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Fucking Guns

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  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Cliffdweller wrote:
    fwiw I was the one (tho perhaps there were others) who made the comment re parkland police officer. I have not commented on this case


    Oh a good half dozen were taking that sympathetic side for the Parkland police officer, plus every op-ed I read. I'm not carrying grudges from one ship to another*, just pointing out the difference in attitude from one event to the next.

    *Except for DocTor who called me a dick! I hate that! So unfeminine.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    Those weren't my words, Croesus, they were the words of people defending the deputy at the Florida shooting who did nothing. Hence the quotes. I called him a coward at the time and was called a dick for doing it, because, it was said, "Most people would have been afraid in that situation," and I shouldn't criticize him because I would have done the same if I wasn't in his shoes. Yet, a few weeks later, these police who were frightened into what seems like a state of panic are pilloried by the very same people who were defending the other man.

    The very same people? [ citation needed ]
    Twilight wrote: »
    The police sometimes make mistakes and shoot unarmed people. When it happens there is always an investigation and sometimes they lose their jobs.

    Very, very rarely. It's almost as common to be fired for not shooting a black suspect.
    Twilight wrote: »
    Why is it that when the victim happens to be black there is added to that, a public outcry and inflammatory headlines everywhere.

    Do you really need a whole essay on race and law enforcement throughout American history? Because that seems a bit outside the scope of the current thread. Let's just say that racism still exists in the United States (Exhibit 1, the election* of Donald Trump) and there's no reason to automatically assume that it's somehow not present in law enforcement.
    Twilight wrote: »
    Don't even start pretending the police shot this man because of his color. They were there to defend the African American residents and their property and probably couldn't see well enough to tell the color of the perpetrator.

    There is no way to know for certain, but it's distinctly possible that being in a mostly non-white neighborhood was one of the reasons these particular officers felt free to get so trigger-happy in conditions of limited visibility. The number of shots fired would seem to argue against the idea that the safety of neighborhood residents was paramount in the minds of the officers in question.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    We were talking about motivation to go to the call, not thoughts at the time of the shooting.

    Of course the safety of the residents wasn't paramount at the time of the shooting -- obviously with what they thought was a gun pointed at them-- their own safety and plain fear was what was motivating them. If you watched the video you would know the idea that they stopped before shooting to think, "Oh I guess I'll shoot him because I'll get in less trouble than if this were a white neighborhood." Part of what they're in trouble for is the short (seconds) of time between saying, "Stop, show your hands," and shooting.

    Besides, why in the world would you expect them to think they would be in less trouble shooting a black person than a white person? Haven't you watched the news in the last few years?

    I also wonder why you're so sure these policemen had a racist motivation to shoot when one of them was black.
    Do you really need a whole essay on race and law enforcement throughout American history?
    I probably know more about that than you do, but if you expect police officers to consider and weigh that history while in the middle of life threatening criminal activity then I think you're expecting far too much. Unless you honestly believe that when they see dark skinned perpetrators they should turn around and walk away. Ether one seems unreasonable to me.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    edited March 2018
    From this side of the pond, there appears to be a difference in the shit a cop gets for shooting an unarmed white guy and what they get for shooting an unarmed black guy.

    Is that what we'd call over here as 'institutionally racist'? Because it looks that way.
  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    The police training academy for my state is part of the campus where I teach. A degree in Criminal Justice is required for employment in town/city forces, to become a state trooper, or to work in corrections. Since nearly every enrolled student is required to take English classes, I and my departmental colleagues routinely get Academy students in class (though a big chunk of their training goes forward within the Academy in separate buildings).

    For the nearly three decades I've taught at this joint, there have been ongoing issues with CJ students in non-Academy classes. They tend to "take over" ( dominating and taking charge of situations is part of their academy training); they tend to be disruptive (lots of authoritarian-oriented young males) and to challenge instructors' (especially female) authority; they tend to treat their non-Academy instructors (and sometimes other classmates) with disrespect, take a "legalistic" view of complying with syllabus language and assignment instructions, etc. My own impression is that a significant proportion of these students, expecially the younger males, tend to think that enforcing the law (or preparing to do so) somehow places them above it.

    When these complaints are brought to the CJ faculty, they shrug and say, "What can we do? It's basically an open enrollment system." We have consistently pointed out that the same is also true of the nursing department, the IT department, the engineering and architectural programs, etc., but these same problems do not arise with these other groups.

    The English Department has finally had to require that the Academy enroll no more than 3 CJ students in any one composition section in an effort to keep a lid on these folks and the problems they cause in class.

    I grant that this is one institution in a small rural state where the population is roughly 96% white. But this small sample suggests that the profession itself somehow attracts a fair percentage of folks who are somewhat more likely than average to want power for the express purpose of abusing any they get their hands on.

    As far as I know every single police shooting in at least the last 10 years (possibly longer, but I wasn't paying attention then) in this state has been found to be justified.

    Add all this to the fact that people of color in my state are disproportionately represented among our poor, our hungry, our homeless, our incarcerated, our unemployed, our special needs & medically fragile students, our high school & higher ed dropouts, and on and on (plus 100% of our death row inmates, though that's only 1, and he killed a cop, which is a specific death-penalty crime by statute here), and frankly, it all does begin to look pretty genocidal to me.
  • Are there laws in the US against intimidation, particularly in relation to attempting to silence the exercise of First Amendment rights?

    Sure, and Sabine has answered some of that.

    You are trying to paint the mere possession of an AR-15 at a protest, in an open carry state, as de facto intimidation. That won't fly.

    Protests, and counter-protests, are a common thing, of course. Both sides of an argument have the right to assemble, protest, and so on. It is common for both sides of a contentious argument to shout slogans, carry placards, and so on that portray supporters of the opposing viewpoint in a bad light. So far, so normal.

    Now consider a state where open carry is legal. By state law, the mere carrying of a legally-owned weapon cannot be considered intimidating. State law says that it is perfectly OK for you to have a pistol on your hip or an AR-15 across your shoulder as you go about your lawful business. There is no exception when that lawful business is attending a protest.

    Most states do have laws against "brandishing" a firearm or similar, and in some states the line between legal open carry and illegal brandishing / improper display / etc. is rather open to interpretation, and not necessarily endowed with any kind of logical consistency.
  • Twilight wrote: »
    mousethief wrote: »
    Really? Time off with pay commends itself to me.

    Even if it means a national reputation as a racist and death threats to your home and family?

    Probably should have thought of that before they brutally murdered an innocent black guy.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Aren't you switching arguments midstream?
  • Twilight wrote: »
    We were talking about motivation to go to the call, not thoughts at the time of the shooting.

    Of course the safety of the residents wasn't paramount at the time of the shooting -- obviously with what they thought was a gun pointed at them-- their own safety and plain fear was what was motivating them. If you watched the video you would know the idea that they stopped before shooting to think, "Oh I guess I'll shoot him because I'll get in less trouble than if this were a white neighborhood." Part of what they're in trouble for is the short (seconds) of time between saying, "Stop, show your hands," and shooting.

    Besides, why in the world would you expect them to think they would be in less trouble shooting a black person than a white person? Haven't you watched the news in the last few years?

    I also wonder why you're so sure these policemen had a racist motivation to shoot when one of them was black.
    Do you really need a whole essay on race and law enforcement throughout American history?
    I probably know more about that than you do, but if you expect police officers to consider and weigh that history while in the middle of life threatening criminal activity then I think you're expecting far too much. Unless you honestly believe that when they see dark skinned perpetrators they should turn around and walk away. Ether one seems unreasonable to me.

    If a young white man can stab a police chief in the face while being arrested for criminal tresspassing and be taken in alive, I think Stephon Clarke, being confronted on suspicion of breaking car windows, should have been able to reach for his cell phone when asked to put his hands up, even in the dark, and not wind up being shot 8 times, six in the back. (The 20 shots referred to earlier are I believe the total number of charges fired by the police in the incident.)

    This case is not about whether or not Stephon Clarke is a perfectly innocent victim or whether or not some use of force by police in this case is understandable. It is about the proportionate use of force, and about patterns in the use of force across suspects of different races - even when the officers using force are themselves nonwhite and even when the people who call police to the scene are themselves nonwhite.

    It's not about whether every police officer that shoots a young black man is racist or violating the law or police department policies - it's about centuries of state violence that has disproportionately fallen on black and brown bodies when compared with white bodies , along with state policies that, if not always in the letter of the law (although for a long time it was definitely in the letter of the law), at least in practice, have shown disproportionately less regard for the welfare of black and brown bodies than for white bodies.

    I am not asking for police officers to sit down and write a dissertation on racial history in the US before making every decision in the moment of an encounter to use force or not. I am asking for increasing community policing (ie, beat cops from the community who spend time getting to know all the different stakeholders in a neighborhood) in majority-person-of-color neighborhoods, decreasing the militarization of police, ending mass incarceration and the war on drugs (no I do not mean making every drug legal or stopping going after violent gangs and drug cartels), and, most importantly, making huge investments to reduce poverty, improve education and healthcare, treat addiction and mental illness, and increase employment in high-quality jobs with living wages in communities of color (as well as in working-class white communities, but the devastation of centuries of oppression in African-American and Indigenous American populations is a more pressing issue).

    And as for the school resource officer in the Parkland shooting, I think he should be in huge trouble for the way he behaved during the shooting, with regards to Twilight's comments earlier.
  • RooK wrote: »
    The 20 bullets used is probably more of a testament to how poorly in control of the situation they were rather than any particular malice.

    Once you make the decision to fire a weapon, you shoot to end the threat. I would expect that the cops were trained to put several rounds in the target's centre of mass.

    In this case, two cops apparently fired 20 rounds. Presumably that's each cop emptying a 10-round magazine at Mr. Clark. Stephon Clark's body was found to have eight bullet wounds, so 40% of the rounds that the officers fired hit the target.

    Emptying your magazine into a suspect doesn't sound much like a trained response - it sounds more like a panic. So I'm agreeing with RooK here.

    The racial questions enter at the point the cops decide to shoot Mr. Clark, and as other posters have noted, there does appear to be a pattern of cops (including black cops) being more willing to escalate the level of violence against black suspects, and more willing to de-escalate things against white suspects.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    [quote="Leorning Cniht;15751The racial questions enter at the point the cops decide to shoot Mr. Clark, and as other posters have noted, there does appear to be a pattern of cops (including black cops) being more willing to escalate the level of violence against black suspects, and more willing to de-escalate things against white suspects.
    [/quote]

    Do you have any statistics on that? Because the latest research I've seen says
    that when African Americans are stopped by police they are no more likely to be killed or seriously injured than are white people who are stopped for similar reasons. The higher statistic (proportionately) of African Americans being hurt by police seems to be based on the fact that they are more likely to be stopped and questioned by police in the first place.
    So it's more exposure to the police, not harsher treatment by the police that's the main problem, according to the recent studies.

    Latest new from the Sacramento incident shows that most of the eight bullets inflicted on Stephon Clark were shot into his back. The coroner believes the first bullet caused him to spin around and take the rest in the back. The coroner also believes he would have been alive for about ten minutes. I agree with RooK that the police lost control and emptied their guns when they wouldn't have needed to even if the suspect had actually been holding a gun.


  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Ohher wrote: »
    The police training academy for my state is part of the campus where I teach. A degree in Criminal Justice is required for employment in town/city forces, to become a state trooper, or to work in corrections. Since nearly every enrolled student is required to take English classes, I and my departmental colleagues routinely get Academy students in class (though a big chunk of their training goes forward within the Academy in separate buildings).

    For the nearly three decades I've taught at this joint, there have been ongoing issues with CJ students in non-Academy classes. They tend to "take over" ( dominating and taking charge of situations is part of their academy training); they tend to be disruptive (lots of authoritarian-oriented young males) and to challenge instructors' (especially female) authority; they tend to treat their non-Academy instructors (and sometimes other classmates) with disrespect, take a "legalistic" view of complying with syllabus language and assignment instructions, etc. My own impression is that a significant proportion of these students, expecially the younger males, tend to think that enforcing the law (or preparing to do so) somehow places them above it.

    When these complaints are brought to the CJ faculty, they shrug and say, "What can we do? It's basically an open enrollment system." We have consistently pointed out that the same is also true of the nursing department, the IT department, the engineering and architectural programs, etc., but these same problems do not arise with these other groups.

    The English Department has finally had to require that the Academy enroll no more than 3 CJ students in any one composition section in an effort to keep a lid on these folks and the problems they cause in class.

    I grant that this is one institution in a small rural state where the population is roughly 96% white. But this small sample suggests that the profession itself somehow attracts a fair percentage of folks who are somewhat more likely than average to want power for the express purpose of abusing any they get their hands on.

    As far as I know every single police shooting in at least the last 10 years (possibly longer, but I wasn't paying attention then) in this state has been found to be justified.

    Add all this to the fact that people of color in my state are disproportionately represented among our poor, our hungry, our homeless, our incarcerated, our unemployed, our special needs & medically fragile students, our high school & higher ed dropouts, and on and on (plus 100% of our death row inmates, though that's only 1, and he killed a cop, which is a specific death-penalty crime by statute here), and frankly, it all does begin to look pretty genocidal to me.

    Somewhere between Ohher's belief in genocide and this African American's view lies the truth. I just don't know which.Here.

  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    Twilight, I'm no statistician -- but neither is John McWhorter. There are various issues with this piece he wrote, and I'm probably not going to live long enough to pick the whole article apart. But here are a few things to bear in mind:

    1. This article appears to pre-date the recent recession, and recessions tend to hit disadvantaged groups a lot harder than the middle-class on up. Whatever economic realities held in the 1990s/early 2000s, they're likely to have changed dramatically since the crash of 2007-2008.

    2. Again, McWhorter is writing outside the field in which he holds academic credentials. He's a linguist and teacher in literature at Columbia; how he comes to be writing on African-American economic status for a professional journal in criminal justice I don't know, but I hope he's not going to try using it for a promotion or for tenure (or the committee doesn't look too closely at this piece of rubbish).

    3. Let's look at just one of the early paragraphs:
    QUOTE:
    "Two: Black people earn 61 percent of what whites do. Though accurate as a nationwide median in 1995, this figure is dragged down by the disproportionate number of single black welfare mothers. Black two-parent families earned 87 percent of what white two-parent families earned in 1995. Also distorting the median is the disproportionate number of blacks who live in the South, where wages are lower overall. If you look only at specific areas rather than at the nation as a whole, black household earnings in 1994 exceeded whites’ in 130 cities and counties across the nation."

    He's both manipulating and cherry-picking his evidence here, even if we grant that the original evidence itself is accurate (I don't know). If we take the "single black welfare mothers" out of consideration, he explains, black earnings compared to white earnings look rather better. But wait: aren't there single white welfare mothers too? Don't they drag down white averages? So inconvenient. So we compare two different groups instead: white 2-parent families and black 2-parent families, so now the black families are doing much better: 87% of what whites earn. Sure, it's a smaller inequality, but it's still unequal. Plus we haven't even examined whether these families are equivalent in other ways -- do these couples hold the same number of jobs? Have the same number of kids? Spaced roughly the same? Spend roughly similar amounts on housing, transport, food?

    Then he suggests we should ignore "the South, where wages are lower overall." Lower overall for whom? Just blacks? Blacks and whites? Or is the wage gap in the South possibly even higher than it is in the North? Why, heck, let's just forget the South and pick 130 cities where African-American families are earning even more than the white folks.

    Well, any situation can be made to look peachy if we simply de-select all the disconfirming data and re-arrange what's left to support the argument we're making. I hope his grasp and explication of linguistics is an improvement on this performance.

    4. How is he defining terms like "poor" and "middle class?" Speaking for myself, I've had close encounters with various poverty programs. The federal poverty guidelines (which differ from program to program) are preposterous; they're so low that few people meet the eligibility requirements. But what are you when you're not "poor" according to the guidelines for heating assistance or food stamps or whatever? Does being too well-off to get heating assistance render you "middle-class?"

    5. We have a similar issue with "earnings," especially as this relates to "wealth." The "middle-class" white family with two paid-off cars, 401Ks, and a house in which they've got 10 years' equity might be earning the same wages, in any 6-month period, as a black family which is renting an apartment and relies on public transport. How about if the white family has two teenagers with part-time jobs and the black family has four little ones under the age of 7? Is one of these families better off than the other? Well, duh.

    Bottom line: Mr McWhorter should probably stick to linguistics.

  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Ohher, I understood most of his economic stats as simply showing how misleading they can be -- if the overall earnings in the South are lower than the in the North and a larger percentage of black people live in the south then, yes, it will make the average wage for blacks compare as lower than whites in a misleading way. If there are, proportionately, far more black single mothers than white single mothers, then that too will make it hard to determine economic differences as strictly racially determined. I've seen many stats showing that single mother families are the prime reason for poverty in America. If there are more of them in any ethnic group then that group will have more poverty.

    However, what interested me most in his article, wasn't his points about poverty, but the overall story of his own disappointment in programs that were meant to help raise the quality of life for African Americans. Like him, I expected the Civil Right efforts of the 1960's to bring African Americans to a much fuller equality overall. I had huge hopes for Affirmative Action and school integration. When school integration didn't help much, I was all about the Head Start program for pre-school stimulation and WIC for early nutrition. Time after time, these things have failed to produce the results hoped for and it's so frustrating! Why do extremely poor white children do better in school than middle class black children? Why do black people who immigrate from the Islands take their place at the top of American schools and businesses and American born blacks don't? And he dares to brings up the elephant in the room when police profiling rears it's head: Why do African Americans commit 42% of the crimes and wouldn't that influence the police when stopping suspects?
  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    Ohher, I understood most of his economic stats as simply showing how misleading they can be -- if the overall earnings in the South are lower than the in the North and a larger percentage of black people live in the south then, yes, it will make the average wage for blacks compare as lower than whites in a misleading way.
    Only if we also assume that wages for whites remain the same, north to south. Should we be assuming that? I doubt it.
    Twilight wrote: »
    If there are, proportionately, far more black single mothers than white single mothers, then that too will make it hard to determine economic differences as strictly racially determined.
    But again, is there a significantly larger proportion of single mother in the two groups? That may depend on how we define single. Many single white welfare moms I'm acquainted with actually have live-in partners, some of whom contribute economically to the household. Are these women "single?" Are we comparing apples and oranges if we're stacking these folks up against black single welfare moms who get no similar help?
    Twilight wrote: »
    However, what interested me most in his article, wasn't his points about poverty, but the overall story of his own disappointment in programs that were meant to help raise the quality of life for African Americans.

    By now, it should be obvious to all but the most naive that the real purpose of anti-poverty programs has nothing to do with "preventing" or "correcting" poverty. The actual purpose of most anti-poverty programs is to prevent out-and-out rebellion while maintaining the poor IN a state of poverty. Evidence?

    1. Income eligibility for most such programs are at near-destitution levels. Food stamps are an exception, at least in some states.
    2. Eligibility cut-offs are strict and rigid for most programs. Your annual income for last year was $2 over the limit, and you have no earnings coming in now and no idea when you're going to get any? Tough. You don't qualify.
    3. Any assistance you do get will be constantly checked & cut against, oh, say, the $15 your sister sent you for your birthday.
    4. You'll be subjected to "churning" -- that, is thrown out of your program periodically in hopes that you'll fail to complain and be too overwhelmed by the voluminous paperwork involved in getting reinstated to bother.
    5. The amounts of any assistance you actually do get may keep you from actually starving or living in a box on the sidewalk, but they will NOT lift you out of your state of near-destitution (unless you cheat).

    That's all I have time for right now, but there's more to come.




  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    If there are, proportionately, far more black single mothers than white single mothers, then that too will make it hard to determine economic differences as strictly racially determined. I've seen many stats showing that single mother families are the prime reason for poverty in America.

    I think you're probably reversing the causality on this one. People aren't prosperous because they're married. They get married because they're prosperous enough to do so. In other words, they have enough material well-being to build a stable life with another person.
    Twilight wrote: »
    I had huge hopes for Affirmative Action and school integration.

    Did American schools ever really integrate?
    Twilight wrote: »
    Why do extremely poor white children do better in school than middle class black children?

    Probably because the poverty of white American children is different from the poverty of black American children.
    But we do not live that world. We live in this one:

    [ chart ]

    This chart by sociologist Patrick Sharkey quantifies the degree to which neighborhood poverty afflicts black and white families. Sociologists like Sharkey typically define a neighborhood with a poverty rate greater than 20 percent as “high poverty.” The majority of black people in this country (66 percent) live in high-poverty neighborhoods. The vast majority of whites (94 percent) do not. The effects of this should concern anyone who believes in a universalist solution to a particular affliction. According to Sharkey:
    Neighborhood poverty alone, accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined.

    No student of the history of American housing policy will be shocked by this. Concentrated poverty is the clear, and to some extent intentional, result of the segregationist housing policy that dominated America through much of the 20th century.

    This seems like a much more reasonable explanation that simply dismissing African-Americans as pathologically deficient.
    Twilight wrote: »
    And he dares to brings up the elephant in the room when police profiling rears it's head: Why do African Americans commit 42% of the crimes and wouldn't that influence the police when stopping suspects?

    Do African-Americans commit 42% of the crimes in the U.S.? I'm willing to admit that African-Americans may make up 42% of Americans currently under criminal sentence but that's not the same thing as committing 42% of the crimes, especially if you're going to justify increased police scrutiny with the reasoning that all/most black people are crooks (or that all/most crooks are black).

    For example, almost every sociological study indicates that black Americans and white Americans use illegal drugs at about the same rate. And yet black Americans are much more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs than white Americans. White subjects of stop-and-frisk were much more likely to be carrying illegal drugs or weapons (the only things that would really show up in stop-and-frisk) which is what you'd expect if race is used as a proxy for criminality despite race not being correlated with this particular type of crime. Black Americans arrested for drug offenses are more likely to charged than white Americans arrested for the same. Black Americans who are charged are more likely to be sentenced than white Americans, and black Americans who are sentenced serve longer sentences, on average, than white Americans sentenced for the same offense. Given that the American criminal justice system gives a lot of discretion to both police and prosecutors it's hard to see this as completely unintentional. So once again I'd argue that you're reversing cause and effect.

    Now you can argue that this is a tangent from the subject of American gun violence, but I'd argue that white American conceptions of black Americans being pathologically criminal is tied up fairly intimately with American gun culture.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Crœsos wrote: »
    Twilight wrote: »
    If there are, proportionately, far more black single mothers than white single mothers, then that too will make it hard to determine economic differences as strictly racially determined. I've seen many stats showing that single mother families are the prime reason for poverty in America.

    I think you're probably reversing the causality on this one. People aren't prosperous because they're married. They get married because they're prosperous enough to do so. In other words, they have enough material well-being to build a stable life with another person.

    A justice of the peace marriage costs about fifty dollars and a set of inexpensive rings about the same. Cost of raising a child? Around $230,000. And yet you say the single mothers are going ahead having children but not getting married because they aren't prosperous enough.

    Twilight wrote: »
    Why do extremely poor white children do better in school than middle class black children?

    [ quote] Croesos wrote:Probably because the poverty of white American children is different from the poverty of black American children.[/quote]
    That's a very long article saying only that poor black people tend to live in poor neighborhoods more often than poor white people. It doesn't prove anything. The poor white child goes to school underdressed in bad weather and unable to concentrate because their stomach is empty just like the poor black child. If you grew up in the Appalachian area like I did, you would know that the idea that poor white kids don't suffer like poor black kids is cruel and an example of self-pitying entitlement that wont allow a drop of sympathy for anyone else. Poor neighborhoods aren't always an extra disadvantage for the poor, sometimes that rich neighborhood means less government funding for school lunches, fewer free clinics and a greater sense of being outcast. The isolation of many poor white homes also allow for more physical abuse and neglect to go undetected.

    However, none of that applies to the Shaker Heights school sited in my link. All the kids went to the same school and lived in the same neighborhoods. I've read of may such schools where the black kids come from middleclass homes in nice neighborhoods and still tend to make up the bottom of the class. There is an essential problem there that will never be addressed if it's always denied.


    Croesos wrote:This seems like a much more reasonable explanation that simply dismissing African-Americans as pathologically deficient.

    Of course no one has said any such thing. The article points out how successful African people are when they come from Jamaica or Haiti, for example. It is clearly not a "pathological deficiency" (and what an ugly thing for you to say.) I don't know the answer but the author of my link believes it's an attitude from the parents and community that doesn't value academic achievement. It's quite possible that that attitude developed over centuries of black people feeling that there was no point in studying hard in school if the jobs requiring education weren't open to them.
    Twilight wrote: »
    And he dares to brings up the elephant in the room when police profiling rears it's head: Why do African Americans commit 42% of the crimes and wouldn't that influence the police when stopping suspects?

    [ quote] Croesos wrote:Do African-Americans commit 42% of the crimes in the U.S.? I'm willing to admit that African-Americans may make up 42% of Americans currently under criminal sentence but that's not the same thing as committing 42% of the crimes, especially if you're going to justify increased police scrutiny with the reasoning that all/most black people are crooks (or that all/most crooks are black).

    [/quote]

    That was my error with the statistic. African Americans commit 47% of violent crimes. So drug crimes don't enter into it. They make up 50% of convicted criminals.

    [ quote]Croesos wrote: If you're going to justify increased police scrutiny with the reasoning that all/most black people are crooks (or that all/most crooks are black).[/quote]

    Once again I said no such thing. Unless you think 47% of the crimes committed is the same thing as 47 percent of all black people or, for that matter, that 47% of anything equals "all/most."

    I really dislike defending myself against things I didn't say, or dealing with false logic. I'll bow out of this conversation now.
  • RooKRooK Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    I said no such thing.

    I have a very flexible imagination, yet I can contort your words to extrapolate to mean nothing else. More likely is that you are oblivious to what your words mean, clinging blindly to the visceral intent you had.

    Good thing you fled. You're not mature enough to face yourself honestly.
  • Twilight wrote: »
    I just happened to read that the Sacramento police chief is African American as well as one of the two police doing the shooting, so I really don't think this is a case of, "domestic genocide of melanin-enhanced men."
    The cops who shot are white. Black people can think black people are mostly criminal.
    Nothing indicated is proof against colour being a factor. Nor anything, yet, directly indicating its was.
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    I do want to think well of the Police. I come from a social class and ethnic background that considers policing an honorable and difficult job to do, so I guess that colors my opinions.
    Policing is a necessary job. If it were honourable, one would think it would attract more honourable people and that its training would make its members more honourable.
    each new immigrant community goes through a period of being the target of racist attitudes before that kind of melts away as a newer ethnic group arrives and is targeted.
    Unless you are brown. Because white immigrants' children become Australians. Brown immigrants children become brown Australians. If they are even allowed that much. Hell, Australia still doesn't treat the original Australians very well.
    RooK wrote: »
    So, take those two components and you have police officers willing to assume the worst, and unwilling to take any chances. Because once they pull that trigger once, they've already committed themselves to killing the suspect. Might as well be certain about it.

    The 20 bullets used is probably more of a testament to how poorly in control of the situation they were rather than any particular malice.
    If one pulls a lethal weapon, it is to kill. People do not typically immediately die or even become incapacitated from one shot. And one shot is reasonably likely not to even hit the target. So many police forces are trained to empty their clips. It is actually the reasonable thing to do if one is going to use deadly force.
    The problem isn't how many rounds they fired, but that they felt it necessary to fire at all. Stephon Clark was shot in the back.
  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    Twilight, I don't know if you're still reading this, and some of this material has little to do with guns, but there's a basic flaw in the "proof" you're using on this "pudding." Here's a personal story:

    I occasionally consult with local school districts in my area of expertise (writing/reading in English). I was called to a middle school to figure out what was going on with "reluctant" (their label, not mine) 7th-grade readers/writers. Three out of four 7th-grade English teachers got right on board with our work as we hashed out the issues, developed some strategies, tried some solutions, etc. etc. The fourth teacher, by contrast, held aloof, claiming that all her students were working right at their potential, there were no problems, nothing needed changing, and so on.

    Cornering #4 in her classroom one afternoon, I asked her about her students' potential, and how she got this info (I freely admit to considerable skepticism about test scores and matters of that ilk). Turns out she had "inherited" her classroom from the teacher who had this same group of students for 6th grade, and the 6th-grade teacher had left behind a sheet taped to a pull-out shelf in her desk. It was an alpha list of the pupils, and beside each kid's name was a number -- the kid's IQ, according to the teacher. She pulled out kids' work she'd recently marked, and indeed, the marks pretty much reflected the kids' IQ scores. Kids with IQs in the 90s were getting low grades and kids with IQs in the 120s were getting top grades.

    I asked for copies of the sheet and her marks and samples of the top and bottom students' writing and took them home to study further. Something was nagging at me, but I couldn't figure it out. For one thing, the bottom student's written work looked pretty sophisticated to me -- solid "B" work rather than rating the "D" it had been given -- while the top student's writing looked to me about average rather than deserving the A it actually got. Finally, I asked the school principal if he would confirm the IQ scores from the students' confidential files.

    It was the principal who discovered that the numbers on #4 teacher's pull-out shelf were not IQ scores at all. They were the students' locker numbers.

    #

    So when black students consistently show up at the bottoms of class rankings, is this because they're "dumb?" Is it because they're smart in other ways but lack academic talent? Because they are "living down" to some teacher's low expectations (or their own)? Because public education itself is somehow structured to ensure that black students can't do well?

    When black men get arrested at higher rates than white men, is this because black men are engaged in more criminality? Or is it because they get more intense scrutiny due to greater mistrust and suspicion? Is it because certain actions are seen as excusable when committed by whites but criminal when committed by blacks? Are black men "living down" to societal expectations of them (or their own)? Do some black men internalize the mistrust and stigma placed on them by this society? Is our criminal justice system itself somehow structured to ensure that blacks will more readily be criminalized than whites?

    You're right that statistics can be misleading. That's especially true when they're manipulated, cherry-picked, and misused, as McWhorter does in the piece you've linked to. It's also true that statistics cannot tell the whole story when it comes to social dynamics and human behavior, and that, when we measure anything by yardsticks we ourselves have crafted, we lose sight of our own part in that process at our peril.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Ohher, I know exactly what you're saying and I agree with it very much, particualrly insofar as lowered expectations, both of society and themselves. But that's why I agree with a great deal of what McWhorter says. I think he largely agrees with you and that is what he means by "victimology," this lowered expectation of the students and their parents in many cases because they believe it's hopeless to try and get ahead in the white man's world. It's what I meant, above, by a tendency to underachieve in school when examples of success are few and far between. A recent book called Hillbilly Elegy, speaks of that very thing in my own ethnic group where apathy and underachievement has reached very high levels.

    I'm not sure what you mean by the "proof," I'm using. I'm not really out to prove anything, only to force ourselves to admit that the problem of what we call "police racial profiling" may be more complicated than simply: Police are all racists out to shoot as many black people as possible.

    I agree that statistics never tell the whole story and that includes the statistics (1) that say police shoot proportionately more black people than white people. Mc Whorter's statistics that say (2) 47% of violent crime is committed by black people should shed some light on why the first statistic happens.

    Reading the second statistic as "black people are all crooks," as Rook and Croesos do is simplistic and doesn't take into account other facts like:
    "47% of violent crimes" is a tiny percent of all black people, the very large majority being law abiding citizens who never commit any crimes of any kind and facts like the ones that show black people are more likely to live in poor urban areas where more crime has always be enacted.

    So if police are being called to those poor urban areas much more often than to rich suburban neighborhoods and the majority of people who live there are African Americans, then more blacks will be arrested for more crimes. This would not mean the police were racist or "black people are all crooks." If police are called to the Walmart about a knife fight in the parking lot and every one in the parking lot is black, they are going to be interrogating and arresting black people that day. No prejudice intended.

    Statistics themselves are not racist. If statistics showed that the police in one town arrested a disproportionate number of teenage white girls and 80% of the crime in that town was committed by teen white girls, then the question should be asked, "Why?" The answer may be as simple as that town had a huge all girls, largely white boarding school.

    All I intended with linking McWhorter's essay was to bring out some of the gray areas and mitigating factors within the whole problem. I don't agree with everything he says or everything you say, but I think you both have many good points and all those points should be considered whether we're trying to lessen the school drop out rate or keep police from shooting so many unarmed people.


  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    Ohher, I know exactly what you're saying and I agree with it very much, particualrly insofar as lowered expectations, both of society and themselves. But that's why I agree with a great deal of what McWhorter says. I think he largely agrees with you and that is what he means by "victimology," this lowered expectation of the students and their parents in many cases because they believe it's hopeless to try and get ahead in the white man's world. It's what I meant, above, by a tendency to underachieve in school when examples of success are few and far between. A recent book called Hillbilly Elegy, speaks of that very thing in my own ethnic group where apathy and underachievement has reached very high levels.

    No, Twilight, you clearly don't know exactly what I'm saying. You've missed the point entirely. The students in that 7th-grade class had neither given up nor stopped trying -- at least not yet. Students who had done good work had been graded poorly because the teacher doing the grading believed the students to be incapable. Students who had done fair-to-middlin' work had received A grades because the teacher believed those students to be clever. Both sets of students had been incorrectly and unfairly evaluated, according to the teacher's mistaken beliefs about their cognitive ability. These students didn't believe themselves to be victims; they actually were victims -- of the teacher's prejudices formed on the basis of locker numbers.

    It's only when people who are in fact trying hard get routinely and repeatedly thwarted by arbitrary and unequally-applied standards that they start feeling victimized. The "victimology" you mention is not, in its initial stages, a cause of underachievement. Rather, underachievement is one common result of being constantly and repeatedly victimized.
    Twilight wrote: »
    . . . the problem of what we call "police racial profiling" may be more complicated than simply: Police are all racists out to shoot as many black people as possible.

    Nobody's claiming that all police are racist or all out to shoot as many black people as possible.
    Twilight wrote: »
    I agree that statistics never tell the whole story and that includes the statistics (1) that say police shoot proportionately more black people than white people. Mc Whorter's statistics that say (2) 47% of violent crime is committed by black people should shed some light on why the first statistic happens.

    First, both Croesus and I have shown that McWhorter's stats are bogus. Why you continue to put faith in them, I don't know, but if I were you, I'd seek information that is (A) more up-to-date, and (B) researched by experts in the field who are not busy grinding axes.
    Twilight wrote: »
    Reading the second statistic as "black people are all crooks," as Rook and Croesos do

    Neither is claiming this; you've misread/misinterpreted/misunderstood both of them.
    Twilight wrote: »
    Statistics themselves are not racist.

    They are when misused or distorted to justify racist policies.
    Twilight wrote: »
    If statistics showed that the police in one town arrested a disproportionate number of teenage white girls and 80% of the crime in that town was committed by teen white girls, then the question should be asked, "Why?" The answer may be as simple as that town had a huge all girls, largely white boarding school.

    Where to begin? First, there is nothing automatic about arrests. When police confront a situation where laws may be getting broken, they decide whether or not to make arrests. On what basis do they decide? Much will depend on individual officers' reactions to and beliefs about the situation they face and the people involved in it -- in exactly the same ways that my 7th-grade teacher was influenced by her beliefs about her students' cognitive strengths. If you happen to have a fair percentage of officers on your force who tend to see black men (or teenage white girls) as inherently more dangerous or criminal than people not answering to those descriptions, those are the folks who will bulk up arrest stats. If these arrested people are also convicted, they'll bulk up the crime stats -- even in cases where the conviction may be undeserved.
    Twilight wrote: »
    All I intended with linking McWhorter's essay was to bring out some of the gray areas and mitigating factors within the whole problem.

    If that's your goal, then please: find less biased, more reliable, and more up-to-date sources. Also please read whatever you find critically.

  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Well that's why we can't agree, you see my article as biased and outdated and I see yours as biased essays, unsupported by facts. Then there are things like your "IQ's were locker numbers," story. I heard that in the 1970's when IQ's were starting to be questioned as valuable tools for teachers. It had nothing to do with race at the time and I found it hard to believe then, IQ scores and locker numbers being sequenced quite differently. Quite a few students must have been sharing the same locker. On the other hand I've listened to a three hour NPR piece about the Shaker Heights high school problem and it was just the opposite of your imagined situation where the teachers were grading the black students harder. The school's primary aim for years was to bring the grades of the African Americans up to par, with all sorts of special programs to fix the issue. If any biased grading was going on (and that's harder to do in high school than elementary) then it would have been slanted in the black student's favor.

    I have another link that you should like better because it's less than a year old. What can white people do to fight racism? I read this when it first came out and I've tried to follow it. We can see how #2 "Ask open ended questions," worked here. Not well at all.

    Probably the best advice for whites is, "It's not all about you." I think that's become a big problem. I consider myself part of the liberal community and have been trying to "help," for 50 years, but I can look back and see that well meaning whites have not solved the race problem in America. In fact it's become worse. Your bullet points above show how we have failed. Maybe it's time for whites to listen more and African Americans to tell us more, instead of just always blaming us for everything.

    You have accused whites of incarcerating innocent black people, not just occasionally as happens in all cases but enough to account for all the discrepancy between population percentage and prison percentage. You have refuted facts with theories and redefined everything from "married," to "poor," just to fit your theories. You have listed all sorts of welfare programs intended to help as evil attempts to keep black people down and you have accused white people of purposeful genocide. It's odd to me that the people on this thread have decided I am the racist on the thread.

  • Twilight wrote: »
    but I can look back and see that well meaning whites have not solved the race problem in America.
    Because not enough whites are well meaning enough.
    In fact it's become worse.
    No. Not even close. There have been gains and losses and not enough progress, but a quick comparison of protests from the past and modern ones are a good example of things being worse in the past.

    Maybe it's time for whites to listen more and African Americans to tell us more, instead of just always blaming us for everything.
    This has been happening for the entire history of the civil right struggle everywhere. It isn't a lack of dialogue attempt on the black side that has leashed efforts.
    You have accused whites of incarcerating innocent black people, not just occasionally as happens in all cases but enough to account for all the discrepancy between population percentage and prison percentage. You have refuted facts with theories and redefined everything from "married," to "poor," just to fit your theories.
    You, IIRC, put forth examples of white people being treated unfairly as examples to refute a bias in the system against people of colour. No one here has ever said every white person is treated perfectly. Race is the dominant factor in perception, but not the only one. Poor and uneducated are powerful factors in how the justice system will view someone. But black trumps all that.
  • If you don't think IQ had anything to do with race, you need to do more research.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    Maybe it's time for whites to listen more and African Americans to tell us more, instead of just always blaming us for everything.

    Unless African-Americans tell you that American law enforcement involves significant racial disparities. That's apparently beyond the pale. (Literally.)
    Twilight wrote: »
    You have accused whites of incarcerating innocent black people, not just occasionally as happens in all cases but enough to account for all the discrepancy between population percentage and prison percentage.

    If you start from the assumption of unbiased policing you learn all kinds of interesting things. For example, African-Americans are terrible drivers! The proportion of African-Americans getting traffic stops is way out of line with that of white Americans. Since we 'know' (somehow) that American policing isn't biased along racial lines the well-documented difference the frequency of traffic stops for white and non-white drivers must be due to the fact that so many black drivers are reckless or incompetent. Some people might consider this a campaign of legalized harassment, but luckily you're here to set the record straight. ("Fun" fact: Philando Castile was stopped by police at least 51 times before the final stop that put an end to his motorized reign of terror. The man must have been a real menace!)

    In a similar way black (and Hispanic) Americans even walk in a more criminal way than their white countrymen. As linked to in my previous post, New York City's "stop-and-frisk" program seemed to disproportionately target that city's black and Hispanic men, despite the fact that they were found to be carrying contraband a lot less frequently than white men who were stopped and frisked.
    Twilight wrote: »
    I agree that statistics never tell the whole story and that includes the statistics (1) that say police shoot proportionately more black people than white people. Mc Whorter's statistics that say (2) 47% of violent crime is committed by black people should shed some light on why the first statistic happens.

    Reading the second statistic as "black people are all crooks," as Rook and Croesos do is simplistic and doesn't take into account other facts like:
    "47% of violent crimes" is a tiny percent of all black people, the very large majority being law abiding citizens who never commit any crimes of any kind and facts like the ones that show black people are more likely to live in poor urban areas where more crime has always be enacted.

    You're trying to have it both ways. Either the (dubiously reasoned) fact that a disproportionate conviction rate among African-Americans translates into a conclusion that African-Americans are therefore committing more crimes (rather than crimes by white Americans being prosecuted less frequently and with shorter sentences handed out) and that this inherent black criminality justifies severely over-policing black Americans (at least when compared to their white countrymen), or the statistic you cite is such a small proportion of the population no broader conclusions can or should be drawn from it. You can't have it both ways. Either African-Americans are pathologically criminal to a degree that justifies heightened scrutiny from the state's law enforcement apparatus or they're not, in which case your endorsement of such heightened scrutiny is unjustified.
  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    Waste of time and energy. I'd call Twilight to Hell otherwise. But just for the record, research on this topic from 2001 (date of the McWhorter publication) by someone whose specialty this isn't (he's a linguist and English professor, not a sociologist or criminologist) is outdated. That's not an opinion. That's a plain fact. You think sociologists and criminologists who do specialize in this field have been twiddling their thumbs for the last 17 years instead of conducting actual serious research? Bullshit. You cling to this rubbish article because it appears to support your prejudices (it actually doesn't, precisely because it IS rubbish), end of story.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    I didn't discover the article until a couple of weeks ago and didn't think the date made much difference in the things he talked about. I still don't. So, I'm not "clinging" to it, but I think he's an intelligent man who makes interesting points. Most journalists who write editorials are not specialists in technical fields but use that research as they write their columns.

    BTW, Ohher, you can't really call someone to Hell who is already there and being drug through the strawman field by people like Croesos who pretends "incarcerating black people," means the same thing as "stopping black people for traffic violations." They are two very different things. Traffic stops are up to the cop on the beat, while incarcerations go through, cop, prosecutors office, defense attorney, judge and jury. It's a little harder for us white people to get everyone on that chain to agree to the legalized harassment you're so sure of.

    Croesos Ohher is right, you're wasting your time. I'm not going to go there again with you to point our all the times you use strawman, ad hominen, and just plain lack of logic to argue. You are the worst debater on the ship.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Twilight--

    May I ask a question? (And I'm not poking at you.)

    Do you watch/ listen to/ read current news? If not, you may not have heard of some of the details. (Again, not poking at you or insulting you. People take in varying amounts of news, and that's ok. It just makes a difference in this kind of discussion.)

    One example: There are often stories about how African Americans are stopped by police unnecessarily (e.g., "driving while black"), treated wrongly and violently, wrongly arrested, wrongly charged, wrongly convicted, wrongly imprisoned, etc. Or killed before even being arrested.

    Some of the offending cops may be trapped in their own "unconscious bias" (that's a thing); others have soaked up ideas from other cops; and perhaps a good many actually hate African Americans.

    That's why there's the Black Lives Matter group. Too much for too long, and people are fed up.


    Also, something I've been wondering: if you've been close to people in law enforcement. You don't have to answer that (or the rest of this post). But it would make sense of why your posts so forcefully, emotionally, and consistently seem to *automatically* take their side.

  • ClimacusClimacus Shipmate
    Not taking sides, but I wonder if the cops not knowing what sort of weapons someone may have plays a part.

    I've read McWhorter in the past.
  • ClimacusClimacus Shipmate
    edited April 2018
    Sorry, on my phone and hit Post.

    I've read McWhorter in the past. Prefer his linguistic writings. But it is interesting to read his view, if only to see what the "other" side is against. And the days of people responding to facts is gone...research I read showed presenting people with facts who disagreed made them more entrenched in their position. A lesson for us all.

    It is a terrible situation. No idea what the answer could be. But as a privileged white male I know my place is to listen to those who are trying to raise their voice, and to try and see it through their eyes (which can be hard if you are not a member of that community and not experienced what they have).
  • Twilight wrote: »
    IQ scores and locker numbers being sequenced quite differently. Quite a few students must have been sharing the same locker.

    I think you missed the sense of Ohher's story. The teacher had inherited a list of student locker numbers, but had interpreted it as a list of IQ scores.

    You still need a certain amount of luck for this story to work - many of the school's locker numbers wouldn't have been viable IQ scores - but it's not impossible.

  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Golden Key wrote: »
    Twilight--

    May I ask a question? (And I'm not poking at you.)

    Do you watch/ listen to/ read current news? If not, you may not have heard of some of the details. (Again, not poking at you or insulting you. People take in varying amounts of news, and that's ok. It just makes a difference in this kind of discussion.)

    One example: There are often stories about how African Americans are stopped by police unnecessarily (e.g., "driving while black"), treated wrongly and violently, wrongly arrested, wrongly charged, wrongly convicted, wrongly imprisoned, etc. Or killed before even being arrested.

    Some of the offending cops may be trapped in their own "unconscious bias" (that's a thing); others have soaked up ideas from other cops; and perhaps a good many actually hate African Americans.

    That's why there's the Black Lives Matter group. Too much for too long, and people are fed up.


    Also, something I've been wondering: if you've been close to people in law enforcement. You don't have to answer that (or the rest of this post). But it would make sense of why your posts so forcefully, emotionally, and consistently seem to *automatically* take their side.
    Golden Key,
    I've never had a policeman in the family or even as a friend and I do not automatically take their side. In fact my last series of posts on this thread on the old ship, was in anger against the cop at Parkland school who failed to take any action to protect the students. I was roundly attacked there for my lack of sympathy for that cop. I guess, to most people here, it's understandable to react in fear and panic if it's school students at risk, but not understandable to react in fear and panic, if it's their own lives are at risk, as it was with the cops who shot Stephon Clark. I have never said that what they did was okay at all, I just expressed doubt whether it was racially motivated. I think they panicked.

    I do watch and read the news and I often read stories about black people harassed by the police. As I said earlier on this very thread, I know racial profiling exists.

    I also know that many more white people than black people are shot by the police. Yes, I know racial profiling is about the proportion of black people shot and I know that's a big problem. I also know that the biggest proportional problem of all is the number of mentally ill people killed by the police.

    I point these things out because, just as you think maybe I don't watch enough news, I think maybe many people watch too much news and don't read enough simple factual statistics. The news rarely covers the shootings of those white people or mentally ill people. Sometimes they do, but not often, because they just don't get the big reactions or the big street protests that the black shootings do. Particularly now while the Black Lives Matter movement is going on. That's why, when a police shooting happens here, a shipmate living in Scotland, might say, "Of course the victim was black, they always are." Well if the news is covering it they probably are.

    If I have any bias on this issue it is not pro-police or anti-black it's pro mentally ill, because as a person with schizophrenia my son has had many encounters with the police and it's always terrifying. One quarter of the people shot by police are mentally ill. Did you see those incidents on the news? Last year, the only news report I saw of a mentally ill person shot by the police was of a mentally ill African American and the emphasis was on the fact that he was black.

    My first post on this thread was about gun control, which I favor strongly. Someone picked out one sentence in that long post where I said fewer guns around might prevent police from thinking, "Gun!" when they see a cell phone. Someone quoted that sentence, taking it as a defense of the police in the latest shooting, and there has followed a long attack where I have been defending myself for some assumed racism.

    I am not a racist. I took part in civil rights marches when I was young, dated black students when I was in college, volunteered in an all black head start program, had a year long relationship with an African American in 1979, during which I was very close with his friends and family. I know some people will dismiss this as the "some of my best friends are black," cliché, but I have certainly heard more conversations and seen first hand more race-related problems than lots of people here.
  • RooKRooK Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    it's understandable to react in fear and panic if it's school students at risk, but not understandable to react in fear and panic, if it's their own lives are at risk

    Just to be totally clear about this:
    It seems very understandable to be afraid of an assault weapon being actively used to kill humans, but it is less understandable to be afraid of an unarmed black man.

    The first one is understandable cowardice. The second one reeks of racism.
    I am not a racist.

    Congratulations.

    I'm not sure how that medal works, but I find myself doubting that it magically un-racists all your assumptions and words.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    RooK wrote: »
    Twilight wrote: »
    it's understandable to react in fear and panic if it's school students at risk, but not understandable to react in fear and panic, if it's their own lives are at risk

    Just to be totally clear about this:
    It seems very understandable to be afraid of an assault weapon being actively used to kill humans, but it is less understandable to be afraid of an unarmed black man.

    The first one is understandable cowardice. The second one reeks of racism.
    I am not a racist.

    Congratulations.

    I'm not sure how that medal works, but I find myself doubting that it magically un-racists all your assumptions and words.

    Of course the police did not know he was unarmed. They thought he was armed and a bullet from a small gun can kill just as effectively as a bullet from an assault rifle.

    I know my, "I am not a racist," is a very subjective statement, but I felt the need to at least state my own belief about myself when people like you, who don't know me, are claiming just the opposite based on some words on the internet that have been twisted to fit people's agendas.

    How easy it is for people like you RooK to sit in your Canadian ivory tower and feel superior based on the number of tsk's you say while watching American news.

    I fear a lot of things these days, President Trump, Russia, North Korea, guns, and the increasing racial tension in America, but the most chilling thing of all are the people in my country both liberal and conservative who have relegated there own decision making capacity to the news outlets of their choice. I think these two recent police incidents are a prime example of that.

    Why do the same liberals who decry the rash actions of the police in Sacramento, have so much sympathy for the policeman in Florida. What happened to, "You don't know what you might do in that situation?" I think the big difference is that Trump called the Florida policeman a coward so he immediately became a darling of the liberals. Do you always check the party line before making your daily decisions? I think you do.
  • Twilight wrote: »

    Of course the police did not know he was unarmed. They thought he was armed and a bullet from a small gun can kill just as effectively as a bullet from an assault rifle.
    Can, meaning possible. As in dead is dead. But the laws of physics dictate that a rifle bullet has a far greater chance of both doing more damage and being lethal. As well as being more accurate.
    How easy it is for people like you RooK to sit in your Canadian ivory tower and feel superior based on the number of tsk's you say while watching American news.
    He lives in America. But I'm not sure if they've drained enough of the syrup from his veins to Americanise him, and he is in Portland, so...
    Why do the same liberals who decry the rash actions of the police in Sacramento, have so much sympathy for the policeman in Florida.
    Because they are completely different situations.
    Not. Related. At. All.

  • lilbuddha wrote: »
    Because they are completely different situations.
    Not. Related. At. All.
    Indeed. And one would think that would matter more to someone so deferent to facts.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    BTW, Ohher, you can't really call someone to Hell who is already there and being drug through the strawman field by people like Croesos who pretends "incarcerating black people," means the same thing as "stopping black people for traffic violations." They are two very different things. Traffic stops are up to the cop on the beat, while incarcerations go through, cop, prosecutors office, defense attorney, judge and jury. It's a little harder for us white people to get everyone on that chain to agree to the legalized harassment you're so sure of.

    Which is why my previously cited reference to drug convictions is so relevant. We don't have to simply assume that conviction or incarceration rates naturally mirror the prevalence of drug use in different demographic groups, we can refer to epidemiological and sociological studies of drug use as a 'sanity check', and almost all of the data indicates that black and white Americans use illegal recreational drugs at pretty much the same per capita rate. Despite this, black Americans are searched for drugs more often than their white counterparts, if found with drugs they're charged more frequently than their white counterparts, if charged they're more often convicted than their white counterparts, and if convicted they're (on average) sentenced to longer periods of incarceration than their white counterparts. On the surface this would seem to indicate that "cop, prosecutors office, defense attorney, judge and jury" are a lot more eager to incarcerate black Americans than white Americans. Is this because they have it out for black Americans, or is it that they're just more sympathetic to white Americans? That's harder to pry apart and I'd suspect it's a bit of each, though in relative terms I don't think it matters much. The bottom line is that black Americans are subjected to a draconian justice system that would be regarded as intolerably harsh if applied in the same way to white Americans.

    Drug convictions are not the same as "violent crimes", but if we take McWhortor's (unattributed and therefor uncheckable) assertion that "black men . . . committed roughly 42 percent of violent crimes in the 1990s" based on the proxy measure of conviction, we have to assume that the very same cops, prosecutors offices, defense attorneys, judges and juries that behave in such a racially disparate way when enforcing drug laws do not do so when enforcing laws covering violent crimes. That's a pretty big assumption to make, and it's a leap I'm not willing to take in a system where it's apparently commonplace for police to plant toy guns on people to justify accidental shootings.
    Twilight wrote: »
    Croesos Ohher is right, you're wasting your time. I'm not going to go there again with you to point our all the times you use strawman, ad hominen, and just plain lack of logic to argue. You are the worst debater on the ship.

    And I welcome your hatred.
    Twilight wrote: »
    I do watch and read the news and I often read stories about black people harassed by the police. As I said earlier on this very thread, I know racial profiling exists.

    We know you know racial profiling exists. What most of us find problematic is that you endorse it as a good and reasonable response to the alleged rampant criminality of African-Americans.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Oh Croesos, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but (1) you're nothing like FDR and (2) I don't hate you at all I just think you don't fight fair on these threads.

    Example of the moment: endorse means to support and approve of. I'm not surprised that you linked to my whole post (trusting that no one wants to read it again, I know I don't) instead of linking a particular line "endorsing" racial profiling; because there is none.

    I admit I was trying to understand why more blacks than whites are stopped and arrested, beyond just profiling. The cops being called to black neighborhoods more often is one of those reasons. Because I listed those reasons doses not mean I'm endorsing profiling, only you would make such an awkward leap of logic. It doesn't mean there isn't lots of straight up profiling or that some police don't stop blacks simply because they are racists who hate black people, it's just a factor in some of the statistics. For you to deny that it could ever be a factor is just another example of your childish refusal to consider any point that doesn't support your simplistic belief.


    To me, the policeman at the school in Florida and the two policeman in Sacramento are all three policeman who failed to perform their duty properly due to fear and panic.

    If anyone honestly thinks the two policeman in Sacramento, one black and one white, shot Stephon Clark twenty times, knowing that he was unarmed, knowing that they would be subject to possible job loss and certain censure from friends, relatives, strangers and the national press, but were willing to face all that just for the sheer pleasure of shooting an unarmed African American, then you have a much lower opinion of humanity than I do.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    Example of the moment: endorse means to support and approve of. I'm not surprised that you linked to my whole post (trusting that no one wants to read it again, I know I don't) instead of linking a particular line "endorsing" racial profiling; because there is none.
    Twilight wrote: »
    And he dares to brings up the elephant in the room when police profiling rears it's head: Why do African Americans commit 42% of the crimes and wouldn't that influence the police when stopping suspects?

    So you're saying you don't "support" or "approve" of racial profiling, but that it's totally justifiable that police treat African-American suspects with greater suspicion because of the obvious and profligate criminality of their demographic group? I'm not sure I see a meaningful difference between [ endorsing / supporting / approving ] racial profiling by police and saying police should be more suspicious of African-Americans because of (unattributed and therefore uncheckable) crime statistics from the 1990s.
  • NicoleMRNicoleMR Shipmate
    edited April 2018
    To bring this thread back to the subject of guns, there's reports of an active shooting going on at Youtube headquarters.
  • So far it seems, the shooter is dead from a self-inflicted gunshot and three people are hospitalised. One critical, one serious and the other in fair condition.
  • Twilight wrote: »
    If anyone honestly thinks the two policeman in Sacramento, one black and one white, shot Stephon Clark twenty times, knowing that he was unarmed, knowing that they would be subject to possible job loss and certain censure from friends, relatives, strangers and the national press, but were willing to face all that just for the sheer pleasure of shooting an unarmed African American, then you have a much lower opinion of humanity than I do.

    This must be the world's biggest strawman. I'm sure the cops shot Stephon Clark because they thought he might have a weapon. The question is whether it is reasonable for them to think that, and I'd suggest that their reactions and their approach to the whole situation might not have been the same had Mr. Clark looked like, say, me.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Re YouTube:

    Yeah, have been getting periodic news updates on the radio, because it's in San Bruno, down the road a piece from SF.

    They're still sorting it all out. Last I heard, 3 injured people in the hospital at Stanford. 1 woman dead, evidently self-inflicted, and they think she was the shooter. They were checking the campus to see if there was a second shooter. Haven't heard further on that.

    Someone pulled a fire alarm. I don't know who. If it was the shooter, then presumably to get everyone out to have more people to shoot? (IIRC, that happened at Parkland.) If someone was trying to alert people to the emergency, the fire alarm might have been a dangerous way to do it--though it may well have been the best method immediately available.

    During the news story, someone--maybe a Stanford doc--said that, after the recent shootings (and he named three or so), you'd think there wouldn't be any more. I *think* that wasn't naivete, but his way of saying "Enough--do something!"

    ISTM we're at a point where we're lucky to make it through a week without a shooting. Hope we don't get to just a *day* without one.
    (votive) (tears)
  • Golden Key wrote: »

    ISTM we're at a point where we're lucky to make it through a week without a shooting. Hope we don't get to just a *day* without one.
    (votive) (tears)
    Never even one week. There are more mass shootings (4 or more people) than there are days of the year. True, some days get more than one and some do not have any, but I don't think a week is the distance between any of them.
    If you include lower numbers of casualties, I doubt any day manages to scrape by. In 2015 40,000 people where shot in America.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Time to reset the "Now Is Not the Time" clock.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Stanford shooter reportedly posted a video of her ranting at the YouTube company. That's all I know.
  • ClimacusClimacus Shipmate
    Unhellish prayers for those injured.

    Domestic dispute is what the Beeb is saying.

    Cannot even imagine what it would be like to return to the scene. Not safe at work...
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Her dad said he had a feeling something was going to happen. Then she disappeared for a few days. He called the police to warn them. Not sure of the timeline.
  • ClimacusClimacus Shipmate
    In 2016, gun homicides made up 74.5 percent of all homicides, the highest share in all the years for which data exists since 1910. Since the late sixties, gun homicides usually accounted for something between 60 and 70 percent of all killings.
    From FiveThirtyEight's daily email, referencing the Washington Post.
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