US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5237

On September 28 2016 20:19 Velr wrote:
Or maybe most of the Internet won't give a shit and just use him as it did before?

DENVER (AP) -- Police officers across the country misuse confidential law enforcement databases to get information on romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Criminal-history and driver databases give officers critical information about people they encounter on the job. But the AP's review shows how those systems also can be exploited by officers who, motivated by romantic quarrels, personal conflicts or voyeuristic curiosity, sidestep policies and sometimes the law by snooping. In the most egregious cases, officers have used information to stalk or harass, or have tampered with or sold records they obtained.

No single agency tracks how often the abuse happens nationwide, and record-keeping inconsistencies make it impossible to know how many violations occur.

But the AP, through records requests to state agencies and big-city police departments, found law enforcement officers and employees who misused databases were fired, suspended or resigned more than 325 times between 2013 and 2015. They received reprimands, counseling or lesser discipline in more than 250 instances, the review found.

Unspecified discipline was imposed in more than 90 instances reviewed by AP. In many other cases, it wasn't clear from the records if punishment was given at all. The number of violations was surely far higher since records provided were spotty at best, and many cases go unnoticed.

Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department.

"It's personal. It's your address. It's all your information, it's your Social Security number, it's everything about you," said Alexis Dekany, the Ohio woman whose ex-boyfriend, a former Akron officer, pleaded guilty last year to stalking her. "And when they use it for ill purposes to commit crimes against you - to stalk you, to follow you, to harass you ... it just becomes so dangerous."

The misuse represents only a tiny fraction of the millions of daily database queries run legitimately during traffic stops, criminal investigations and routine police encounters. But the worst violations profoundly abuses systems that supply vital information on criminal suspects and law-abiding citizens alike. The unauthorized searches demonstrate how even old-fashioned policing tools are ripe for abuse, at a time when privacy concerns about law enforcement have focused mostly on more modern electronic technologies. And incomplete, inconsistent tracking of the problem frustrates efforts to document its pervasiveness.

The AP tally, based on records requested from 50 states and about three dozen of the nation's largest police departments, is unquestionably an undercount.

A new study out of Yale found that pre-K teachers, white and black alike, spend more time watching black boys, expecting trouble.

Lead researcher Walter Gilliam knew that to get an accurate measure of implicit bias among preschool teachers, he couldn't be fully transparent with his subjects about what, exactly, he was trying to study.

Implicit biases are just that — subtle, often subconscious stereotypes that guide our expectations and interactions with people.

"We all have them," Gilliam says. "Implicit biases are a natural process by which we take information, and we judge people on the basis of generalizations regarding that information. We all do it."

Even the most well-meaning teacher can harbor deep-seated biases, whether she knows it or not. So Gilliam and his team devised a remarkable — and remarkably deceptive — experiment.

At a big, annual conference for pre-K teachers, Gilliam and his team recruited 135 educators to watch a few short videos. Here's what they told them:

We are interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging
behavior in the classroom. Sometimes this involves seeing behavior before it becomes problematic. The video segments you are about to view are of preschoolers engaging in various activities. Some clips may or may not contain challenging behaviors. Your job is to press the enter key on the external keypad every time you see a behavior that could become a potential challenge.
Each video included four children: a black boy and girl and a white boy and girl.

Here's the deception: There was no challenging behavior.

While the teachers watched, eye-scan technology measured the trajectory of their gaze. Gilliam wanted to know: When teachers expected bad behavior, who did they watch?

"What we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs," Gilliam says. "Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy."

Indeed, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool than white children. Put another way, black children account for roughly 19 percent of all preschoolers, but nearly half of preschoolers who get suspended.

One reason that number is so high, Gilliam suggests, is that teachers spend more time focused on their black students, expecting bad behavior. "If you look for something in one place, that's the only place you can typically find it."

[...]

When a Young Republicans group gathered in Houston earlier this month to debate election strategy, top of the agenda was not how to battle Hillary Clinton – but whether they should support their own party’s candidate.

After an impassioned discussion, two-thirds of the 40-odd people at the Rice University College Republicans meeting voted not to back Donald Trump, joining other conservative college groups around the country in refusing to endorse the GOP presidential nominee.

Even in reliably red Texas, even for a generation eager for a candidate who disrupts and discomfits the ossified Washington establishment, Trump is a hard sell.

“Item No 1 on the list was how do we support a racist, how do we support someone who says horrible things about people, when that’s just not what we believe?” said Jake Blumencranz, the group’s president.

Leading up to the general election, ambivalence towards Trump from many millennial Republicans is compounding the long-term erosion of support for the party among young and middle-aged people.

A Pew analysis found that in 1992, 61% of Republican voters were younger than 50. Today, that number has declined to 41%, while only 13% of 18- to 29-year-olds favour the GOP. Compare that with 21% in 1992, when Democrats lagged Republicans in that age bracket.

It should have been an unalloyed thrill for Blumencranz, a 20-year-old from New York, to take charge in an election year. Instead, he said, “it’s been very difficult. It’s made my job almost impossible as a college Republican in a leadership role. When I started, Trump was not the nominee yet and it was kind of frightening knowing that I would become president as Trump would be the nominee. Will I have to support him? Will I have to rally behind him? Then I thought about the fact that I might have to resign if my club chose to do that, because I just don’t think I can morally do that myself.”

Now, in the first presidential election where he can cast a ballot, he is pondering whether to go for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, or not vote for a presidential candidate at all.

Juliette Turner, an 18-year-old student and author from north Texas, stumped for Trump at the contentious meeting. Though not blind to his flaws, she believes a President Trump would install conservatives in the supreme court, a vital issue for her, and that history shows division spells disaster.

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“The Democrats have won for the past two election cycles. I believe that’s because they have rallied around their candidate no matter the cost, and what I’ve seen the Republican party do, much to our detriment, we have this mentality of going to the grave with our ideals,” she said.

“I was appalled when Ted Cruz did not speak Trump’s name at all in his speech at the Republican national convention. Compare that to what Bernie Sanders did – I’m pretty sure there was just as much animosity between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.”

Dogmatic inflexibility does not sit well with a generation of GOP sympathisers that, Blumencranz said, tend to describe themselves as fiscally conservative but socially liberal. While millennials are often characterised as optimistic, they face economic challenges that could make them less prosperous than their parents.

On September 28 2016 23:03 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


Police haven't announced what arbitrary item it was this time around, just that it wasn't a weapon? And apparently black guys are pretending to aim and shoot at cops with non-weapons?

The Democrats have won for the past two election cycles. I believe that’s because they have rallied around their candidate no matter the cost, and what I’ve seen the Republican party do, much to our detriment, we have this mentality of going to the grave with our ideals,” she said.