) the attitude shared by people who are notShodan, that we can make pointless comparisons and draw conclusions about brownshirtedness based on arrests alone.
and
b) a police department and a DA’s office that seem willing to make shit up.
Now, to some more specific points:
You are correct that i am using him as an example even though he was relying on the only information available at the time. I don’t blame him for doing that; all of us can only work with what we have at the time. But not all of us take such things as arrests during a street protest as reliable evidence of whether or not people of a particular politcal persuasion have a tendency towards “brownshirt tactics.”
Hell, the DNC convention in Philadelphia only four years previously followed a reasonably similar pattern, with quite a lot of people arrested and then freed without charges, or after having the charges dropped, and with some evidence of police overzealousness. American—indeed global—history is rife with examples of police who take an “arrest on the slightest (or even no) pretext” attitude at public demonstrations, and it seems to me that people should know by now the caution with which such “evidence” of protesters’ bad deeds should be used.
Well, this may be a problem with my interpretation, i guess. If i felt he had asked the question in a genuine attempt to elicit a debate on the issue, it might not have been such a big deal. But to start a debate in GD over whether these very preliminary statistics are good evidence of Democrats’ great willingness to use “brownshirt tactics” seems to me rather contrary to the spirit, although maybe not the letter, of GD debate standards.
And i’m not sure exactly what you mean by asserting that the data turned out to be “skewed through an unpredictable dynamic.” Excessive police enthusiasm for making arrests seems, to me at least, a rather predictable facet of public demonstrations. Also, i don’t blame Shodan for how the data turned out; i blame him for the conclusions he drew from such flimsy evidence.
Yes you did. But you also said “brownshirt tactics” and, despite phrasing your post as a question or a subject for debate, made pretty clear that you thought that these arrests allowed for broad general conclusions about “one side” of the American political divide.
That’s a lot of waffling about their level of guilt, a lot of grudging admissions of their innocence combined with an attitude suggesting that they were probably guilty but got away with it because prosecution was too much hassle. You may be right about the issue of the DA’s resource allocation, but it says something that such a high proportion of the arrests were apparently thought not even to be worth the effort. I’d be interested to know what the typical rate of dimissals is, as a percentage of arrests, for the NYPD.
As for your assertion that the arrests might be made “more sticky” for first amendment reasons—well, yes they could. Which kind of supports my concern about whether all these arrests should have been made in the first place.
Whew. I guess it’s lucky then that i never made the assertion that everyone arrested was innocent. Glad i avoided that one.
and
Both of these assertions fail to deal with the first point that i made in the OP, which as that the original comparison was fundamentally flawed anyway. In order to make these sort of claims about overall levels of illegality, you would have to provide a lot more evidence than you have given. All we have are the arrest or the conviction rates. What we don’t have is:[ul][li]the number of those detained who were Democrats, and the number who were Republicans (E-Sabbath has testified to seeing some right-wing folks arrested)[/li][li]the number who were protesting against the conventions, and the number who were protesting against the protesters[/li][li]the overall numbers of people protesting in NYC and Boston (necessary for purposes of proportion; after all, if 5 people are arrested at a demonstration of 20, and if 10 people are arrested at a demonstration of 1000, are the people in Group B twice as bad as the people in Group A?)[*]the number of those arrested compared to the population as a whole. I’m no statistican, so i really don’t know the answer to this. If we assume, according to the recent election results, that there are about 60 million Dems and 60 million Reps in America, how statistically significant is it that the ratio of valid arrests is 162:5, in such a large population? [/ul]Now, it may be that accounting for all these variables might actually prove your point, but the fact is that you never even attempted to look beyond raw arrest numbers.[/li]
And even putting these issues aside, i’m also surprised how easily you slide by the most worrying part of this whole thing—the conduct of certain police officers and of the NYC DA’s office. If such clear examples of bad faith emerged in the cases i cited, surely it’s possible to believe that more occurred? Hell, one particular officer was, according to the NYT, found not to have been present at the arrests of five different people, all of whom he signed a complaint against. While i might disagree with your characterisation of the situation, and your use of the label “brownshirt,” anything that you say about this event has very few consequences for our actual liberties and our system of justice. The same cannot be said of the actions of police officers and District Attorneys, and it’s them that i’m really pissed at in this incident.
I object as well. Merely marching/protesting/potentially committing vandalism or other illegal acts does not a Nazi make. Using the term “brownshirt” in this context is a) ludicrous, and b) makes light of what brownshirts and Nazism were all about.
I also suspect that a goodly percentage of those arrested at the RNC were in fact guilty of some pissant crimes or other, and that the D.A. concluded there was little value in tying up the time of his department and the courts pursuing all of them. Getting the alleged perps off the street and damping down potential trouble was likely the main goal in the first place, not securing convictions.
Abuse of arrest powers and/or altering evidence are of course separate issues worthy of comment.
By the way, I think that the main reasoning behind the GOP going to New York was not to “to rub the liberal city’s nose in “compassionate” conservatism”, but to wrap the party in the glow of 9/11-related sacrifice and supposed dynamic response to terrorism. And I doubt city leaders, valuing publicity and alleged revenues from the convention, cared about motivations very much.
FWIW, i agree with you. Part of the reason i placed this thread in the Pit rather than GD was so that i could engage in some political hyperbole.
As for the issue of revenue, is the final verdict in on whether the added revenue from conventions like this outweighs that added cost of security and the inconvenience to local residents?
I can personally attest to the relative peacefulness of the Boston cops. A couple years ago I was in Boston where there was a protest against the impending war, and I was bored so I walked to it to, never having been to a protest before. There were people there sitting in the road blocking a key bridge, and the cops came and told them to disperse. All of them but one did, and they “arrested” her by putting her in the cop car for a couple minutes then letting her go (dunno if they told her to come in later for formal charges or not.)
I hesitate to think what would happen if they were New York cops. Personally, I think all the people in the street should have been arrested, if they didn’t have a march permit.
Maybe it was due to the massive amounts of protests planned around Boston for that day, and they had to take care of them all as quickly as possible. But I still would think that this anecdote goes a long way in explaining the disparity in numbers of arrests. (After all, when’s the last time we heard Boston cops sodomizing a detainee or shooting an unarmed suspect 30 times?)
You forgot one: Boston is not New York. Geographically they are not identical cities, they do not have identical security concerns, and their respective police forces are not going to employ identical tactics.
I escaped from Beantown that week, but from what I hear, downtown was a ghost town. It may well be that there were so few arrests because there was no one around to arrest.