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On April 27 2021 19:22 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 13:32 Liquid`Drone wrote:On April 27 2021 07:24 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 07:08 BlackJack wrote:On April 27 2021 06:26 Artisreal wrote:On April 27 2021 06:13 BlackJack wrote:On April 27 2021 01:50 EnDeR_ wrote:Let me preface my response by saying that I wasn't aware that about 50 police officers lose their lives doing their jobs every year at the hands of armed civilians. I did not realise it was that bad, and probably explains why they are so quick to eliminate the threat as they probably feel constantly under attack. On April 26 2021 05:24 oBlade wrote:
You keep saying "routine traffic stop." It's not routine once they open fire. The two guys we were talking about who got shot after opening fire on the police officer, why did they do that? Because they had warrants out. There are not only so many criminals around, there are so many currently wanted criminals that pulling people over randomly for expired plates in the course of a day, can end up with you pulling over extremely dangerous people without knowing it. Why shoot at cops? Because you don't want to go to jail. Why not flee? Because a high speed chase is extremely stacked against you, whereas pretending to comply until you murder the cop and drive away gives you a way out. I saw the video of someone get pulled over for a tinted window machinegun the officer. I did, however, want to argue this point. The data shows that the majority of police shootings started with the police shooting, not the suspect. In fact, in only about a quarter of cases the suspect fired their gun, according to this study that looked at all police killings in 2015 onlinelibrary.wiley.com. The study is quite nice and includes a lot of data. I extracted the data from the paper so you can see it here: For 10% of the shootings, the suspect was completely unarmed which is kind of crazy. Mostly, people got killed for brandishing their gun/knife and attacking with non-gun weapons. 11 were shot for trying to run away, and 7 people were shot accidentally in 2015, which is a lot in my opinion. Clearly the issue is more with the whole justice system. I do take your point that criminals in the US seem to have less to lose than those in other western democracies, which definitely makes them more likely to shoot at police which exacerbates the problem.
In general, my thoughts are that crime is too widespread. The more dangerous it is for police on a regular basis, and the more they end up in dangerous situations, naturally the more they need training and equipment and tools that are suited for those situations and may misapply those. It increases the variance of everything. And the remedies for crime are education to prepare people for jobs, a strong economy to give them those jobs, arresting criminals, drug interdiction, family, and community.
I agree with most of this, but I still think a bit more emphasis on de-escalation before the situation gets to the pulling out weapons stage would not be amiss. At the end of the day, the narrative that people are getting shot for routine traffic stops while complying with police is just bullshit. Not to say that it absolutely never happens (see: Philando Castille) but it's obviously the rarest example that gets presented as the status quo. It's like Pro-lifers that make an argument against abortion because of late-term abortions when they represent 1% of all abortions. It's nauseating hearing all these uber wealthy celebrities and politicians saying "I have to wonder every day if my child is going to come home tonight or if they are going to be killed by the police." Really? Do their children not know you shouldn't pulled out guns/knives and attack police? Or do they just irrationally believe that their child is likely to be the 1 in a million case that gets killed like Philando Castille? I'm kind of surprised you didn't realize how rough it was for police in the US. Your own numbers show that multiple times a day police are being shot at, having a gun pulled on them, being attacked with knives, etc. Eri is basically the only person in this entire thread that when making a comparison between the US and a country like Norway will also acknowledge that Norway has a lot less violent crime than the US. Everyone else just conveniently neglects to mention that. Comparing the US which has a very weak social safety net to Norway and chalking up the difference in police shootings entirely to the behavior of the police is either ignorant or disingenuous. The best way to reduce police shootings is to reduce poverty, reduce desperation in people, reduce untreated mental illness, etc. But those things cost money. Have guns drawn on cops? Gun control. I agree with your conclusion how to tackle the problem. I don't understand your reasoning that cops aren't killing to many people. Don't have enough money for the measure? Have proper VAT, wealth tax, inheritance tax and income tax all over the country and your money problems are solved. Oh and while your're at it, close them loopholes for amazon and their ilk. My main point was that the narrative you offer below is bullshit On April 15 2021 18:00 Artisreal wrote:
If you're a black person and get stopped by police for fuck all reason, there's no fucking chance to opt out. If that was a thing, therer wouldn't be as many murders by the police.
Imagine a traffic control where you have to consent to having a 5% chance of being shot for no good reason, i.e. your skin color. No fucking body would do that.
There is quite a bit of truth to what artisreal is saying. From the same study i quoted earlier: The results indicated civilians from “other” minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely as White civilians to have been unarmed. Basically, most of the black and minority people on that list were less likely to be armed and less likely to have been attacking the officers involved, and yet, they were still twice as likely to get killed than a white person. That's something that needs to be addressed and something worth protesting for. Also, 100 of those killings were with unarmed suspects, and 11 were with a fleeing suspect. At the bare minimum, that should never happen again. When Artisreal posts '5% chance of getting shot for your skin color' the post ends up being hyperbolic nonsense which has no relation to reality. There's so much real racism, and the actual numbers are bad enough, that we don't need to invent more racism or blatantly exaggerate the numbers. Looking at https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/findings/, more than 50000 Americans are pulled over every year. Like 12% of Americans are black. They do get stopped more frequently, there's no question about that, although I'm a bit too busy to find exact numbers, but for the sake of the argument let's say they're stopped at twice the frequency, so 25% of those are black. That'd give us 12500 stops per day. (About 25% of police killings are black people, so I just went with that number for this reason. It doesn't really matter for the point I'm making.) At a murder rate of 5%, we'd see 625 black Americans shot by police during traffic stops on a daily basis. In reality, police killed just above 1000 people in all of 2020, 241 of those were black, and these were not all the consequence of traffic stops - according to this, it's more than a quarter (but presumably less than a third), so let's go with a reasonable.. 75. So instead of Artisreal's number of roughly 228125, we're looking at roughly 75. My post still contains elements of unacceptable racism - black people comprise 12% of the population but 25% of people shot by police. And it might well be that the actual shootings aren't even the worst element of the interactions between black people and police, maybe the whole.. having to be ultra-deferent, perception of police as enemy (reasonable when they demand ultra-deference), the perception of being considered suspicious.. It all contributes to a really unhealthy relationship. But we shouldn't make up numbers, and if we're throwing out ballpark numbers for the sake of discussion (this is totally fine, we can't be expected to research everything), then those ballpark numbers shouldn't be 3000 times higher than reality. I agree that we should not overstate the problem, it doesn't help the discussion. The response 'this is such a rare occurrence that is therefore not important' is equally problematic in my view, because it is not about frequency; it's about the fact that it is happening at all. I did like the 'how many nazi-sympathizer judges would you be happy having'. It's a nice way of encapsulating the argument against 'but it's only a very small amount of interactions!' -- one is already one too many.
It’s been said before but the actual deaths are the tip of the iceberg. For one guy that gets shot and killed, you have many who endure totally unnecessary and unacceptable level of violence.
So it’s not just the prospect of getting killed, but just of an encounter with the police to turn extremely violent for no reason that we are talking about here.
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On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc.
Yeah. All of that makes a lot of sense. I think some problems are unfortunately more deeply rooted in the way the system is designed. The fact that prosecutors don’t go after cops because otherwise their whole PD just stops working with them and they can’t do shit anymore is very, very hard to fix. And from what I’ve understood, that’s one of the main reasons police officers face so little accountability.
I would love to hear someone who has worked in a courthouse / a police department to comment on that though.
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On April 27 2021 18:41 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 16:45 GreenHorizons wrote:On April 27 2021 13:50 plasmidghost wrote:
The cops have that famous slogan of "to protect and serve". It's true when you realize that the only thing they protect and serve is corporate interests. They did this to someone who couldn't fight back in any capacity for simply forgetting to pay for $14 of items from Walmart, a company that made literally $14,881,000,000 in net profit in 2020 (according to their 2020 SEC filing) and then watched in glee and celebrated. Police cannot be reformed. The entire institution is built for the sadistic power-hungry borderline evil people in society and the longer it continues, the more people it will kill, injure, and traumatize.
Yup. The sooner people in the US come to grips with this the better imo. What are you proposing?
I support the prison/police abolitionist movement. Prison/police abolition basically calls for the elimination of prisons/police and a fundamental reimagining of how to mitigate harm from aberrant behavior to arrive at restorative justice for those harmed.
From a practical perspective it means following solutions to the problems of policing/prison that work to remove those institutions and their authoritarian abuses from society instead of empowering/legitimizing these intrinsically abusive institutions as reformism does imo.
It doesn't mean closing all prisons/police departments tomorrow and sending out high school councilors to bank robberies or whatever other nonsense leaps to the mind of many people though.
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On April 27 2021 19:53 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 19:22 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 13:32 Liquid`Drone wrote:On April 27 2021 07:24 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 07:08 BlackJack wrote:On April 27 2021 06:26 Artisreal wrote:On April 27 2021 06:13 BlackJack wrote:On April 27 2021 01:50 EnDeR_ wrote:Let me preface my response by saying that I wasn't aware that about 50 police officers lose their lives doing their jobs every year at the hands of armed civilians. I did not realise it was that bad, and probably explains why they are so quick to eliminate the threat as they probably feel constantly under attack. On April 26 2021 05:24 oBlade wrote:
You keep saying "routine traffic stop." It's not routine once they open fire. The two guys we were talking about who got shot after opening fire on the police officer, why did they do that? Because they had warrants out. There are not only so many criminals around, there are so many currently wanted criminals that pulling people over randomly for expired plates in the course of a day, can end up with you pulling over extremely dangerous people without knowing it. Why shoot at cops? Because you don't want to go to jail. Why not flee? Because a high speed chase is extremely stacked against you, whereas pretending to comply until you murder the cop and drive away gives you a way out. I saw the video of someone get pulled over for a tinted window machinegun the officer. I did, however, want to argue this point. The data shows that the majority of police shootings started with the police shooting, not the suspect. In fact, in only about a quarter of cases the suspect fired their gun, according to this study that looked at all police killings in 2015 onlinelibrary.wiley.com. The study is quite nice and includes a lot of data. I extracted the data from the paper so you can see it here: For 10% of the shootings, the suspect was completely unarmed which is kind of crazy. Mostly, people got killed for brandishing their gun/knife and attacking with non-gun weapons. 11 were shot for trying to run away, and 7 people were shot accidentally in 2015, which is a lot in my opinion. Clearly the issue is more with the whole justice system. I do take your point that criminals in the US seem to have less to lose than those in other western democracies, which definitely makes them more likely to shoot at police which exacerbates the problem.
In general, my thoughts are that crime is too widespread. The more dangerous it is for police on a regular basis, and the more they end up in dangerous situations, naturally the more they need training and equipment and tools that are suited for those situations and may misapply those. It increases the variance of everything. And the remedies for crime are education to prepare people for jobs, a strong economy to give them those jobs, arresting criminals, drug interdiction, family, and community.
I agree with most of this, but I still think a bit more emphasis on de-escalation before the situation gets to the pulling out weapons stage would not be amiss. At the end of the day, the narrative that people are getting shot for routine traffic stops while complying with police is just bullshit. Not to say that it absolutely never happens (see: Philando Castille) but it's obviously the rarest example that gets presented as the status quo. It's like Pro-lifers that make an argument against abortion because of late-term abortions when they represent 1% of all abortions. It's nauseating hearing all these uber wealthy celebrities and politicians saying "I have to wonder every day if my child is going to come home tonight or if they are going to be killed by the police." Really? Do their children not know you shouldn't pulled out guns/knives and attack police? Or do they just irrationally believe that their child is likely to be the 1 in a million case that gets killed like Philando Castille? I'm kind of surprised you didn't realize how rough it was for police in the US. Your own numbers show that multiple times a day police are being shot at, having a gun pulled on them, being attacked with knives, etc. Eri is basically the only person in this entire thread that when making a comparison between the US and a country like Norway will also acknowledge that Norway has a lot less violent crime than the US. Everyone else just conveniently neglects to mention that. Comparing the US which has a very weak social safety net to Norway and chalking up the difference in police shootings entirely to the behavior of the police is either ignorant or disingenuous. The best way to reduce police shootings is to reduce poverty, reduce desperation in people, reduce untreated mental illness, etc. But those things cost money. Have guns drawn on cops? Gun control. I agree with your conclusion how to tackle the problem. I don't understand your reasoning that cops aren't killing to many people. Don't have enough money for the measure? Have proper VAT, wealth tax, inheritance tax and income tax all over the country and your money problems are solved. Oh and while your're at it, close them loopholes for amazon and their ilk. My main point was that the narrative you offer below is bullshit On April 15 2021 18:00 Artisreal wrote:
If you're a black person and get stopped by police for fuck all reason, there's no fucking chance to opt out. If that was a thing, therer wouldn't be as many murders by the police.
Imagine a traffic control where you have to consent to having a 5% chance of being shot for no good reason, i.e. your skin color. No fucking body would do that.
There is quite a bit of truth to what artisreal is saying. From the same study i quoted earlier: The results indicated civilians from “other” minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely as White civilians to have been unarmed. Basically, most of the black and minority people on that list were less likely to be armed and less likely to have been attacking the officers involved, and yet, they were still twice as likely to get killed than a white person. That's something that needs to be addressed and something worth protesting for. Also, 100 of those killings were with unarmed suspects, and 11 were with a fleeing suspect. At the bare minimum, that should never happen again. When Artisreal posts '5% chance of getting shot for your skin color' the post ends up being hyperbolic nonsense which has no relation to reality. There's so much real racism, and the actual numbers are bad enough, that we don't need to invent more racism or blatantly exaggerate the numbers. Looking at https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/findings/, more than 50000 Americans are pulled over every year. Like 12% of Americans are black. They do get stopped more frequently, there's no question about that, although I'm a bit too busy to find exact numbers, but for the sake of the argument let's say they're stopped at twice the frequency, so 25% of those are black. That'd give us 12500 stops per day. (About 25% of police killings are black people, so I just went with that number for this reason. It doesn't really matter for the point I'm making.) At a murder rate of 5%, we'd see 625 black Americans shot by police during traffic stops on a daily basis. In reality, police killed just above 1000 people in all of 2020, 241 of those were black, and these were not all the consequence of traffic stops - according to this, it's more than a quarter (but presumably less than a third), so let's go with a reasonable.. 75. So instead of Artisreal's number of roughly 228125, we're looking at roughly 75. My post still contains elements of unacceptable racism - black people comprise 12% of the population but 25% of people shot by police. And it might well be that the actual shootings aren't even the worst element of the interactions between black people and police, maybe the whole.. having to be ultra-deferent, perception of police as enemy (reasonable when they demand ultra-deference), the perception of being considered suspicious.. It all contributes to a really unhealthy relationship. But we shouldn't make up numbers, and if we're throwing out ballpark numbers for the sake of discussion (this is totally fine, we can't be expected to research everything), then those ballpark numbers shouldn't be 3000 times higher than reality. I agree that we should not overstate the problem, it doesn't help the discussion. The response 'this is such a rare occurrence that is therefore not important' is equally problematic in my view, because it is not about frequency; it's about the fact that it is happening at all. I did like the 'how many nazi-sympathizer judges would you be happy having'. It's a nice way of encapsulating the argument against 'but it's only a very small amount of interactions!' -- one is already one too many. I mean, I think the nazi judge framing is interesting, but I also don't think these are all that comparable. When talking about American police killing people, the frequency is pretty consistently how it's framed - because that's how the US differentiates itself from countries you might compare it with. Unless you want to rework the role of police - in a way we can't really see in any western country, Norway included, then occasional police killings is something we accept. As long as society has violent criminals and police are supposed to handle those violent criminals, then occasionally people will die - even if all police are good at their jobs. The frequency is basically the main cause for concern here - if American police killed 50 instead of 1000 people every year and these 50 killings were distributed more evenly across races (and ideally if there was no history of extrajudicial killings of prominent black people), then police killing people wouldn't be any more of an issue in the US than it is in Norway. As far as nazi judges goes, 1 is too many, period, and nothing in society really justifies the presence of any.
I agree with you, zero killings is unfeasible. With my last sentence, I was referring to killings of unarmed/fleeing subjects. In this, one is one too many.
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On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc.
I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems.
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Norway28706 Posts
That I agree with, especially fleeing subjects.
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On April 27 2021 20:13 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc. I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems.
I mean several problem can - and should - be addressed at once, don’t you think? I think just the last item would be a game changer. The fact that if s completely awful cop gets fired, he can just get employed somewhere else means there is no way to actually purge the police from its worse elements. That’s disastrous.
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Norway28706 Posts
On April 27 2021 20:13 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc. I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems.
I think ending the war on drugs is incredibly worthwhile for just this purpose because there are so many police-citizen interactions that go sour - or that even happen in the first place - because of the war on drugs.
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On April 27 2021 19:48 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 06:13 BlackJack wrote:On April 27 2021 01:50 EnDeR_ wrote:Let me preface my response by saying that I wasn't aware that about 50 police officers lose their lives doing their jobs every year at the hands of armed civilians. I did not realise it was that bad, and probably explains why they are so quick to eliminate the threat as they probably feel constantly under attack. On April 26 2021 05:24 oBlade wrote:
You keep saying "routine traffic stop." It's not routine once they open fire. The two guys we were talking about who got shot after opening fire on the police officer, why did they do that? Because they had warrants out. There are not only so many criminals around, there are so many currently wanted criminals that pulling people over randomly for expired plates in the course of a day, can end up with you pulling over extremely dangerous people without knowing it. Why shoot at cops? Because you don't want to go to jail. Why not flee? Because a high speed chase is extremely stacked against you, whereas pretending to comply until you murder the cop and drive away gives you a way out. I saw the video of someone get pulled over for a tinted window machinegun the officer. I did, however, want to argue this point. The data shows that the majority of police shootings started with the police shooting, not the suspect. In fact, in only about a quarter of cases the suspect fired their gun, according to this study that looked at all police killings in 2015 onlinelibrary.wiley.com. The study is quite nice and includes a lot of data. I extracted the data from the paper so you can see it here: For 10% of the shootings, the suspect was completely unarmed which is kind of crazy. Mostly, people got killed for brandishing their gun/knife and attacking with non-gun weapons. 11 were shot for trying to run away, and 7 people were shot accidentally in 2015, which is a lot in my opinion. Clearly the issue is more with the whole justice system. I do take your point that criminals in the US seem to have less to lose than those in other western democracies, which definitely makes them more likely to shoot at police which exacerbates the problem.
In general, my thoughts are that crime is too widespread. The more dangerous it is for police on a regular basis, and the more they end up in dangerous situations, naturally the more they need training and equipment and tools that are suited for those situations and may misapply those. It increases the variance of everything. And the remedies for crime are education to prepare people for jobs, a strong economy to give them those jobs, arresting criminals, drug interdiction, family, and community.
I agree with most of this, but I still think a bit more emphasis on de-escalation before the situation gets to the pulling out weapons stage would not be amiss. At the end of the day, the narrative that people are getting shot for routine traffic stops while complying with police is just bullshit. Not to say that it absolutely never happens (see: Philando Castille) but it's obviously the rarest example that gets presented as the status quo. It's like Pro-lifers that make an argument against abortion because of late-term abortions when they represent 1% of all abortions. It's nauseating hearing all these uber wealthy celebrities and politicians saying "I have to wonder every day if my child is going to come home tonight or if they are going to be killed by the police." Really? Do their children not know you shouldn't pulled out guns/knives and attack police? Or do they just irrationally believe that their child is likely to be the 1 in a million case that gets killed like Philando Castille? I'm kind of surprised you didn't realize how rough it was for police in the US. Your own numbers show that multiple times a day police are being shot at, having a gun pulled on them, being attacked with knives, etc. Eri is basically the only person in this entire thread that when making a comparison between the US and a country like Norway will also acknowledge that Norway has a lot less violent crime than the US. Everyone else just conveniently neglects to mention that. Comparing the US which has a very weak social safety net to Norway and chalking up the difference in police shootings entirely to the behavior of the police is either ignorant or disingenuous. The best way to reduce police shootings is to reduce poverty, reduce desperation in people, reduce untreated mental illness, etc. But those things cost money. I think the comparison with pro-lifers is not an apt one; not to re-start that particular debate, but there are (arguably) pros and cons to both positions. There are no pros to police killing unarmed people or people who are trying to flee. One thing that you might want to try here is to put yourself in their shoes. Certainly the risk is overstated, but risk perception is very subjective -- several posters in this thread are happy to accept that when police overassess the risks, their behaviour is justified and it is seen as OK to just expect the absolute worst case scenario. Why not give affluent black folks the same treatment? The data is actually on their side, from a PNAS article from 2019 doi.org: Show nested quote +For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.
We estimate that over the life course, at levels of risk similar to those observed between 2013 and 2018, about 52 [39, 68] (90% uncertainty interval) of every 100,000 men and boys in the United States will be killed by police use of force over the life course If death by cop was a leading cause of death for your children, you would also overstate the case if you had a platform to do so. I know I would because I find it completely unacceptable. With respect to your second paragraph, I have had very limited exposure to law enforcement in the US, and risk is difficult to gauge. 50 dead police officers a year is excessive by any metric, and I would imagine that police would be just as happy to have that number come down. Certainly, policing is not an isolated issue, wealth inequality and a weak safety net all contribute to the problem we are currently observing. Nevertheless, there are certain interventions that could reduce the number of excesses. I think one of the points that Drone raised, that black people are forced to act extremely deferentially towards police in order to not have a negative interaction is problematic, particularly considering that black people are 5 times more likely to be unfairly stopped by the police, according to www.pewresearch.org.
From the article
We estimate an overall mortality rate of about 1.8 per 100,000 for men between the ages of 25 y and 29 y.
From the data you posted a few pages back on fatal police shootings of 2015 we found that only 9.4% were unarmed. Compared to 90% that were shooting at police, pointing/brandishing a gun at police, attacking police with other weapons, attack police with knives, etc. Even though that 9.4% can also include people that were attacking police with their bare hands (a large man vs a lady cop could easily killer her with their bare hands) let's just assume that all 9.4% of those were unjustified
9.4% of 1.8 per 100,000 = 0.17 per 100,000. Or 1.7 per million. I imagine you're just trying to play devil's advocate for the argument "5% chance of being shot for being black during a traffic stop" but you're literally providing me evidence that I'm right when I say the odds are closer to 1 in 1,000,000. If you only look at the people that were complying with police and doing nothing wrong it's probably way more rare than that even.
Also the same article you posted shows that the mortality rate for homicide is 20 per 100,000 which is 10 to 20 times higher than the 1.8 per 100,000 of being killed by police. It's basically a fact that a black kid in America is WAY more likely to be shot by another black kid in America than by police. But the black politician and celebrity mothers never seem to worry about that. Strange.
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On April 27 2021 20:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 20:13 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc. I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems. I mean several problem can - and should - be addressed at once, don’t you think? I think just the last item would be a game changer. The fact that if s completely awful cop gets fired, he can just get employed somewhere else means there is no way to actually purge the police from its worse elements. That’s disastrous.
I actually think that the number of absolute garbage humans that become cops is relatively small among the general cop population -- that they get sheltered behind the 'blue wall' is absolutely atrocious and it's insane that still happens. The absolutely egregious killings that get the biggest headlines are probably perpetrated by this minority, no argument from me there!
I would argue that the barrage of headline news actually distracts from an uncomfortable truth: officers that follow their training and are otherwise normal human beings trying their absolute best also end up killing suspects. Basically, the system produces these outcomes. Blaming individuals for a systemic problem is unlikely to solve the issue, so, to reiterate my position, none of the items on this list addresses that fundamental problem, although it probably would mitigate it somewhat.
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On April 27 2021 20:22 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 19:48 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 06:13 BlackJack wrote:On April 27 2021 01:50 EnDeR_ wrote:Let me preface my response by saying that I wasn't aware that about 50 police officers lose their lives doing their jobs every year at the hands of armed civilians. I did not realise it was that bad, and probably explains why they are so quick to eliminate the threat as they probably feel constantly under attack. On April 26 2021 05:24 oBlade wrote:
You keep saying "routine traffic stop." It's not routine once they open fire. The two guys we were talking about who got shot after opening fire on the police officer, why did they do that? Because they had warrants out. There are not only so many criminals around, there are so many currently wanted criminals that pulling people over randomly for expired plates in the course of a day, can end up with you pulling over extremely dangerous people without knowing it. Why shoot at cops? Because you don't want to go to jail. Why not flee? Because a high speed chase is extremely stacked against you, whereas pretending to comply until you murder the cop and drive away gives you a way out. I saw the video of someone get pulled over for a tinted window machinegun the officer. I did, however, want to argue this point. The data shows that the majority of police shootings started with the police shooting, not the suspect. In fact, in only about a quarter of cases the suspect fired their gun, according to this study that looked at all police killings in 2015 onlinelibrary.wiley.com. The study is quite nice and includes a lot of data. I extracted the data from the paper so you can see it here: For 10% of the shootings, the suspect was completely unarmed which is kind of crazy. Mostly, people got killed for brandishing their gun/knife and attacking with non-gun weapons. 11 were shot for trying to run away, and 7 people were shot accidentally in 2015, which is a lot in my opinion. Clearly the issue is more with the whole justice system. I do take your point that criminals in the US seem to have less to lose than those in other western democracies, which definitely makes them more likely to shoot at police which exacerbates the problem.
In general, my thoughts are that crime is too widespread. The more dangerous it is for police on a regular basis, and the more they end up in dangerous situations, naturally the more they need training and equipment and tools that are suited for those situations and may misapply those. It increases the variance of everything. And the remedies for crime are education to prepare people for jobs, a strong economy to give them those jobs, arresting criminals, drug interdiction, family, and community.
I agree with most of this, but I still think a bit more emphasis on de-escalation before the situation gets to the pulling out weapons stage would not be amiss. At the end of the day, the narrative that people are getting shot for routine traffic stops while complying with police is just bullshit. Not to say that it absolutely never happens (see: Philando Castille) but it's obviously the rarest example that gets presented as the status quo. It's like Pro-lifers that make an argument against abortion because of late-term abortions when they represent 1% of all abortions. It's nauseating hearing all these uber wealthy celebrities and politicians saying "I have to wonder every day if my child is going to come home tonight or if they are going to be killed by the police." Really? Do their children not know you shouldn't pulled out guns/knives and attack police? Or do they just irrationally believe that their child is likely to be the 1 in a million case that gets killed like Philando Castille? I'm kind of surprised you didn't realize how rough it was for police in the US. Your own numbers show that multiple times a day police are being shot at, having a gun pulled on them, being attacked with knives, etc. Eri is basically the only person in this entire thread that when making a comparison between the US and a country like Norway will also acknowledge that Norway has a lot less violent crime than the US. Everyone else just conveniently neglects to mention that. Comparing the US which has a very weak social safety net to Norway and chalking up the difference in police shootings entirely to the behavior of the police is either ignorant or disingenuous. The best way to reduce police shootings is to reduce poverty, reduce desperation in people, reduce untreated mental illness, etc. But those things cost money. I think the comparison with pro-lifers is not an apt one; not to re-start that particular debate, but there are (arguably) pros and cons to both positions. There are no pros to police killing unarmed people or people who are trying to flee. One thing that you might want to try here is to put yourself in their shoes. Certainly the risk is overstated, but risk perception is very subjective -- several posters in this thread are happy to accept that when police overassess the risks, their behaviour is justified and it is seen as OK to just expect the absolute worst case scenario. Why not give affluent black folks the same treatment? The data is actually on their side, from a PNAS article from 2019 doi.org: For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.
We estimate that over the life course, at levels of risk similar to those observed between 2013 and 2018, about 52 [39, 68] (90% uncertainty interval) of every 100,000 men and boys in the United States will be killed by police use of force over the life course If death by cop was a leading cause of death for your children, you would also overstate the case if you had a platform to do so. I know I would because I find it completely unacceptable. With respect to your second paragraph, I have had very limited exposure to law enforcement in the US, and risk is difficult to gauge. 50 dead police officers a year is excessive by any metric, and I would imagine that police would be just as happy to have that number come down. Certainly, policing is not an isolated issue, wealth inequality and a weak safety net all contribute to the problem we are currently observing. Nevertheless, there are certain interventions that could reduce the number of excesses. I think one of the points that Drone raised, that black people are forced to act extremely deferentially towards police in order to not have a negative interaction is problematic, particularly considering that black people are 5 times more likely to be unfairly stopped by the police, according to www.pewresearch.org. From the article Show nested quote +We estimate an overall mortality rate of about 1.8 per 100,000 for men between the ages of 25 y and 29 y. From the data you posted a few pages back on fatal police shootings of 2015 we found that only 9.4% were unarmed. Compared to 90% that were shooting at police, pointing/brandishing a gun at police, attacking police with other weapons, attack police with knives, etc. Even though that 9.4% can also include people that were attacking police with their bare hands (a large man vs a lady cop could easily killer her with their bare hands) let's just assume that all 9.4% of those were unjustified 9.4% of 1.8 per 100,000 = 0.17 per 100,000. Or 1.7 per million. I imagine you're just trying to play devil's advocate for the argument "5% chance of being shot for being black during a traffic stop" but you're literally providing me evidence that I'm right when I say the odds are closer to 1 in 1,000,000. If you only look at the people that were complying with police and doing nothing wrong it's probably way more rare than that even. Also the same article you posted shows that the mortality rate for homicide is 20 per 100,000 which is 10 to 20 times higher than the 1.8 per 100,000 of being killed by police. It's basically a fact that a black kid in America is WAY more likely to be shot by another black kid in America than by police. But the black politician and celebrity mothers never seem to worry about that. Strange.
I don’t know about that. It’s usually the same people who protest against police violence who actually care about doing something about the abherant level of gun violence in the US - by regulating guns and disarming the population - and people who see no problem with police violence who are all for gubs to be about as hard to buy than a box of cereals.
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On April 27 2021 20:28 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 20:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 27 2021 20:13 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc. I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems. I mean several problem can - and should - be addressed at once, don’t you think? I think just the last item would be a game changer. The fact that if s completely awful cop gets fired, he can just get employed somewhere else means there is no way to actually purge the police from its worse elements. That’s disastrous. I actually think that the number of absolute garbage humans that become cops is relatively small among the general cop population -- that they get sheltered behind the 'blue wall' is absolutely atrocious and it's insane that still happens. The absolutely egregious killings that get the biggest headlines are probably perpetrated by this minority, no argument from me there! I would argue that the barrage of headline news actually distracts from an uncomfortable truth: officers that follow their training and are otherwise normal human beings trying their absolute best also end up killing suspects. Basically, the system produces these outcomes. Blaming individuals for a systemic problem is unlikely to solve the issue, so, to reiterate my position, none of the items on this list addresses that fundamental problem, although it probably would mitigate it somewhat.
I am not sure. You might be right. Most of the time when I read details about cops killing people needlessly, it appears yhe cop was absolutely garbage.
There were arricles in the NYT about how Derek Chauvin was systematically being extremely violent and abusive, for example, with testimonies of people he arrested previously.
Again, it’s not to say there is no structural problem here, there absolutely is. But shitty cops never getting fired permanently is a gigantic problem. It means the police itself doesn’t have the means of improving its own standard.
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On April 27 2021 20:22 BlackJack wrote:From the article Show nested quote +We estimate an overall mortality rate of about 1.8 per 100,000 for men between the ages of 25 y and 29 y. From the data you posted a few pages back on fatal police shootings of 2015 we found that only 9.4% were unarmed. Compared to 90% that were shooting at police, pointing/brandishing a gun at police, attacking police with other weapons, attack police with knives, etc. Even though that 9.4% can also include people that were attacking police with their bare hands (a large man vs a lady cop could easily killer her with their bare hands) let's just assume that all 9.4% of those were unjustified 9.4% of 1.8 per 100,000 = 0.17 per 100,000. Or 1.7 per million. I imagine you're just trying to play devil's advocate for the argument "5% chance of being shot for being black during a traffic stop" but you're literally providing me evidence that I'm right when I say the odds are closer to 1 in 1,000,000. If you only look at the people that were complying with police and doing nothing wrong it's probably way more rare than that even. Also the same article you posted shows that the mortality rate for homicide is 20 per 100,000 which is 10 to 20 times higher than the 1.8 per 100,000 of being killed by police. It's basically a fact that a black kid in America is WAY more likely to be shot by another black kid in America than by police. But the black politician and celebrity mothers never seem to worry about that. Strange.
You've misread that. 1.8 for 100,000 for men, that includes white men. You glossed over the first paragraph which clearly states:
Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police .
And, here's the relevant paragraph:
Between the ages of 25 y and 29 y, black men are killed by police at a rate between 2.8 and 4.1 per 100,000, American Indian and Alaska Native men are killed at a rate between 1.5 and 2.8 per 100,000, Asian/Pacific Islander men are killed by police at a rate between 0.3 and 0.6 per 100,000, Latino men at a rate between 1.4 and 2.2 per 100,000, and white men at a rate between 0.9 and 1.4 per 100,000. Inequalities in risk persist throughout the life course.
The question isn't 'is it more likely to be killed by another person than by the police?'. The question is: is the risk of getting killed by the police acceptable? I would argue that it isn't, regardless of ethnicity.
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On April 27 2021 20:38 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 20:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 20:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 27 2021 20:13 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc. I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems. I mean several problem can - and should - be addressed at once, don’t you think? I think just the last item would be a game changer. The fact that if s completely awful cop gets fired, he can just get employed somewhere else means there is no way to actually purge the police from its worse elements. That’s disastrous. I actually think that the number of absolute garbage humans that become cops is relatively small among the general cop population -- that they get sheltered behind the 'blue wall' is absolutely atrocious and it's insane that still happens. The absolutely egregious killings that get the biggest headlines are probably perpetrated by this minority, no argument from me there! I would argue that the barrage of headline news actually distracts from an uncomfortable truth: officers that follow their training and are otherwise normal human beings trying their absolute best also end up killing suspects. Basically, the system produces these outcomes. Blaming individuals for a systemic problem is unlikely to solve the issue, so, to reiterate my position, none of the items on this list addresses that fundamental problem, although it probably would mitigate it somewhat. I am not sure. You might be right. Most of the time when I read details about cops killing people needlessly, it appears yhe cop was absolutely garbage. There were arricles in the NYT about how Derek Chauvin was systematically being extremely violent and abusive, for example, with testimonies of people he arrested previously. Again, it’s not to say there is no structural problem here, there absolutely is. But shitty cops never getting fired permanently is a gigantic problem. It means the police itself doesn’t have the means of improving its own standard.
Yes, the killings that make the news are the shocking ones -- most police shootings only get reported in local news so you're much less likely to be aware of them; much as I was shocked when I went through the people killed in April.
The police culture of sheltering their worst offenders is unacceptable and is absolutely a gigantic piece of the problem. It is genuinely baffling that this is still happening with all the video evidence that comes out on a regular basis. But, nevertheless, if the goal is to reduce the number of police killings, getting rid of the garbage humans doesn't fix the systemic problem, it only ameliorates it.
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On April 27 2021 20:13 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc. I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems.
I'd say they all basically fall into "non-reformist reforms" I'd support (provided the specifics make sense). I'd agree they are pretty narrow and could see them only as a "good start".
Folks should probably take some time to consider how/why something like:
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
is something that still needs to be done rather than something that happened in the previous decades all of those things were being called for.
That one in particular is totally in the purview of police and something they could have done whenever they wanted (or announce they are starting tomorrow).
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On April 27 2021 20:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 20:13 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 19:54 BlackJack wrote:
If people could stop the hyperbole for 5 minutes we could probably all agree on some common sense police reform, e.g.
-end no-knock warrants
-end qualified immunity
-stop letting police investigate themselves for wrongdoing
-stop asking police to arrest people for having some plants (war on drugs)
-stop letting shitty cops that are fired or forced to resign go to new towns and become cops there
etc. I'd say most posters here would agree with you that that would be a good start. I would argue that the items in your list will do little to cut down the number of people that die at the hands of police every year as they don't address the core problems. I mean several problem can - and should - be addressed at once, don’t you think? I think just the last item would be a game changer. The fact that if s completely awful cop gets fired, he can just get employed somewhere else means there is no way to actually purge the police from its worse elements. That’s disastrous.
I actually think the third item would be the most important here. If you have an actual independent agency investigating police brutality (That is not in any way linked to the police department being investigated, and ideally also has no personal connections to those people), you can greatly reduce a lot of those systemic problems. If cops can no longer expect to be investigated by their friends, and prosecuted by people dependent on those friends, i think a lot would change.
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On April 27 2021 20:40 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 20:22 BlackJack wrote:From the article We estimate an overall mortality rate of about 1.8 per 100,000 for men between the ages of 25 y and 29 y. From the data you posted a few pages back on fatal police shootings of 2015 we found that only 9.4% were unarmed. Compared to 90% that were shooting at police, pointing/brandishing a gun at police, attacking police with other weapons, attack police with knives, etc. Even though that 9.4% can also include people that were attacking police with their bare hands (a large man vs a lady cop could easily killer her with their bare hands) let's just assume that all 9.4% of those were unjustified 9.4% of 1.8 per 100,000 = 0.17 per 100,000. Or 1.7 per million. I imagine you're just trying to play devil's advocate for the argument "5% chance of being shot for being black during a traffic stop" but you're literally providing me evidence that I'm right when I say the odds are closer to 1 in 1,000,000. If you only look at the people that were complying with police and doing nothing wrong it's probably way more rare than that even. Also the same article you posted shows that the mortality rate for homicide is 20 per 100,000 which is 10 to 20 times higher than the 1.8 per 100,000 of being killed by police. It's basically a fact that a black kid in America is WAY more likely to be shot by another black kid in America than by police. But the black politician and celebrity mothers never seem to worry about that. Strange. You've misread that. 1.8 for 100,000 for men, that includes white men. You glossed over the first paragraph which clearly states: Show nested quote +Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police . And, here's the relevant paragraph: Show nested quote +Between the ages of 25 y and 29 y, black men are killed by police at a rate between 2.8 and 4.1 per 100,000, American Indian and Alaska Native men are killed at a rate between 1.5 and 2.8 per 100,000, Asian/Pacific Islander men are killed by police at a rate between 0.3 and 0.6 per 100,000, Latino men at a rate between 1.4 and 2.2 per 100,000, and white men at a rate between 0.9 and 1.4 per 100,000. Inequalities in risk persist throughout the life course. The question isn't 'is it more likely to be killed by another person than by the police?'. The question is: is the risk of getting killed by the police acceptable? I would argue that it isn't, regardless of ethnicity.
Even doubling that rate doesn't help your case. 1 in a million chance of dying is 0.0001%. Not much difference between 0.0001% and 0.0002%. Also my point is that it's illogical for black mothers, especially wealthy ones, to fear that their child is going to be killed by police. Maybe you are okay with the media manipulating people into irrational fears but I am not. History has shown many negative things can happen if you allow that.
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On April 27 2021 19:39 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 19:25 Artisreal wrote:On April 27 2021 19:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 27 2021 19:15 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 19:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Probably not. Sorry about that.
I am just extremely frustrated that the thread is heading back to where it was a few months ago, on the same topics, for the same reason.
But never mind and apologies for losing my temper. I think it makes sense. Police killings of unarmed black men are a recurring occurrence in the US, so it is normal that we talk about it as they make a lot of headlines -- we just had the Chauvin trial so it's a very current topic. You always have the option to not engage in the topic if you think it's boring  I think it’s a fascinating topic and that it has been led in a great way, with many nuanced and insightful arguments from all sides. This discussion on police brutality is one of the best we have had on this thread. That’s why I kind of lost it when we started to head back to “abolish the police” and “all cops are power hungry killers and sadists”. I can of course not engage but I know well enough where this leads. Let’s just not say stuff like that. It destroys constructive discussion. My reaction was not the greatest, though, sorry about that. I think the abolish the police question is rather indicative of how far detached from the reality of the oppressed the "other side" is. But imo it boils down to this: If you're pushing for reform for 60 years and the status quo is what you get. Would you still think reform is viable? Correct me if you think I'm gravely in the wrong and/or if that is not what your gripe with the former discussions is about. I don’t think it’s a good way of looking at the problem. But ok, here is my take: Reform is probably incredibly hard to achieve. The main reason for that is that first and foremost you need mentalities to change, and culture to change. And that takes a long time. It’s not just making a reform or a revolution. It’s about people - not just cops, everyone - thinking differently. I said it before in that thread, but as long as people think for example that killing someone who trespasses on your property is ok - or just that “killing the bad guy” is a good way to deal with trouble - you are going to have massive problems with people whose role is to exerce violence in the name of public good. Meanwhile, there are many fronts on which the problem can be tackled: accountability, training, culture of descalation within law enforcement, etc. That’s done through a lot of protesting, a lot of voting, a lot of debating. And the good thing is that this is what is happening right now. Like all complex and deep rooted problems, it’s infuriatingly slow and takes a lot of convincing. What does not help is to instead give a ludicrous and completely unrealistic “revolutionary” general fix. That doesn’t achieve anything. We need a police force, there is no way to just lay down hundred of thousands of people, it’s politically totally infeasible, and so on and so forth. I think if you take a hard look at your solution, and factoring everything, there is 0% chance that it will be done, it’s a good idea to look for something else. What do you think are the odds that in 20, 30 or 50 years, the police is getting disbanded in the US? Again it’s not because I find the situation is acceptable or tolerable that I say those things. Yelling very loud something totally unfeasible is not very efficient. Especially when it comes with accusing everyone who is actually working on actual solutions to be complicite, enablers, not caring and so in as it’s usually done.
Thank you for your engagement. I have to say that I think I agree with most everything you wrote.
What I still do not understand is how there is any difference between revolution and ACTUALLY implementing these points you mentioned in a reasonable time frame of say 5-10 years of try and error.
Because looking back, reform brought us nothing. Which in turn means that unless we break the structure and revolutionise how the US implements policing, there's no progress.
It might feel like semantics, but it is not. It NEEDS a revolution, call it evolution.
Just like with pokemon, the first form is ground based but the evolution can fly. We don't reach the treshold for that unless we add this one ingredient to the police soup which is accountability and justice.
I feel kinda rambly but people are dying every day and people are talking about acceptability of reforms.
That's the unphased person in the ivory tower of safety talking about how they cannot stomach reforms that would help the plebs not getting shot.
I think it's worth considering time and again that Realpolitik did not get us very far in this. We have to reimagine how the police can work so it serves the people and doesnt serves a warrant for petty crimes with 25 bullets attached.
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That make sense. Police is heavily unionized though isn’t it? That might make even those common sense measure reaaaally hard and costly to implement.
France has problems with its police - though not of the magnitude of the US. The problem is that when politicians in power try to address any of the structural problems the police has, they get a strike on their asses, and find themselves without a police to work with at all. Consequently you only see change when there is a huge public push and that action becomes unavoidable.
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On April 27 2021 21:05 Artisreal wrote:Show nested quote +On April 27 2021 19:39 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 27 2021 19:25 Artisreal wrote:On April 27 2021 19:20 Biff The Understudy wrote:On April 27 2021 19:15 EnDeR_ wrote:On April 27 2021 19:01 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Probably not. Sorry about that.
I am just extremely frustrated that the thread is heading back to where it was a few months ago, on the same topics, for the same reason.
But never mind and apologies for losing my temper. I think it makes sense. Police killings of unarmed black men are a recurring occurrence in the US, so it is normal that we talk about it as they make a lot of headlines -- we just had the Chauvin trial so it's a very current topic. You always have the option to not engage in the topic if you think it's boring I think it’s a fascinating topic and that it has been led in a great way, with many nuanced and insightful arguments from all sides. This discussion on police brutality is one of the best we have had on this thread. That’s why I kind of lost it when we started to head back to “abolish the police” and “all cops are power hungry killers and sadists”. I can of course not engage but I know well enough where this leads. Let’s just not say stuff like that. It destroys constructive discussion. My reaction was not the greatest, though, sorry about that. I think the abolish the police question is rather indicative of how far detached from the reality of the oppressed the "other side" is. But imo it boils down to this: If you're pushing for reform for 60 years and the status quo is what you get. Would you still think reform is viable? Correct me if you think I'm gravely in the wrong and/or if that is not what your gripe with the former discussions is about. I don’t think it’s a good way of looking at the problem. But ok, here is my take: Reform is probably incredibly hard to achieve. The main reason for that is that first and foremost you need mentalities to change, and culture to change. And that takes a long time. It’s not just making a reform or a revolution. It’s about people - not just cops, everyone - thinking differently. I said it before in that thread, but as long as people think for example that killing someone who trespasses on your property is ok - or just that “killing the bad guy” is a good way to deal with trouble - you are going to have massive problems with people whose role is to exerce violence in the name of public good. Meanwhile, there are many fronts on which the problem can be tackled: accountability, training, culture of descalation within law enforcement, etc. That’s done through a lot of protesting, a lot of voting, a lot of debating. And the good thing is that this is what is happening right now. Like all complex and deep rooted problems, it’s infuriatingly slow and takes a lot of convincing. What does not help is to instead give a ludicrous and completely unrealistic “revolutionary” general fix. That doesn’t achieve anything. We need a police force, there is no way to just lay down hundred of thousands of people, it’s politically totally infeasible, and so on and so forth. I think if you take a hard look at your solution, and factoring everything, there is 0% chance that it will be done, it’s a good idea to look for something else. What do you think are the odds that in 20, 30 or 50 years, the police is getting disbanded in the US? Again it’s not because I find the situation is acceptable or tolerable that I say those things. Yelling very loud something totally unfeasible is not very efficient. Especially when it comes with accusing everyone who is actually working on actual solutions to be complicite, enablers, not caring and so in as it’s usually done. Thank you for your engagement. I have to say that I think I agree with most everything you wrote. What I still do not understand is how there is any difference between revolution and ACTUALLY implementing these points you mentioned in a reasonable time frame of say 5-10 years of try and error. Because looking back, reform brought us nothing. Which in turn means that unless we break the structure and revolutionise how the US implements policing, there's no progress. It might feel like semantics, but it is not. It NEEDS a revolution, call it evolution. Just like with pokemon, the first form is ground based but the evolution can fly. We don't reach the treshold for that unless we add this one ingredient to the police soup which is accountability and justice. I feel kinda rambly but people are dying every day and people are talking about acceptability of reforms. That's the unphased person in the ivory tower of safety talking about how they cannot stomach reforms that would help the plebs not getting shot. I think it's worth considering time and again that Realpolitik did not get us very far in this. We have to reimagine how the police can work so it serves the people and doesnt serves a warrant for petty crimes with 25 bullets attached.
I think on the opposite that we often fail to see how much progress is being made. Take racism. I am not (and was not 50 years ago) a black person in the US, but I know enough to say confidently that despite horrendous inequalities and the appaling treatment of black people by the police, the situation of black people and even their interactions with the police have immensely improved since the 1960s. Read the biography of any black person in the US in those days - it’s frightening how awful the situation was.
It’s not to say it’s good or tolerable now. It’s not. But the progresses are huge and constant. It’s just the country comes from such insane rock bottom - we talk a level of injustice hardly seen in human history just 150 years ago - that it’s not done yet at all.
Otherwise I like things getting done. And my observation is that only feasable things get done, and that they get done one at a time. To follow your analogy, no reptile was born one day with a pair of wings and started to fly like a colibri. It took generations of slow changes and each step bringing a small evolutionary advantage - jump further, get smoothly back to the ground from a tree and whatnot before anything could fly at all.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.ibb.co/yfZdvPB/table.png)
