[Police brutality] American injustice, yet again.

[Hermit]

I'm really developing a fondness for the Dallas Police chief. I also think he's got a point about police being asked to handle things police weren't meant to handle.

[Cygnia]

 

After The Dallas Shootings, Police Are Arresting People For Criticizing Cops On Facebook And Twitter

 

[Starlord]

Obviously (well, you'd think it'd be obvious), arresting people for voicing displeasure and/or disparaging comments cannot be tolerated, but specific threats should definitely be investigated.

[Old Man]

Dallas shooter used a Saiga AK-74.

 

I'm not sure if I mentioned this earlier but while the situation was unfolding I saw some of the footage of the gunfight, including the part where the shooter killed one of the officers at point blank from behind.  All I could think about was how the poor cop never saw it coming.

[Pattern Ghost]

Yeah. He shouldn't have been hugging the column. Cover works both ways, unfortunately.

 

I keep hearing about the Dallas PD officers initial reactions to get the crowd to safety, or in one woman's case, shield her child and her from the gunfire. They seem like a pretty decent group all in all.

[Hugh Neilson]

Obviously (well, you'd think it'd be obvious), arresting people for voicing displeasure and/or disparaging comments cannot be tolerated, but specific threats should definitely be investigated.

A similar line exists in respect of cyberbullying, and hate crime/hate speech laws. At what point does my right to free speech conflict with the rights of others to a sufficient degree that it should be curtailed? As long as I am only verbally telling others they should take up arms and kill Group X, is it OK?

[Starlord]

Dunno, I'm not smart enough or informed enough to determine the line between:

 

Gee, I hope some cop kills a black man tomorrow.

or

Wouldn't it be great if the cops killed another black man at the rally tomorrow?

or

Let's shoot a cop at the demonstration today?

or

Hey Officer Jones, I know where you live, you're gonna die in the next few days.

[Hugh Neilson]

Perhaps you're smart enough to determine that any line between them is too fuzzy to consider any of them acceptable.

[薔薇語]

I was trying to find something more about the following video but couldn't find any hits other than some conspiracy sites (infowars) or some of the more rightwing sites (brietbart). Does anyone know more about this?

The video is of a group marching down a NY street. It would seem to have been taken just a bit before the Dallas shooting. It is supposedly of a BLM march. In the video, the group chants "What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!" 

Assuming this actually was a BLM march, it just makes my trust and support for people in the BLM movement drop even lower (not that it was high to begin with). 

Soar. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

What's amazing to me about all this is that 9 times out of 10 or more, the outrage machine cranks up screaming and waving its arms, only to find that the brutality wasn't brutal and the poor innocent lamb of a child victim was a monster they had to stop.

But that doesn't stop the machine.  There are still people fool enough to believe the "hands up don't shoot" lie.

[Lawnmower Boy]

What's amazing to me about all this is that 9 times out of 10 or more, the outrage machine cranks up screaming and waving its arms, only to find that the brutality wasn't brutal and the poor innocent lamb of a child victim was a monster they had to stop.

But that doesn't stop the machine.  There are still people fool enough to believe the "hands up don't shoot" lie.

 

It's not amazing at all. We understand that police-involved shootings emerge from circumstances in which police confront civilians. Confrontations don't just happen, like weather. There are realfactors, if sometimes misunderstandings, which lead the police to make the decision to shoot. In most cases, police shoot people who were cruising for some kind of bad outcome. With the caveat that this kind of argument can lead to, "Oh, sure, we executed him for a murder he didn't commit, but you know, he drove over the limit all the time," we can have some sympathy for the police.

 

Here is the problem that some Americans keep dodging around: Police killed almost five black people per every million black residents of the U.S., compared with about 2 per million for both white and hispanic victims.

 

These circumstances are, of course, no novelty. When I say, "you Americans," I have absolutely no reason to be smug. Substitute "First Nations" for Black; iand you're good to make exactly the same kind of criticisms in Canada. (Actually, it's a lot worse, if anything.) Australia? "aboriginal." New Zealand, "Maori;" in the United Kingdom, it has been a struggle of generations to get "Irish" out of this category, and central Europe has a persistent problem of police maltreatment of Roma and Cinti. Sweden? Lapps and Finns. North Germany? Poles, until ethnic cleansing, fortunately, he said, with intentional irony, segregated the populations. (Notice that while Christian north Germans notoriously have unfortunate reactions to Jewish Germans, the nature of the abuse of that minority has been very different in character.) China? Uighurs. Indonesia? Ethnic Chinese. Japan? Ethnic Koreans. The Philippines? Muslims.

 

Here, in fact, is an acceptable generalisation: it happens everywhere.

 

In particular, in regions of the United States with small and segregated visible minority populations, the same patterns of discrimination emerge against whites with visible markings of "white trash" status, and no-one is less happy about it than the people identified by their neighbours as "white trash." 

 

So  do we explain this global phenomena, from Greenland's icy plain to the meth-addled trailer parks of Oregon, in which some police use force disproportionately more readily against members of low-status visible minorities than against members of high status majorities? The best explanation is that police forces are sometimes ineffective in preventing bullies from joining the ranks. Those bullies exploit opportunities to escalate situations, and in some small number of cases, those escalations go badly awrey, leading to a number of unnecessary killings.

 

How do you address these problems? Well, for the neighbourhood in which Bill Gates lives, the answer is obvious. A policeman who is dumb enough to harass Bill Gates daughters hears all about it when he applies for his next job, at 7-11. (Notice that the way power works in society, Bill Gates doesn't have to ask for this, or even want it. It just happens, because who wants someone on board who has pissed Bill Gates off?) Oh, and also Bill Gates' nephews and nieces and --you know what? Just to be safe, let's not pull over any teens in expensive cars in this neighbourhood.

 

Minorities, though? They don't live in Bill Gates' neighbourhood. They don't look like Bill Gates' nephew. They don't have this power. Again, because it is not possible to emphasis this enouogh, it does not matter which minority, which neighbourhood, because I could be talking about the slums of Ulaan Bator or Algiers as esily as St. Paul, Minnesota. Blacks in Minnesota, about Irish in Yorkshire, or Koreans in Osaka, it doesn't matter. The solution? Internal checks. No one likes being sat down in the office and asked "What the heck happened there?", but and take it from personal experience in one sector at least, unless you enjoy really long lineups at the checkouts, it sometimes has to be done. The problem lies in pushing the institution into making the effort, and sometimes this takes pushing.

 

But let's get back to the whole bit about being puzzled. There is, of course, an alternative explanation for the problem: these minorities, as minorities, had it coming, because they're all like that. That's why I've placed heavy emphasis on the fact that this is a global problem, that the culture and country of origins (never mind "race") of the discriminate minority is pretty clearly irrelevant. A  group can be a low-crime majority in one country, a model minority in a third, and a trouble-making underclass in a third tends to demolish the notion that we are talking about something intrinsic to culture or (God help us), "race." It's a nexus of class and visible markers! It's something we've known since kindergarten! Bullies are good at spotting people they can bully, and the people who can be bullied are the people who can't fight back!

 

There is one further and particularly uncomfortable aspect of this, which is that we tend to externalise categories like "bully." It's of a piece of that whole "banality of evil" thing, where the belief that "I am a good person" serves to allow the self-perceived "good person" to participate in horrible crimes, since they can't be horrible, on account of their being a "good person." Sure in our goodness, we wander off and make ourselves feel a bit better in a situation by bullying someone. Someone who, we tell ourselves, "had it coming." To my shame, I've been there. I'm pretty sure everyone has. 

 

This is a universal human problem that demands constant and uncomfortable self-reflection. Do we feel uncomfortable when we are press on it! Of course we do! And, hey, you know who is really good at pressing this button? Bullies! It doesn't matter! The issue isn't that the other guy is being mean to us for a little "harmless" ribbing of poor Brenda! (I mean, some hypothetical individual who isn't a professor in New York these days, God, I'm sorry. . . ) The issue is that we did it, and we should probably stop and think about it before we do it again.

 

And, you know, some twelve-year old with a toy gun gets shot down in a routine police encounter. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Police killed almost five black people per every million black residents of the U.S., compared with about 2 per million for both white and hispanic victims.

That's pretty misleadingly presented.  For every black man shot by the cops, 3 whites are.  Since blacks are significantly more involved in street crime than whites, its even more stark a difference.  Whites break the law a lot, but they do so in more white collar ways, which don't involve armed confrontations with the police.  Yet still are shot many times more often.

The really sad part is a black man is many, many times more likely to be gunned down by a fellow black citizen, but nobody seems to give a crap about that.

[Starlord]

IMO, BLM's peaceful protests stop being peaceful when they block traffic; emergency vehicles in particular.

[Lawnmower Boy]

That's pretty misleadingly presented.  For every black man shot by the cops, 3 whites are.  Since blacks are significantly more involved in street crime than whites, its even more stark a difference.  Whites break the law a lot, but they do so in more white collar ways, which don't involve armed confrontations with the police.  Yet still are shot many times more often.

The really sad part is a black man is many, many times more likely to be gunned down by a fellow black citizen, but nobody seems to give a crap about that.

 

If by "misleadingly presentd," you meant to type "not misleadingly presented at all," then I agree! The rate is per million, and not absolute. Since there are fewer blacks than whites, it can be both true that more whites are shot by police, and that the rate per million of blacks being shot by police is higher than whites!

 

If by "sad part" you mean that it's sad that most people are killed by friends and relatives, that is certainly a sad thing. (So, blacks by blacks, whites by whites, Albano-Greek Americans by Albano-Greek Americans, etc.) Murder is always sad. You know what else is sad? Being shot by police is sad. The police are supposed to be there to protect us, and we should really make some kind of effort to prevent it.

 

Obviously, there are cases where police-involved shootings are all but inevitable. It's the cases where it's not --you know, twelve-year-olds with toy guns, unarmed men pinned down by several officers, law-abiding citizens pulled over in "driving while black" type encounters. That's where there's an argument for oversight.

 

Or we could just smear them all with guilt by association. That works too. For a certain value of "works." 

[megaplayboy]

Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

 

This is why black people and white people can watch the same video and come away with a completely different impression.

[Clonus]

That's pretty misleadingly presented.  For every black man shot by the cops, 3 whites are.  Since blacks are significantly more involved in street crime than whites, its even more stark a difference.  Whites break the law a lot, but they do so in more white collar ways, which don't involve armed confrontations with the police.  Yet still are shot many times more often.

The really sad part is a black man is many, many times more likely to be gunned down by a fellow black citizen, but nobody seems to give a crap about that.

 

And...how is that sad?  Yes, obviously more people are killed by civilians than cops.  It would be very strange if that was not the case.  The difference is when a civilian does it without a sound legal justification, that's a crime.  

[megaplayboy]

The police are cloaked in the power of the state. Civilians who kill are held wholly accountable, but historically (and even recently) that has not been the case with the police. In the context of police killing people of color it begins to look like state sanctioned execution of PoC.

[Hermit]

I guess I'm weird. When it comes to standards I expect people to live up to, I have higher ones for cops than I do your average citizen. And I certainly expect police to behave well above the standards of criminals.

 

Given such things as civil asset forfeiture, police brutality, and a murders by officers of the unarmed.... it seems I expect too much

[Marcus Impudite]

I guess I'm weird. When it comes to standards I expect people to live up to, I have higher ones for cops than I do your average citizen. And I certainly expect police to behave well above the standards of criminals.

 

Given such things as civil asset forfeiture, police brutality, and a murders by officers of the unarmed.... it seems I expect too much

Don't forget about the ones that kill people's pets for sh*ts and giggles, laugh in the faces of distraught pet owners afterward, and then suffer absolutely no meaningful consequences for their misdeeds.

[Hermit]

[Old Man]

Baton Rouge shooting leaves three cops dead, three injured: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/multiple-baton-rouge-police-officers-killed-shooting-attack-article-1.2714761

 

It's not clear whether this was a law enforcement action gone wrong or an attack on police, but the police are treating it like the latter.

[薔薇語]

BBC article discussing the issue of police deaths and deaths by police in the US. Part of it was even surprising to me.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36826297

 

Soar.

[Pattern Ghost]

I think that the perceived risk on the part of police mentioned in the article is an issue. There was a story on the radio news (CBS) about an African American minister who was an activist against police shootings. (Not sure if he had ties with BLM movement or not.) The minister was invited to train with a police department, running use of force scenarios. He was impressed by how quickly a violent encounter could unfold while doing the scenarios, and said that he now understands the split second, life and death, nature of the decision to use force that police face.

 

And he has a point. This is why police are indemnified in their actions beyond what civilians are. We ask the police to intervene to enforce the law, and they rightfully get a measure of benefit of the doubt beyond civilians with no authority or duty to act.

 

However, I believe that there's a danger inherent in this mode of training. I think it's very easy to run drills that condition an officer to act too quickly under stress, to hammer fear into their heads.

 

If an officer believes a weapon is present, and tells a subject to freeze, then it's reasonable for that officer to employ deadly force to enforce that freeze command. BUT, if that officer had already issued a command, the subject needs time to process the new command. If a hand is already reaching for a wallet to hand over ID, it's not going to stop instantly because a police officer said so. The subject's brain needs to switch gears, then stop the hand. I think it's very possible to get shot over this reaction delay.

 

I suspect that may be what happened in Minnesota. It certainly fits the facts better than a racist assassination of a random motorist. I think both men made mistakes, although one paid for both mistakes with his life. The state of Minnesota requires training for a concealed carry permit, and also a duty to notify law enforcement on contact that you're armed. Which means that part of that training should have been exactly how to go about informing without being shot. (It's actually pretty simple. You keep  your hand where they can be seen by the officer, inform him, wait for his instructions before moving a muscle, and for good measure tell the officer what you're doing to comply while complying so there's no confusion. You don't reach for your wallet when asked for ID, then inform the officer while moving your hands.) The officer was likely too quick on the trigger because he had the idea that being too slow would end up getting you hurt or dead hammered into him in training.

 

That's all speculation. If that's the gist of what happened, I wouldn't expect the officer to suffer any serious repercussions. What I'd like to see is a nationwide review of police training protocols to see if they're actually being trained in the fact that it takes someone a second or two to switch mental gears to comply with a command.

[megaplayboy]

There has been commentary by police experts that if the officers in St. Paul were indeed making a felony stop, then the procedure for doing so is quite different from the conduct of the officers in that incident.

[Pattern Ghost]

Calling it a felony traffic stop is a stretch, so I'd doubt the credibility of any experts dug up by the media on that one.

 

Edit: To clarify, when you're making a felony traffic stop, you need to be justified in using deadly force on the occupant of the vehicle. (Because you'll be training weapons on them, which is a use of deadly force.) It's going to be in a circumstance where you're very near certain that the person you're pulling over is in fact a felon. (For example the plates come back as stolen, or don't match the vehicle in question, or the car is the subject of an Amber Alert, etc.)

 

In this case, the subject was a close physical match for a BOLO alert issued for a robbery three or four days prior. Police stop people all the time to interview them immediately after such incidents without using felony stop procedures. Because there's no certainty it's the person you're looking for.