We only kill black people. Racism in the US police force. Why? - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14840616
An innocent white woman was shot in Minneapolis for no reason by a police officer just a few weeks ago. It made international headlines, so it's not too surprising that she might be concerned. :eh:

Sure, there's no logical reason for a non-violent person to have to fear a police officer. But police officers haven't been behaving logically for some time.
#14840618
There are 1.3 million full time law enforcement personnel in the US. How many shot someone this year?
This absurd hysterical reasoning about the police being the enemy is groundless. No sane person should accept such extreme rarities as an indication of a general trend. It is really sad that people can be led to such ridiculous conclusions when the reality overwhelmingly shows the average police officer may never draw his weapon during his entire career.
#14840715
There are 350 million guns in USA, how many of them were fired at police officers this year?
This absurd hysterical reasoning about the police being in danger is groundless. No sane police force should accept such extreme rarities as an indication of a general trend. It is really sad that police forces can be led to such ridiculous conclusions when the reality overwhelmingly shows the average civilian may never shoot a cop during his entire life.
#14841676
Heisenberg wrote:You know what, I think you have a point - I spoke too soon. All I had seen was the ~30 second clip shown on the BBC site.

I still think it was a careless thing to say, and would likely come back to bite him when it came to interactions with black suspects/members of the public. It's the sort of thing that would be perfect ammunition for official complaints and accusations of bias, and would probably make his job untenable in the long run.

But you're right - the context you provided suggests it wasn't malicious, or making light of police shootings.

It's probably easy to take this out of context, but I think it also tells us something about how hyper-sensitive we are with respect to race issues. From the article it looks like the review board and his superiors agreed that he was trying to reassure the women and get her to comply, yet he was fired regardless, and their reasoning seems to be similar to yours. As mentioned earlier, I don't think it would have been a big deal had he used the same logic based on gender and I find it hard to believe that he would have had difficulties when interacting with males afterwards.

From what I know, the data on police shootings doesn't really support the accusation that the police is racist any more than that it is sexist, that is, if you control for violent crime rates the disparity between the sexes and between races vanishes. We seem to have no problem to control for this to explain the difference between men and women, and most of us probably think it is quite obvious, but for race disparities we generally refuse to look at the crime rate as a confounding variable and only base it on population shares. This leads to the police having to compensate for our fallacious thinking and the erroneous perception that results from it, and the only way to do this is through a public relations effort which includes sacrificing people who are usually way down in the pecking order and who have done nothing wrong. Over and over, we are creating and intensifying divisions and mistrust unnecessarily and suppose a fragility in communities that quite likely doesn't exist, or at least wouldn't exist if we didn't constantly feed it.

It's pretty clear I think that politicians have no idea what to do about the high crime rate among blacks and have for some time now tried to deflect this onto others, such as police and schools, which are neither equipped to fix the underlying problems, whatever they are, nor should they have to.
#14842019
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:It's probably easy to take this out of context, but I think it also tells us something about how hyper-sensitive we are with respect to race issues. From the article it looks like the review board and his superiors agreed that he was trying to reassure the women and get her to comply, yet he was fired regardless, and their reasoning seems to be similar to yours. As mentioned earlier, I don't think it would have been a big deal had he used the same logic based on gender and I find it hard to believe that he would have had difficulties when interacting with males afterwards.

From what I know, the data on police shootings doesn't really support the accusation that the police is racist any more than that it is sexist, that is, if you control for violent crime rates the disparity between the sexes and between races vanishes. We seem to have no problem to control for this to explain the difference between men and women, and most of us probably think it is quite obvious, but for race disparities we generally refuse to look at the crime rate as a confounding variable and only base it on population shares. This leads to the police having to compensate for our fallacious thinking and the erroneous perception that results from it, and the only way to do this is through a public relations effort which includes sacrificing people who are usually way down in the pecking order and who have done nothing wrong. Over and over, we are creating and intensifying divisions and mistrust unnecessarily and suppose a fragility in communities that quite likely doesn't exist, or at least wouldn't exist if we didn't constantly feed it.

It's pretty clear I think that politicians have no idea what to do about the high crime rate among blacks and have for some time now tried to deflect this onto others, such as police and schools, which are neither equipped to fix the underlying problems, whatever they are, nor should they have to.



Do you have a link to stats controlled for violent crime? Or maybe raw data?

Too often we are presented with stats without enough information to assess the claims supported. I'd like to find out what the result would be if we control for age too. Observation suggests it is young men of marginalised minorities that are responsible for a lot of the violent crime. But one needs to process the data and see what result comes out of it in this age of measurement.

Of course it is important to ask why the stats show men from marginalised minorities are hauled up by the law at rates above their proportion of the total population. The answer is quite obvious. So is the solution.
#14842035
Here's a simple analysis of FBI data which uses homicides as a proxy for violent crime rate and includes age (which as you say matters). There's a link to the FBI data in the article.

Image

Image

Image
The same person wrote a follow-up as it turns out the FBI data is incomplete and the WSJ published additional data after contacting police departments directly. Unfortunately, the image in the article doesn't show up for me, but the conclusion is:
Bottom line: Between 2007 and 2012, these departments told the FBI they killed 1.7 blacks for every white they killed (374 vs. 220). They also reported 4.9 blacks as homicide offenders for every white reported (5,773 vs. 1,171). In other words, the racial disparity in homicide offenders is nearly three times that in police killings. This is an even bigger gap than I found when I used all the data in my earlier post (0.82:1 vs. 1.5:1, itself nearly double).

It's worthwhile to read both articles in full, as he mentions several caveats such as the WSJ data is from large police departments only and there were discrepancies between the data some police departments provided to the FBI and to the WSJ.

The same site also republished an article by ResPublica which, typically for the left, does not control for homicides or crime rates and came to the usual unsurprising conclusion.

foxdemon wrote:Of course it is important to ask why the stats show men from marginalised minorities are hauled up by the law at rates above their proportion of the total population. The answer is quite obvious. So is the solution.

Could you elaborate? I'm not sure it's obvious to me.

I think one factor that contributes is that police will increase their presence in high crime areas, which is usually welcomed by the residents. Since these are often areas with high minority populations, minorities do not only have disproportionate contact with police but are also hauled up more. Whether the disparity is higher than it should be based on the actual crime rates is not clear and I would expect quite difficult to tease out of the data.
#14842238
Thank you for the source @Kaiserschmarrn .

The data indicates there isn't institutional racism in the police force. @anarchist23 , how do you interprete this data?

But the question remains, why are young minority males (data doesn't control for gender, but observation shows it is usually males who engage in violence) so prone to criminal behaviour?

I suggested I know the solution so that means I think I know what the problem is. Basically young males will play up if they are excluded by authority. Men, by and large, love authority. Ideally older men look out for younger men but also discipline them to social norms. If older male authority has no sympathy for younger males, then younger males rebel and form their own mini-patriarchy.

If you accept my arguement, then it is entirely predictably that young men in marginalised minorities would form gangs and engage in violent crime. The prohibition on recreational drugs only adds fuel by proving a source of revenue to gangs.

So the solution should be obvious. A responsible patriarchy that both concerns itself with the life interests of young men while threatening them with disciplinary action if they step out of acceptable bounds, will resolve the matter in as short a time as a few years.

The hold up here is that the current situation suits the established distribution of power in American society and thus is unlikely to be resolved. And that is really the institutional discrimination @anarchist23 is rabbiting on about.



I'd like to do a bit of cross cultural comparison. China doesn't seem to have the problems with minority youth gangs that America does. Now, it is often thought that China is ethnically homogenous. This is not the case. There are plenty of minorities in China. Even the Han isn't homogeneous. In fact the Han are a collection of ethnic groups assimilated into the Han/Borg collective over a few thousand years. But China is patriarchal. Older men, men in authority are expected to be concerned about the welfare of the community at large. They have to sympathise with the aspirations of young men and take responsibility for them. China is quite authoritarian but it does emphasis the importance of keeping young men 'in the fold'.

Americans, in contrast, are basically a bunch of crypto-anarchists who refuse to accept any serious concept of communal responsibility. Instead they are primarily concerned with private matters. The result is public squalor and exclusion. I can't honestly see how the Americans could resolve the problem of young minority male violence without fundamentally changing their core beliefs.
#14842312
There is institional racism in the US police force and this fact is accepted by the police themselves.

Lies, damm lies and statistics..

The key statement in the previous article is...
Note that these are raw numbers; they are not adjusted for the fact that there are nearly five times more non-Hispanic whites than blacks in the U.S. So even among older Americans shot by police, blacks are disproportionately represented. But that disproportion is far greater among the young, to the point that blacks outnumber whites significantly.




This is a better indicator...

Image
Stats from FBI
#14842505
anarchist23 wrote:There is institional racism in the US police force and this fact is accepted by the police themselves.

Lies, damm lies and statistics..

The key statement in the previous article is...




This is a better indicator...

Image
Stats from FBI


Then maybe the US justice system doesn't know what they are talking about.

https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Housing/PropertyManagers/ManagementResources/CriminalJusticeSystemDisparities_07-23-13.pdf

This presentation argues your case yet the Asian/Pacific Island stats show some minorities have much lower conviction rates than other identified groups (slide 15). If there is institutional racism toward minorities, how can this be explained?

One thing that is clear is that males are overwhelmingly the offenders. Furthermore, it is young males. And it is poor males. Some ethnic groups are economically disadvantaged.

Note also the rising incarceration rates overall and then also note the rise in socio-economic inequality in America over the last 50 years. Me thinks this is about more than racism. Those ethnic groups without a strong tradition of discipline and education have suffered more than average. The white majority have suffered on average. The more disciplined, educated minorities have done better than average.

So this tells us it is a question of values. It would appear Asian values are more successful in an increasingly competitive environment than white American values (we haven't controlled for class though) and the values of marginalised minorities are even less successful.

If we wanted to overcome these disparities, should we compensate the less competitive, that is address inequality, or require everyone to adoption Asian values? The former would be expensive, while not guaranteeing any change in crime, while the later would require a fundamental change in values in order to accept a more patriarchal, hierarchal and authoritarian society, but with greatly reduced crime.

After all, it is about reducing crime. You can't just tell the police to ignore crime in order to get the statistical outcome you want. Complaining about institutional racism in the police while ignoring some minority groups have high rates of crime is socially irresponsible.
#14843118
foxdemon wrote:Thank you for the source @Kaiserschmarrn .

The data indicates there isn't institutional racism in the police force. @anarchist23 , how do you interprete this data?

But the question remains, why are young minority males (data doesn't control for gender, but observation shows it is usually males who engage in violence) so prone to criminal behaviour?

I suggested I know the solution so that means I think I know what the problem is. Basically young males will play up if they are excluded by authority. Men, by and large, love authority. Ideally older men look out for younger men but also discipline them to social norms. If older male authority has no sympathy for younger males, then younger males rebel and form their own mini-patriarchy.

If you accept my arguement, then it is entirely predictably that young men in marginalised minorities would form gangs and engage in violent crime. The prohibition on recreational drugs only adds fuel by proving a source of revenue to gangs.

So the solution should be obvious. A responsible patriarchy that both concerns itself with the life interests of young men while threatening them with disciplinary action if they step out of acceptable bounds, will resolve the matter in as short a time as a few years.

The hold up here is that the current situation suits the established distribution of power in American society and thus is unlikely to be resolved. And that is really the institutional discrimination @anarchist23 is rabbiting on about.



I'd like to do a bit of cross cultural comparison. China doesn't seem to have the problems with minority youth gangs that America does. Now, it is often thought that China is ethnically homogenous. This is not the case. There are plenty of minorities in China. Even the Han isn't homogeneous. In fact the Han are a collection of ethnic groups assimilated into the Han/Borg collective over a few thousand years. But China is patriarchal. Older men, men in authority are expected to be concerned about the welfare of the community at large. They have to sympathise with the aspirations of young men and take responsibility for them. China is quite authoritarian but it does emphasis the importance of keeping young men 'in the fold'.

Americans, in contrast, are basically a bunch of crypto-anarchists who refuse to accept any serious concept of communal responsibility. Instead they are primarily concerned with private matters. The result is public squalor and exclusion. I can't honestly see how the Americans could resolve the problem of young minority male violence without fundamentally changing their core beliefs.

I'm in broad agreement with you. However, I think we should acknowledge that the US wasn't what you call "crypto-anarchist" until fairly recently. Today it seems the only value/virtue that is socially enforced is tolerance, with everything else and traditional values in particular being relegated to either oppressive or irrelevant. The latter I think is due to the ideological preponderance of materialism, i.e. explaining developments through material circumstances, among today's intellectuals and the starting point of all this can be traced back to the 60s cultural revolution. Interestingly, the communist countries tried to go full progressive at first but quickly came to the realisation that this had substantial downsides for society. From my reading it was under Stalin that a lot of these policies were reversed and based on a more pragmatic and traditional footing. Hence, the Eastern European states after the fall of the Iron Curtain emerged on average more conservative, patriotic, religious and cohesive than Western Europe.

I don't know enough about China to comment in detail, but at least superficially it seems to be true there as well. There was apparently a joke going around Chinese social media not long ago where Mao was asking questions about what happened since his death. One of his questions was what happened to the cultural revolution to which the answer was: "It's in America now." :lol: There is some truth to that.

anarchist23 wrote:There is institional racism in the US police force and this fact is accepted by the police themselves.

Lies, damm lies and statistics..

The key statement in the previous article is...

That key statement is also true for the homicide (and violent crime) numbers. If you adjust for population proportions in both, police shooting and homicides, the graph of the ratio above stays the same. In other words, what you consider a key statement isn't one at all.

What do you think about the disproportionate number of males being shot by police? Do you think it's purely down to institutional sexism in the police force?
#14843156
@Kaiserschmarrn
anarchist23 wrote:There is institional racism in the US police force and this fact is accepted by the police themselves.


This little video encapsulates one of the reasons why there are proportionally more minority's busted in the US than white Americans.




As in most countries, the behaviour of the police is usually a reflection of the norms of the general population whether it's sexism or racism. As I said previously the US police force is institionally racist.

The racial biases of white members of a community have a direct link to the number of black people shot and killed by police officers in that same area, new research indicates.

A study published last year found that African Americans are almost three times more likely than white people to be killed by the police’s use of force. Indigenous Americans are also almost three times as likely to suffer such a fate, while Hispanic men are twice as likely.

Now, a new report suggests the biases and prejudices held by white residents in an area has a close correlation to the number of black people who will lose their lives at the hands of officers.

“We expected many economic or demographic variables such as the overall wealth of an area, residential segregation, average levels of education in the area, or overall crime levels, to be involved,” said the report's lead author, Eric Hehman.

Yet the researchers - Mr Hehman from Ryerson University in Toronto, Jessica Flake from Toronto’s York University, and Jimmy Calanchini of Germany’s Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg - found implicit bias, or the strength of someone’s association between specific social groups and threat, was the primary indictor as to the level of lethal force.

Specifically, they added, regional implicit biases toward black people, or the implicit stereotypical association between black people and weapons, predicted African Americans being more likely to be killed by police. Where these biases were stronger, African-Americans were more likely to be killed by police.

“[The results] indicate that this is not specifically a problem of police officers, but reveals that there is something about the broader communities and contexts in which these officers make speeded, life and death decisions that is associated with killing more African-Americans,” said Mr Hehman.

The report, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS), considered the ways in which attitudes and stereotypes can spread through conversations, facial expressions and even body language.

“To the extent that police officer are exposed to the biases of their fellow residents in their region, they may adopt those attitudes themselves,” the report says.

“Accordingly, one possibility is that prevailing regional biases might shape police officers own attitudes and their behaviour on the job are a result of those attitudes.”

As part of their research, Mr Hehman and colleagues looked at use of lethal force against whites and blacks, and linked it with bias data from Project Implicit at Harvard, a non-profit group attacked to the university that seeks to educate the public about hidden biases and to provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data, and demographics from the 2010 US Census.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 63501.html

And as you brought this up, the US police force is sexist to boot. This is born out by the disproportionate number of policemen to policewoman.
If there were more policewoman in the US police force, it wouldn't suffer from the macho culture that is ingrained in it. This possibly might cut down the disproportionate number of black men that are shot by the US police.

Last week a Texas police officer was fired for excessive brutality after a video showed him body slamming a 12-year-old girl, in her classroom, to the ground.

The disturbing scene was eerily reminiscent of another video that captured the brutal arrest, last October, of a girl in a South Carolina school. In that case, an officer tossed the student across the room before violently restraining her.

In both instances, the officers using excessive force were men. Sandwiched in between these incidents were two others, involving female officers. Last October, one of those officers diffused a street fight in Washington, D.C., by engaging in a dance off.

In February, a Dallas police officer stopped an active shooter who had opened fire in a busy Wal-Mart. The officer, a woman, did not fire a weapon, but chased the shooter, demanding verbally he stop shooting.

Female officers discharge their weapons at far lower rates and are more effective at negotiating better and less lethal outcomes, even though citizens are not more likely to use less force when officers are female.

http://womensenews.org/2016/04/would-fe ... ere-women/
#14843490
Now the lefties are at war with the police... :knife:

Could it possibly be...and this is just a theory mind you...but could it possible be, that the violent crime rate is staggeringly higher in black neighborhoods, than in white neighborhoods?
When a woman and a man procreate, it is the DUTY of the parents to raise the child they've created together, and set good examples for a healthy and productive life. That does not mean that the "daddies" should run out to the park and sell crack to highschool kids, and eventually landing his ass in jail, and it does not mean that the "mommies" should be collecting kids to increase their pull on welfare.
Blaming the police is fucked up.
#14843500
Buzz62 wrote:Now the lefties are at war with the police... :knife:

Could it possibly be...and this is just a theory mind you...but could it possible be, that the violent crime rate is staggeringly higher in black neighborhoods, than in white neighborhoods?
When a woman and a man procreate, it is the DUTY of the parents to raise the child they've created together, and set good examples for a healthy and productive life. That does not mean that the "daddies" should run out to the park and sell crack to highschool kids, and eventually landing his ass in jail, and it does not mean that the "mommies" should be collecting kids to increase their pull on welfare.
Blaming the police is fucked up.


You tend to ignore racism and the history of racism.

Do you know what racism is?
#14843503
Pants-of-dog wrote:You tend to ignore racism and the history of racism.

Do you know what racism is?

History? POD...racism has existed longer than prostitution...probably.
What the hell are you on about?

Lets play "analogy" again.
Our legal system has, in recent years, come to the determination that prostitution has always been there, and will always be there. So, instead of fighting with it and trying to end it, they wisely have decided to try to control it...as much as possible.
Do I advocate for legalized prostitution? I'm not really sure, to tell you the truth, but I'm not a fan of it either. However, with these controls in place, we are now beginning to stamp out CHILD prostitution, which I am most vehemently opposed to under any circumstances...including religious excuses BTW.

You will NEVER "stamp out" racism, POD.
Sad but true. The more you try, the higher the expense gets.
#14843509
Buzz62 wrote:History? POD...racism has existed longer than prostitution...probably.
What the hell are you on about?

Lets play "analogy" again.
Our legal system has, in recent years, come to the determination that prostitution has always been there, and will always be there. So, instead of fighting with it and trying to end it, they wisely have decided to try to control it...as much as possible.
Do I advocate for legalized prostitution? I'm not really sure, to tell you the truth, but I'm not a fan of it either. However, with these controls in place, we are now beginning to stamp out CHILD prostitution, which I am most vehemently opposed to under any circumstances...including religious excuses BTW.

You will NEVER "stamp out" racism, POD.
Sad but true. The more you try, the higher the expense gets.


That's nice.

How does racism relate to police shootings in the USA?
#14843533
no, we do not agree.
YOU in particular, think you can wipe out racism with violent "but moral" violence.
Racism is "part" of the reason for allot of things POD.
"PART".

Its amazing how "tunnel-visioned" you are.
"FIGHT RACISM!" :lol:

IMO, and mind you, you already think the worst of me I'd bet, but IMO, you should focus on "BEATING RACISM" with your head, instead of balloons full of piss.

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