:smack: Make up your minds. Yesterday in this or another thread one of the advocates for Cops-Who-Kill claimed that cops lack the skill for nonlethal force because they spend all day writing tickets for broken tail-lights, and need to use their weapon only once a decade or so. Now you’re pretending Joe the Cop handles three major felonies before breakfast, eats a can of spinach and races off to handle three more. 
The fact that black people are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of unjustified police violence, up to and including deliberate murder, would indicate otherwise.
:smack: If you’re speaking of me, I never argued against comply-with-cops. To the contrary, this advice is so obvious as to be trite and I thought OP was worth only sarcasm.
Of course you comply with cops … or risk your life. (Can you point to anyone arguing otherwise?) And 2+2=4; do we need a thread about that also?
Philando Castile was complying with cop orders when he reached for his ID. Is your comment directed at him? Tamir Rice complied with no police orders because no orders were given to him. Is your comment directed at him?
Sober intelligent middle-class whites with no criminal history do not experience life the same way as down-at-heels persons who might be emotionally agitated, drunk, in need of psychiatric help, and are certainly in need of sympathy. Is your comment directed at them? When someone is too agitated to comply with your advice, do they deserve to be shot?
Are the poor and black areas of U.S. turning into a horrid police state, or does the ubiquity of video cameras just make us more aware of it? I’m not sure. But the attitude demonstrated by the trite and insolent advice offered in OP is part of the problem.
Part of the problem is TV, which perpetuates the myth that police officers give you three of more warnings before they shoot.
Bullshit. You get ONE warning and about two seconds to react. If you don’t the cop does.
I’m not saying that’s always right, just that it’s the way it is.
Philando Castile DID comply with the cops and they murdered him anyway.
Got any more bright ideas?
See post #94 and cites. Adding to that post to address your particular statement I know of no statistics for unjustified killings of suspects by the police by race. But there are statistics for police killings of suspects or any force used in arresting suspects, by race.
Summarizing again recent articles in major papers the rate of shootings of blacks by the police is 2.5 that of whites (WAPO), but per FBI data that’s about the same ratio as the overall arrest rate black/white. The rate of force (of all kinds, justified or not) used in arrests was found in a recent study (per NYT) to be ~28% higher per arrest for blacks than whites, but that’s not really ‘overwhelming’, even before considering that force might be justified in a higher proportion of arrests of blacks than arrests of whites. And that possibility is suggested, though not proved, by the fact (FBI data) that the rate of arrest of blacks for some serious crimes (murder 6+ times as high, robbery 8+ times as high) is much more disproportionate than the overall arrest rate.
It would seem difficult to assemble complete and broadly agreed upon statistics on unjustified police use of force, since they’d probably depend on official findings of justification, which are often controversial. But if overall police use of force or lethal force isn’t actually disproportionate to the rate of commission of serious crimes by race this IMO seriously undercuts the typical presentation of the issue, in the public debate, as mainly a racial one. And stats don’t seem to show a clear disproportion in police killings to crime rate by race.
Individual incidents should be evaluated on their own merits. Likewise the above isn’t directly relevant to a discussion of whether the police could reduce killings of suspects (legally justified or not) without unduly endangering themselves or reducing the effectiveness of law enforcement. Perhaps they can, which would be good.
That’s the totally asinine side of their argument, to which my response is; “Oh wait, you think it’s ok to kill people because you’re busy?”
NO
Why would we expect the rate of police killing of black men to be in proportion to the black crime rate? I think that assumption demonstrates a very shallow understanding of the nature and causes of crime.
So his girlfriend was lying when she said he put his hands up after being told not to move?
So you believe he was killed for putting his hands up when ordered to freeze, and that would be a completely justified shooting? :dubious:
The facts are a bit different.
I know that a man who’d just declared he had a gun made an unexpected movement after being told not to move.
I don’t know of statistics for unjustified killings either, and would be wary anyway since, for example, I think Tamir Rice’s killing was considered “justified.” :eek:
But one attribute might serve as a very very crude proxy for unjustified: Did the victim have a weapon?
Some portion of police killings really are justified, and including them in stats will dilute evidence of racism. There are many egregious examples of bad killings — Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, etc. Are there many examples of obviously wrong killings of whites?
And to some small extent, it is the entire underclass, regardless of race, which is being mistreated. (And middle-class blacks may fall victim to police misbehavior if cops make assumptions based on skin color.)
For that and your previous comment and septimus’ comment. You are saying the inference of a correlation between crime rate and police shooting rate shows a shallow understanding, but I doubt there’s a deep understanding of this issue anywhere. OTOH a political movement and theme is based on a strong assumption that unjustified police shootings have a strong specifically racial aspect or even motive. What deep understanding (with factual back up) is that based on? I think it’s self evidently meaningless to simply calculate the rate of police shootings of a particular group and say that’s a problem of bias against that group with no analysis whatsoever of whether police use of force against such group might be much more common in the normal course of justified law enforcement activity. Yet it often seems stated that way in the public debate, 2.5 times higher rate of police shootings of blacks: proof of a problem of (it seems often implied, a quantitatively proportional) racial bias by the police.
Your graph shows a disparity basically between police killings and locations. That seems pretty orthogonal to police killings and racial cause, especially viewing the locales in the graphic, which don’t seem to correlate heavily to race. The places on the two ends in police killing rate Bakersfield and Riverside (County CA is it?) are relatively similar places with less than national proportional black populations. Likewise Philadephia and Oakland are nearly at opposite ends, despite some similarity (though Oakland has a lower African American % than Philly now, used to be more similar). If the suggestion is that lots of factors beyond race could enter into police shootings (like department practices, local ‘civilian’ culture etc): of course. But again the public movement and debate seems based on a strong assumption about a particular cause, that the suspects are black and being discriminated against.
Nor does it actually disprove the inference that more interaction with police based on higher crime rate would result in more shootings by the police, justified or not, after correcting for local differences. One wouldn’t expect a ratio of arrest rate for robbery or murder of 6-8:1 to have any effect on the rate of police shootings of suspects?
Septimus’ quoted study is more relevant IMO and thanks for that. But as to the quote
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“Some portion of police killings really are justified, and including them in stats will dilute evidence of racism. There are many egregious examples of bad killings — Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, etc. Are there many examples of obviously wrong killings of whites?”
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And to some small extent, it is the entire underclass, regardless of race, which is being mistreated. (And middle-class blacks may fall victim to police misbehavior if cops make assumptions based on skin color.)
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The last part seems to tends toward measuring problems by how much attention the media gives them, which is fraught IMO for any issue. There’s no evidence AFAIK that unjustified police shootings of blacks are more common now than they were, yet obviously getting more media attention. One could assume the problem was previously ignored and now not as much, but that’s all that is, an assumption. The same people believing that would I’d guess in many cases also believe that media (local TV news in particular) over emphasizes the threat of African American criminals.
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But mistreated seems to assume unjustified, or even conscious wrongdoing which is often asserted in the public debate, usually the assertion of malicious racial bias. Perhaps underclass behaviors in contact with the police are more likely to result in the need for justified police force, or it’s some combination of that and ‘mistreatment’. Ever watch ‘Cops’? (you’d be justified to throw my comment in 1. back in my face if I pretended that was real evidence, I’m not saying so, but it suggests to me both possibilities at times).
That percentage has dropped to 35% for 2016. Most likely just variation in small data samples than anything meaningful.
Dylan Noble, and there’s even a video: Footage shows Fresno police shot Dylan Noble twice on ground – video | California | The Guardian
He was pulled over for speeding and according to cops reached into his waist band. They shot him twice. At this point, someone starts recording it from around a corner. Dylan can be seen laying on the ground face up. Two cops are about 5 feet away from him facing the top of Dylans head. They are yelling instructions. At 5 seconds there is a shot on the video, the third time Dylan is shot. He remains laying on the ground and makes no attempt to get up. The cops continue to yell instructions and at the 20 second mark shoot him again. Making two on the video and four overall.
No weapon was found on Dylan’s body.
Or the case of Kelly Thomas:
Ramos, and other cops, then beat Thomas to death. He died from choking on his own blood.
Here’s a video:
I'd recommend not watching it. It took them about four minutes to beat Thomas into silence and for most of it he is begging them to stop.Corry El, my purpose of posting that graph was to show that police shootings do not seem to be correlated to rates of violent crime. That rebuts the implied premise of your earlier post that the disparity in shootings might be the result of the higher rates of violent crime within black communities.
It is absolutely true that merely demonstrating a racial disparity in shootings does not show a racial cause (though it is an important first step!). I don’t think most people who support BLM rest their argument on the fact of the disparity alone.
You do realize that the only thing a gun ban will do is take at wins Ferrin law abiding citizens whiffs guns are no that to anyone. Do you really believe if guns were babe’s they criminals would just turn in their firearms?
If anything the problem would be worse as now citizens would be unable to defend themselves. Sorry, but the idea theft a gun ban would end gun violence is a false perception.
Sorry for the typos. As I’ve explained before, small phone screen, old eyes, big fingers and stupid auto correct. Well that and my inability to preview before I post.
We could all follow Rudy Giulani’s explanation that all it would take is for black mothers to tell their children to be polite to policemen. Because we can all see how well that worked for Philando Castile.
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Again I don’t see how it directly rebuts it. At some point it defies common sense to say that arrest rates for violent crimes have no influence on police shooting rates. Let me ask again more directly, is that your contention? And do you think the graphic is proof of that? Yes, the graphic suggests that factors other than racial bias by the police might account for some, all, or even more than all of the disparity by race in police killings. But that’s basically my point, not to ‘prove’ that crime rates explain it all. I tried to be clear saying that, that 6-8 times higher arrest rate for murder/robbery suggested, didn’t prove, an alternate explanation. AFAIC the graphic just adds to that, suggesting further alternative explanations besides just crime rates.
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I don’t see how you can say that, the last sentence. The raw stat (or variations of the same) of higher rate of killing of blacks by police is repeated constantly in media in support of BLM, without any discussion of what it actually means, if anything. And that’s the more intellectual sice of the ‘argument’, not considering slogans and soundbites, ‘it’s open season on African Americans’ etc.
BLM is largely based on an ‘everyone knows’ understanding extrapolated from particular incidents, and it shows all the typical excesses of something which makes claims and generalizations far beyond established facts.