African-American Asphyxiated by Police in Minneapolis - Page 160 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15106965
@wat0n

1. The Fryer paper does not provide evidence about a causal link between number of interactions and rate of crimes. It merely notes that this is one possible mechanism for the observed relationship between PDs that are investigated because of high profile brutality or killings and subsequent increases in crime. Even if we accept a causal link between number of interactions and rates of crime, please note that the actual number of officers did not change. The officers simply stopped interacting as much despite still being there.

2. Feel free to quote the other research. I find it interesting that you refuse to compare Toronto because the cities may differ too much, but cities in Argentina seem to be comparable.

3. Why would police inefficiency (in terms of deployment) be a reason to keep police around and pay them as much or more? Does rewarding inefficiency usually work? This inefficiency in deployment seems to be another reason to defund the police.
#15106973
wat0n wrote:What I don't understand, then, is why would one defund PDs while they still haven't figured out how to best deploy their forces - a process that is expensive in itself, since it may require support by outside experts.


If their "forces" are not good enough, why would anyone want to deploy them anywhere?

The police are supposed to prevent crime. Not to act against civilians unless absolutely necessary.
Not to become as bad as the criminals they chase.

U.S. police are perhaps victims of a rigged chessboard as everyone else but if they lose the trust of
the people it is supposed to protect (at least what it pretends to belive), the battle was lost long ago.
#15106974
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. The Fryer paper does not provide evidence about a causal link between number of interactions and rate of crimes. It merely notes that this is one possible mechanism for the observed relationship between PDs that are investigated because of high profile brutality or killings and subsequent increases in crime. Even if we accept a causal link between number of interactions and rates of crime, please note that the actual number of officers did not change. The officers simply stopped interacting as much despite still being there.


Are you suggesting that interactions would be expected to stay flat if there were less cops in the streets? How long would their shifts be and how large of a geographical area would they need to cover? Is this feasible? And how would those interactions be anyway, do you think they would become more or less violent as a result?

And also, your example about Toronto is not causally interpretable either.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. Feel free to quote the other research. I find it interesting that you refuse to compare Toronto because the cities may differ too much, but cities in Argentina seem to be comparable.


The paper doesn't compare cities in Argentina with American cities. It compares car thefts in blocks that didn't get an increased police presence with blocks that did.

Di Tella (2004) wrote:Abstract

An important challenge in the crime literature is to isolate causal effects of police on crime. Following a terrorist attack on the main Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 1994, all Jewish institutions received police protection. Thus, this hideous event induced a geographical allocation of police forces that can be presumed exogenous in a crime regression. Using data on the location of car thefts before and after the attack, we find a large deterrent effect of observable police on crime. The effect is local, with no appreciable impact outside the narrow area in which the police are deployed.


Pants-of-dog wrote:3. Why would police inefficiency (in terms of deployment) be a reason to keep police around and pay them as much or more? Does rewarding inefficiency usually work? This inefficiency in deployment seems to be another reason to defund the police.


It doesn't indeed, but what makes you believe that firing current officers and defunding PDs would fix this problem? Do you want to know what would? Some good old police union busting combined with an investment on consulting on the matter. Once that happens, yes, a reduction in the number of officers would be feasible.

That's also what NYC did for that matter: They hired consultants who provided advice on where to best deploy their police forces, and began to decrease the number of police out in the streets as a response to a decrease in the crime rates and not the other way around. From your own source (emphasis added):

USA Today wrote:...

James McCabe, a retired New York Police Department official who travels the country as a police staffing consultant, says there is little clear connection between staffing numbers and crime. “New York City made the conscious decision to reduce the number of cops,” he noted in an interview. “And crime continued to go down. It’s not what you have, it’s what you are doing with them.”

The NYPD is one of a few departments that routinely recalculate how many officers they need to staff a 24-hour cycle. Called the Patrol Allocation Plan, the statistical model studies 911 calls and calculates such variables as how the time of day and type of crime affect an officer’s response time.

NYPD’s model is similar to what McCabe, and consultants like him, preach as the gold-standard in police staffing strategies. These “workload allocation models” are time-consuming and require statistical skills that most police departments lack. Instead, cities sign pricey contracts with Weiss, McCabe and their competitors to perform data-driven analyses of how officers can best use their time.

But the suggested reforms don’t always stick, because they entail a lot of bureaucracy and require wholesale support from City Hall and local police unions. The recommendations typically involve assigning longer work shifts, moving officers out of jobs that don’t require guns—duties such as crime scene investigations and administration—and hiring more civilians.

...


If anything it would seem that police budgets may as well need to go up, at least at the beginning. Then they may go down as conditions allow.

The article also warns us to avoid comparing staffing and crime rates between different cities, which probably makes sense:

USA Today wrote:...

“It’s helping communities figure out how they can get the most out of their police department,” said Jeremy M. Wilson, a Michigan State University criminal justice professor and police staffing expert.

Wilson discourages police departments from comparing staffing levels to cities of similar size, and instead suggests basing police deployment primarily on the numbers of 911 calls and allowing time for cops to get out of patrol cars to talk to people. “It’s important for each community to understand what the community wants and can afford,” Wilson said. “Some communities want a community-oriented style, some want a law-and-order style, or service model. That has implications for deployment, costs, number of officers.”

Memphis has a murder rate worse than Chicago’s and a police force that has shrunk by nearly a fifth since 2011, to a head count of 2,020. The city is on its fourth round of outside police staffing consultants in eight years.

The most significant change, prompted by an outside expert, was made on previous mayor A.C. Wharton's watch. In 2013, the department redrew its precinct maps in response to a 2012 analysis from a Washington D.C think tank, the Police Executive Research Forum.

PERF’s analysis, obtained by The Marshall Project, pointed out that the downtown tourist district had up to seven times as many cops on patrol per square mile as the city’s more violent areas. Officers in high-crime North Memphis spent half their work day chasing 911 calls, leaving less time to learn about the neighborhoods they protect. Their counterparts assigned to the tourist zones spent only a fifth of their time answering the police radio.

The Memphis Police Department carved out new precinct boundaries, but rejected other advice. For example, the consultants found that officers were spending a lot of time chasing reports about burglar alarms and vicious dogs. City officials debated and rejected the idea of freeing up cops by outsourcing low priority complaints to other city agencies, or to private security firms.

“That was going to be a pretty steep hill for us to get over with the citizens, to say we aren’t providing that service anymore,” said former Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong. “It is hard to stop doing something that you have traditionally done.”

...


Chicago and Memphis are yet another reason why raw comparisons between cities are probably not a good idea, even if they may share some things in common. For instance as a resident I'm also willing to bet that Chicago is actually more heavily policing the downtown area and upscale neighborhoods than poor inner-city ones. Up to an extent, it's not that surprising since those areas also happen to be where most of the city's economic activity and thus tax revenues are generated, on top of being safer for cops themselves to be deployed at (people don't like to work in dangerous places, and this includes those whose work consists in doing just that - particularly when they are senior officers). I guess a similar thing happens in Memphis.

Yet none of this actually supports defunding the police, at least not for now.
#15106978
@wat0n

1. I do not see the point to those questions. If you have an argument to make, please do so. Now that we see that the nunber of police does not lead to less crime, we can move on to your new argument about interactions.

Please provide evidence for the claim that less police interactions leads to more crime. Thnak you.

2. The Argentina paper does not help us understand violent crime rates at all. And you would need to assume that Buenos Aires has a similar enough context to North American cities that whatever causal mechanism happened in Buenos Aires would also happen here.

3. What problem is police defunding supposed to address? This habit of using pronouns and extending arguments over several posts makes it difficult to parse your arguments. Please note that the problem of deployment efficiency completely disappears when there are no cops to deploy, if that is “this problem”.
#15106987
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. I do not see the point to those questions. If you have an argument to make, please do so. Now that we see that the nunber of police does not lead to less crime, we can move on to your new argument about interactions.

Please provide evidence for the claim that less police interactions leads to more crime. Thnak you.


After you provide evidence that less cops causes less crime, as you claimed, sure. Cops are simply a proxy for interactions anyway.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. The Argentina paper does not help us understand violent crime rates at all. And you would need to assume that Buenos Aires has a similar enough context to North American cities that whatever causal mechanism happened in Buenos Aires would also happen here.


Why? In particular, the mechanism (people are somehow not willing to steal a car, or worse, in front of a cop) doesn't seem to be particular to Buenos Aires.

Pants-of-dog wrote:3. What problem is police defunding supposed to address? This habit of using pronouns and extending arguments over several posts makes it difficult to parse your arguments. Please note that the problem of deployment efficiency completely disappears when there are no cops to deploy, if that is “this problem”.


I don't understand your point here. You were saying that we should defund PDs because less cops = less crime. I'm waiting for you to provide any evidence of this.
#15107020
@wat0n

1. I never claimed that having less cops causes there to be less crime, except in the obvious case of police committing crime, such as the murders of George Floyd, Elijah McClain, and Breonna Taylor. Instead, I claimed that it is possible to have significantly less cops and also have significantly less crime, and provided examples. And I argued that addressing the root causes of crime would reduce crime.

2. Why what?

3. I thought you wanted me to explain how abolition dealt with some problem, and I wanted you to clarify the problem. Now you seem to be ignoring your previous comment about whatever problem that was and are now asking me to support an argument that I did not make. See point 1.
#15107033
Out of approximately 6 million interactions annually between black people and police in the US, in 2019 there were 14 unarmed black people killed by police. Of those 14, only 5 of them were not attacking the police, and of those 5 only in 2 cases was the officer white.

So the odds of getting killed by a white officer if you're a black unarmed person not attacking the cops is 1 in 3 million. You're over 4x more likely of getting struck by lightening in a given year (1 in 700,000).

Was George Floyd wrongfully murdered? Yes. Should the cop(s) be charged? Yes. Is there an epidemic of unarmed black people being murdered by cops? No.

Also, the odds are 1 in 20,000 of a police officer being killed by a black American. The odds of an unarmed black person being killed by a cop of any race, including those that are attacking a cop, is 1 in 439,000. So, the odds of a police officer being killed by a black American is 21 times higher than an unarmed black American being shot & killed by a cop.
#15107034
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. I never claimed that having less cops causes there to be less crime, except in the obvious case of police committing crime, such as the murders of George Floyd, Elijah McClain, and Breonna Taylor. Instead, I claimed that it is possible to have significantly less cops and also have significantly less crime, and provided examples. And I argued that addressing the root causes of crime would reduce crime.


And yet, you haven't explained how would having less cops around help to decrease crime. In particular, even the examples in your own source suggest it would be necessary to actually increase police presence (particularly in neighborhoods that need it most) at the beginning, reducing staffing only as crime rates actually go down. Furthermore, addressing the social root causes of crime (providing greater opportunities for people living in inner-city neighborhoods so they do not get involved with gangs, changing drug laws and the like) would also be a rather long-running process that would take several years to help in this matter - hence, still supporting the idea that defunding the police is something that would arise as the end result of better policing rather than as a precondition to it. Here the order does alter the product.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. Why what?


Why isn't the comparison between different blocks in Buenos Aires not a good example to take into account for policing in general? Would people be less deterred to steal a car (or do something a lot worse) in front of a cop in Argentina than in the US, where they seem to be quite willing to use force to stop that sort of behavior? :eh:

Pants-of-dog wrote:3. I thought you wanted me to explain how abolition dealt with some problem, and I wanted you to clarify the problem. Now you seem to be ignoring your previous comment about whatever problem that was and are now asking me to support an argument that I did not make. See point 1.


Well, as far as I can tell, the idea that less cops = less crime is highly questionable. Better policing = less crime seems to be a lot more grounded, but the initial investment to that effect seems to be substantial based on what's necessary to do so (going as far as needing to hire a team of criminologists and data analysts to help estimate the demand for staffing by neighborhood within a city, needing to reassign cops from unarmed, office work to other more complicated ones that require them to be out in the streets and hire civilians to do the administrative stuff and so on). Defunding PDs would run counter to taking this direction, and reducing cops without improving policing would be unlikely to help with anything either.

@Unthinking Majority those figures seem to be off for the US as a whole. A city with some 250,000 residents should have 1-2M police-civilian interactions a year, maybe 1bn would be more accurate for the nationwide number of interactions between the police and people of all races (so I would expect a lot more interactions between African Americans and the police than 6M) and in 2019 28 unarmed African Americans were killed throughout that year.
#15107037
@Unthinking Majority

Those numbers seem incorrect.

Where did you find them?

———————-

@wat0n

1. You start off your first paragraph repeating your strawman and then end with the related argument that even if my actual argument is correct, that defunding the police would happen later. But that is not necessary. There are many places where police budgets could be cut right now. Like demilitarization.

2. As I said, it does not take into account violent crime, and as you said, “ Crime itself can take a different character too, regardless of police presence.“ So we have a different type of crime, which is of a different character, in a different cultural context, with different policing models.

3. This appears to be a gish gallop review of some of the things that might influence my argument. Perhaps you would care to pick one and discuss it with evidence?
#15107040
Pants-of-dog wrote:@wat0n

1. You start off your first paragraph repeating your strawman and then end with the related argument that even if my actual argument is correct, that defunding the police would happen later. But that is not necessary. There are many places where police budgets could be cut right now. Like demilitarization.


What do you aim to accomplish with that, and what would you cut? More importantly, how much would PDs save on it annually? A one-time sale of e.g. military grade weaponry to the Federal Government could be warranted, but it would not solve long-running social problems.

Pants-of-dog wrote:2. As I said, it does not take into account violent crime, and as you said, “ Crime itself can take a different character too, regardless of police presence.“ So we have a different type of crime, which is of a different character, in a different cultural context, with different policing models.


Maybe, but I would be curious to see what makes you believe that American police would represent less of a deterrent than Argentinian one. If anything, it makes sense to expect the effect to be larger in the US if cops are so trigger happy - and thus the local (block-level) response in American cities could be actually larger. Likewise, it seems unlikely that gang members would murder someone in front of cops.

Pants-of-dog wrote:3. This appears to be a gish gallop review of some of the things that might influence my argument. Perhaps you would care to pick one and discuss it with evidence?


I'm only drawing from the same USA Today article you cited earlier. See my quotes from it above: Everything would seem to suggest that at the very least there would be a need to actually increase the budgets of PDs at the beginning, since the design of those staffing strategies requires an investment and at the beginning more police presence would be necessary in inner-city neighborhoods and civilian staff would need to be hired to perform the administrative work cops themselves sometimes do. As crime rates in dangerous neighborhoods went down, then yes, I would be OK with decreasing policing there as long as it doesn't creep up once again.
#15107042
wat0n wrote:those figures seem to be off for the US as a whole. A city with some 250,000 residents should have 1-2M police-civilian interactions a year, maybe 1bn would be more accurate for the nationwide number of interactions between the police and people of all races (so I would expect a lot more interactions between African Americans and the police than 6M) and in 2019 28 unarmed African Americans were killed throughout that year.


The numbers for police interactions with black Americans was 6,146,600 in 2015, published in 2018 by the Department of Justice: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf

You can filter data on police shootings by year, weapon, race of victim, armed/unarmed etc. compiled here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
#15107045
Unthinking Majority wrote:The numbers for police interactions with black Americans was 6,146,600 in 2015, published in 2018 by the Department of Justice: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf


Ah, but we are thinking about different things. That figure represents the number of people who had an interaction with the police (i.e. 6M different African Americans had interactions with the police, I was referring to the number of interactions between civilians and cops - which can include several interactions between the same civilian with the police).

Unthinking Majority wrote:You can filter data on police shootings by year, weapon, race of victim, armed/unarmed etc. compiled here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/


I was looking at the Mapping Police Violence Project database. But yeah, there are different ones in this regard - that's why it's necessary to have official, FBI stats in this matter.
#15107046
wat0n wrote:I was looking at the Mapping Police Violence Project database. But yeah, there are different ones in this regard - that's why it's necessary to have official, FBI stats in this matter.


From the Washington Post article, on their methodology:

"The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. In 2015, The Post documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as had been recorded by the FBI. Last year, the FBI announced plans to overhaul how it tracks fatal police encounters."
#15107069
Unthinking Majority wrote:of those 5 only in 2 cases was the officer white.

When I asked about this at the start of the the whole Floyd business, even my question was removed as racist. Its interesting to note how powerful my words are, and how desperate people are at key moments to silence me. People are OK now with me expressing my views on 9/11, people are OK now with me expressing my utter contempt for the American peoples pathetic hysterical response to 9/11. But at the time there was no way anyone would allow me a platform to express to views, as it could so easily completely undermine the prevailing hysterical consensus.

This seemed to me the key question to ask. In a comparable encounter is a White cop more likely to kill a Black person than a non White-European cop or even a Black cop?

Unthinking Majority wrote:Out of approximately 6 million interactions annually between black people and police in the US, in 2019 there were 14 unarmed black people killed by police. Of those 14, only 5 of them were not attacking the police, and of those 5 only in 2 cases was the officer white.

So the odds of getting killed by a white officer if you're a black unarmed person not attacking the cops is 1 in 3 million. You're over 4x more likely of getting struck by lightening in a given year (1 in 700,000).

Was George Floyd wrongfully murdered? Yes. Should the cop(s) be charged? Yes. Is there an epidemic of unarmed black people being murdered by cops? No.

Also, the odds are 1 in 20,000 of a police officer being killed by a black American. The odds of an unarmed black person being killed by a cop of any race, including those that are attacking a cop, is 1 in 439,000. So, the odds of a police officer being killed by a black American is 21 times higher than an unarmed black American being shot & killed by a cop.

However there is a problem with this. It all talks about unarmed people. Americans have a right to be armed, whether they are Black or White. The Constitution says the people have a right to bear arms, nothing about it being a privilege, to be given after back ground checks, or the people have a right to bear light ineffective arms that leave them defenceless in the face of authoritarian government. People, what ever their skin colour,have a constitutional right not to be killed by police just because they are bearing arms.

Its funny because I constantly get labelled as some white-european supremacist racist, yet I think the initial campaign of the Black Panthers was entirely legitimate and if it exposed the US Constitution for the worthless toilet paper it always was, then so be it.
#15107075
Rich wrote:When I asked about this at the start of the the whole Floyd business, even my question was removed as racist. Its interesting to note how powerful my words are, and how desperate people are at key moments to silence me. People are OK now with me expressing my views on 9/11, people are OK now with me expressing my utter contempt for the American peoples pathetic hysterical response to 9/11. But at the time there was no way anyone would allow me a platform to express to views, as it could so easily completely undermine the prevailing hysterical consensus.

This seemed to me the key question to ask. In a comparable encounter is a White cop more likely to kill a Black person than a non White-European cop or even a Black cop?

Keep it up and you will join me with a yellow card.
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