# What's Wrong With Black Lives Matter **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 15, 2016, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879 "2016-08-15T04:58:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2016, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/121 "2016-08-16T23:09:55Z")
> [@drachillix](#): > > If this is the case, we dont have a policing problem, we have a huge black culture problem. Or does someone want to argue that 6-7 year olds are having serious negative encounters with police. If you don’t think the USA has a policing and judicial problem you need to get out more. Do people here really not understand even the absolute basics of the issues in their own society? ---
**Author:** ![Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/5e9695/32.png) [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giraffes_Can_t_Dance)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/122 "2016-08-17T01:29:00Z")
> [@Lance\_Turbo](#): > > [Tyshawn Lee too.](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-tyshawn-lee-the-march-turner-20151104-column.html) Get the fuck out of here with your irrelevant, drive-by links. ---
**Author:** ![Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/5e9695/32.png) [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giraffes_Can_t_Dance)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/123 "2016-08-17T01:30:45Z")
> [@up\_the\_junction](#): > > If you don’t think the USA has a policing and judicial problem you need to get out more. > > Do people here really not understand even the absolute basics of the issues in their own society? There’s nothing institutionally racist going on. There is however a gross disproportion of crime being committed by black males, between the ages on 15ish-34ish. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/124 "2016-08-17T01:31:40Z")
> [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](#): > > BLM, with the help of white-guilt Caucasians, have created a false narrative of racism, in order to divert accountability. It’s easier to blame cops, instead of facing the music. Nonsense. BLM is a specific organization with a specific focus. Nothing they do actually takes away from efforts to address the issues of poverty and racism in the black community or in U.S. society. It does, unfortunately, provide a cover for those people who want to avoid dealing with actual issues by providing those people with a handy excuse to ignore all the efforts addressing problems while focusing on the name of one group and then claiming that it is all the fault of those people, anyway. For example: > [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](#): > > Police officers actually kill more whites than blacks. Blacks account for half of the homicides in the US, despite making up just 14% of the US population. Digging further, the overwhelming majority of those murders are committed by black males, between the ages of 15-34; which accounts for between 3-4% of the US population. So despite the grossly disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by blacks, whites are actually disproportionately killed by cops. This sort of claim is simply silly. It is a bait and switch tactic that compares different statistics as though they were meaningful and draws a bad conclusion. (Police kill twice as many blacks as whites, but based on population, they kill twice the percent of blacks as whites.) Comparing the number of murders in any group really has no bearing on the number of people killed by police, particularly when one takes the time to look at the numbers of unarmed people killed by police. [Study finds police fatally shoot unarmed black men at disproportionate rates](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/study-finds-police-fatally-shoot-unarmed-black-men-at-disproportionate-rates/2016/04/06/e494563e-fa74-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html?tid=a_inl). And the danger of a neighborhood that is often put forth as the “reason” why police are more trigger happy among blacks is also not supported by evidence. The linked graph demonstrates that police shootings (red squares) are not even proportional to violence (blue Xs). [Police violence and community violence are independent issues](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?utm_term=.662853595fc0) You keep claiming that BLM is trying to divert attention from black violence, (although I have seen no evidence to support that claim). It could be posited (as the first link does) that police tend to be more fearful in black neighborhoods and are, thus, more trigger happy. However, it could also be that if police increased rage de-escalation efforts and tried to stop needlessly shooting unarmed blacks, they could establish better rapport with the community, easing those tensions. ---
**Author:** ![Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/5e9695/32.png) [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giraffes_Can_t_Dance)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/125 "2016-08-17T01:32:56Z")
BLM is currently protesting…Graceland. Makes a whole bunch of sense, doesn’t it? Just like when they marched down Michigan Avenue, yelling at shoppers who were out with their families. ---
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Chance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jonathan_chance/32/701_2.png) [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/126 "2016-08-17T01:38:29Z")
> [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](#): > > Get the fuck out of here with your irrelevant, drive-by links. Warning again. You need to learn that you can’t treat other posters like this here at the SDMB. Otherwise your time here will be short. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/127 "2016-08-17T01:41:59Z")
> [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](#): > > There’s nothing institutionally racist going on. Wrong. Drug laws were written that targeted blacks’ “drugs of choice” more harshly than whites’ “drugs of choice,” resulting in higher sentences for blacks for equivalent crimes. Law Enforcement agencies spend more effort targeting black communities for even non-violent drug crimes than they do targeting white communities. Programs established to help people escape addiction and to re-enter their communities as productive citizens are offered to whites at higher rates than they are offered to blacks. Blacks are more often arrested and charged with felonies when whites would be ticketed and/or charged with misdemeanors for the same crimes. Driving While Black results in far more harassment of black citizens than any similar “enforcement” directed toward whites. These are all examples of institutional racism that result in more distrust of the police by the black community and more imprisonment of blacks, impeding their ability to obtain and hold jobs. The notion that institutional racism is not occurring is nothing more than denial of facts. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/128 "2016-08-17T02:15:09Z")
> [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](#): > > Get the fuck out of here with your irrelevant, drive-by links. You said that nobody held a rally for that kid. He provided a link proving that you were completely wrong about that. In what possible way is that an irrelevant link? Also, your concern for the problems facing African American communities would be a bit more convincing if it weren’t predicated on completely ignoring everything African Americans say about their problems they’re facing. ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 7:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/129 "2016-08-17T07:11:25Z")
> [@Giraffes\_Can\_t\_Dance](#): > > There’s nothing institutionally racist going on. There is however a gross disproportion of crime being committed by black males, between the ages on 15ish-34ish. God help us. It’s like the 1950s. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/130 "2016-08-17T08:04:26Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > From my understanding of apartheid, I agree with all this. The Jim Crow South was effectively an apartheid society. Remnants of this remain, but I objected to the use of “apartheid” for modern oppression and discrimination in the US because I thought it trivialized the real Apartheid. Apartheid has a more-or-less technical meaning referring to the specific policies and legal structures used by the SA government, in addition to the looser meaning. There’s a perfectly cromulent, historically commonplace word for what the US had under Jim Crow, synonymous with that looser meaning - segregation. And for what it has now - discrimination. > [@pool](#): > > I think that’s a poor metric anyway, because aside from the race issue, the US just has a problem with incarcerating a huge number of the population period, regardless of race. 4,347/100,000 vs 678/100,000 = 6.4 x more, when the population of Whites is 5.7 x more, is a **36.5 x disparity in incarceration** - that is is the kind of disparity that merits mention beyond just the general lockup-happy culture. > [@](#): > > I mean for god’s sake we have more people in prison than China! Or North Korea… ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 8:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/131 "2016-08-17T08:07:39Z")
> [@Duke\_of\_Rat](#): > > I wonder what life in a Chinese prison is like compared to life in a US prison? I’m sure it’s a big relief to the guy imprisoned for 5 years for 1g of crack, that at least he isn’t in a _Chinese_ prison… ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 9:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/132 "2016-08-17T09:29:28Z")
Why would anyone in a rich first world democracy want their society to be compared with China? ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 10:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/133 "2016-08-17T10:10:55Z")
Correction: > [@tomndebb](#): > > (Police kill twice as many **blacks as whites** , but based on population, they kill twice the percent of blacks as whites.) (Police kill twice as many **whites as blacks** , but based on population, they kill twice the percent of blacks as whites.) ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/134 "2016-08-17T12:24:06Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Wrong. Drug laws were written that targeted blacks’ “drugs of choice” more harshly than whites’ “drugs of choice,” resulting in higher sentences for blacks for equivalent crimes. If you are talking about crack vs. cocaine, this is wrong. Crack was not more harshly sentenced than cocaine because of racism, but because crack is more [harmful](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm) and more [addictive](https://www.justice.gov/archive/olp/pdf/crack_powder2002.pdf) (pdf). If you are talking about something else, then you will need to produce a cite. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Duke\_of\_Rat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Duke\_of\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duke_of_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/135 "2016-08-17T12:50:24Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > I’m sure it’s a big relief to the guy imprisoned for 5 years for 1g of crack, that at least he isn’t in a _Chinese_ prison… Or perhaps the Chinese guy decides using crack isn’t worth the risk of being sent to a _Chinese_ prison. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/136 "2016-08-17T13:00:05Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > If you are talking about crack vs. cocaine, this is wrong. Crack was not more harshly sentenced than cocaine because of racism, but because crack is more [harmful](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm) and more [addictive](https://www.justice.gov/archive/olp/pdf/crack_powder2002.pdf) (pdf). If you are talking about something else, then you will need to produce a cite. > > Regards, > Shodan Here’s an example of how [crack vs. cocaine sentencing unfairly targets the poor](http://www.vocativ.com/underworld/drugs/crack-vs-coke-sentencing/). Here is the [Fair Sentencing Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act) that tried to address the issue. It specifically is designed to correct the disparity of sentencing based on race, not the addictive properties of one compared to the other, because: [QUOTE=Fair Sentencing Act wiki] A study released in 1997 examined the addictive nature of both crack and powder cocaine and concluded that one was no more addictive than the other. The study explored other reasons why crack is viewed as more addictive and theorized, "a more accurate interpretation of existing evidence is that already abuse-prone cocaine users are most likely to move toward a more efficient mode of ingestion as they escalate their use.[7] The Los Angeles Times commented, “There was never any scientific basis for the disparity, just panic as the crack epidemic swept the nation’s cities.”[8] [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/137 "2016-08-17T13:00:47Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > If you are talking about crack vs. cocaine, this is wrong. Crack was not more harshly sentenced than cocaine because of racism, but because crack is more [harmful](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm) and more [addictive](https://www.justice.gov/archive/olp/pdf/crack_powder2002.pdf) (pdf). If you are talking about something else, then you will need to produce a cite. > > Regards, > Shodan I noticed neither of your links was to a peer-reviewed journal article. Wonder why. I also noticed that the subtitle of your first link was “alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack,” which is a bit of an inconvenient fact if you claim sentencing guidelines are related to harm. Here’s an actual [peer-reviewed journal article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8918856): “The physiological and psychoactive effects of cocaine are similar regardless of whether it is in the form of cocaine hydrochloride or crack cocaine…the federal sentencing guidelines allowing possession of 100 times more cocaine hydrochloride than crack cocaine to trigger mandatory minimum penalties is deemed excessive.” Hope that helps. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/138 "2016-08-17T13:08:26Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > I noticed neither of your links was to a peer-reviewed journal article. The _Economist_ article was a summary of a study published in _The Lancet_. Wonder why you didn’t notice. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/139 "2016-08-17T13:12:54Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > The _Economist_ article was a summary of a study published in _The Lancet_. Wonder why you didn’t notice. > > Regards, > Shodan Even if the articles are true, does this justify the immense discrepancy? It wasn’t small differences in amounts for possession, or in sentencing length – they were massive. Would a difference in harm in the drugs justify _any_ difference in sentencing, or is it possible that racism might have been involved (whether it was on purpose or not)? ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2016, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879/140 "2016-08-17T13:13:37Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > The _Economist_ article was a summary of a study published in _The Lancet_. Wonder why you didn’t notice. > > Regards, > Shodan I didn’t notice because I didn’t bother to read it. If you did, why didn’t you link to the Lancet article, hmmmm? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-black-lives-matter/762879.md?page=8)