Do you believe that we’re in the middle of an upsurge in crime and that police officers are increasingly going on killing sprees, mostly directed at black men? Think again, says Steve Malanga at City Journal:
After the Ferguson grand jury made its ruling, President Obama told the nation that “the law too often feels like it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion.†Since the Ferguson incident involving Michael Brown and officer Darren Wilson last August, the New York Times has published stories about communities where minorities get stopped more frequently than whites, implying racial discrimination. But these stories ignore Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing that crime victims disproportionately identify minorities as perpetrators of crime, too. Senator Rand Paul has even used Ferguson to launch an attack on the war on drugs, saying that it puts the police in a difficult situation in dealing with the public—though drugs had little to do with the confrontation between Brown and Wilson (except as they may have influenced Brown’s aggressive behavior).
Despite such pronouncements, two decades of data on police interactions with the public don’t support the idea that something extraordinary is afoot, that the police are becoming “militarized†as President Obama has suggested, or that distrust between police and local communities has produced an enormous spike in conflicts. By contrast, the data show that significant crime declines have been accompanied by a leveling off and then a reduction in confrontations with the police, as reported by Americans of all races.
To believe otherwise you must believe that the data are wrong, fabricated, and a lot of effort is being devoted to that assertion.
If, on the other hand, you think that people are reacting to the mistaken things they believe, we might devote a little attention to wondering why they believe them.
1) Militarization refers to more than police shooting people. The no-knock raids and the adoption of military equipment also factor in to this claim. It is quite clear that some police, as demonstrated by the Ferguson police, have very militarized equipment and use it in a very aggressive manner (actually well beyond what the military would do even in a war zone).
2) If you want to use data, then use data. Blacks commit, IIRC, about 3-6 times as many crimes, depending upon the crime, yet they are shot 21 times as often. Detailed studies on this are conflicting, but there is a discrepancy in ratios which cannot be denied, even if the cause is not clear. The data also show that the police rarely suffer consequences from a bad shooting. The data also tell us that police in many other countries fire the weapons much less frequently. Why so often here, even when people are unarmed? Why have we tolerated this for so long? (Maybe we are actually ok with this, after all, it mostly happens to poor folks. Just make out a large lawsuit check on the occasions when they kill someone a bit more affluent.)
3) We know an awful lot of stuff does not get reported. Talk with the minority members in your families, if they will talk about it, and listen to them tell you about what happens when DWB. Ask your PR relatives about their interactions with the police.
Steve
De-militarizing the police is likely to prove a lot harder than many seem to think. I’ll speak to Chicago since I know the most about its police force.
In Chicago to qualify to train as a police officer one of three things needs to be true: either you’ve got a high school diploma and certain number of years of military service, you’ve got a certain number of college credits and a little less military service, or you’ve got a bachelors degree.
Nearly all Chicago police officers are ex-military and that’s their frame of reference. Changing that would require changing the rules (which would be strongly resisted) and probably a generation.
the law too often feels like it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion.â€
A revealing statement, that.
Why don’t the data track numbers of people killed by police?
Wow, hit the button before I read that question.
Why do I not see data on numbers of people killed by police?
The militarization is the equipment that they carry and the tactics they use. You take away the equipment and restrict the tactics.
I remember when 9mm semi-automatic pistols were sold as a replacement for .38 revolver because police were “out-gunned” by the criminals. The 9mm could carry more rounds, but it took more rounds to take down somebody. The real reason was that it looked like a .45.
At 11:35 tonight I heard a gunshot off to the NE. At 1:07 I heard six more in rapid succession in the same direction. This isn’t all that uncommon an occurrence. We’ve also had several driving gun battles in the last couple of years, with goons in two vehicles driving around hanging out the windows shooting at each other. Now I’m no fan of the police, but how are they going to do the kinder gentler thing in a neighborhood like mine?
My favorite example is this one, especially for the news paper’s misleading opening sentence:
That was around the corner from my oldest friend’s house, and I drove by the scene about 30 minutes after it happened, completely unaware of what had happened. (I was on Powers Drive, in case anyone wants to look it up. It was down the end of a side street, and they had blocked off most of them at that time. News crews, cops and spectators were swarming the area.)
Near my house we had a gang member from the Gorillaz (no shit, blacks calling themselves gorillaz – but don’t you do it, white boy!) drove by a bunch of girls and started shooting at them. That was great stuff – the shooter, in the passenger seat, leaned over across the driver to fire out the driver’s window with the car in motion. Actual gorillas should be suing that gang for defamation of character – how many actual gorilla gorilla gorillas are that stupid? Seriously, who the fuck thinks leaning across the driver while he’s driving is a good idea, much less firing off a pistol in his face?
Oh, they were shooting at the girls for some dumb-assed gang-related reason. I think one of the girls had a friend who was going with someone in another gang or something equally pointless. Good news: the main injury was someone got shot in the ass.
The best part of that one? The driver and shooter of the car had been kicked off a local high school campus a few months earlier for toting guns on school property. What’s the point in adding new gun laws when they won’t even punish people for egregious violations of the old laws?
The most tragic case happened four streets behind me. I’ve mentioned it before. A family was dropping a friend off after church and before going shopping for their teen daughter’s birthday presents. A car went speeding by with the assholes shooting at the man in the house they had just robbed. (Accounts vary: some have the man from the robbed house, a drug-house, natch, persuing in a car shooting back, others have Mosby & Co. shooting back at the house.) The b-day girl got hit in the head. She didn’t die. She’s a complete invalid, and the stories about the case suggest she’s all but a vegetable now. Tragic. The family recently won a huge lawsuit against the shooter for civil damages. They’re not going to see a penny of that $100,000,000 award, of course, but they did it for the principle of the matter. So very sad.
So seriously, how are the kinder gentler police supposed to deal with this shit? No doubt if the arrest of one Tyrone Mosby had gone wrong, we’d be hearing about the darling little angel all over the news. As it was, the arrest wasn’t easy:
More from the same article:
The Justice system at work – you know, the one that never gives a brother a fair shake. Now doubt Mr. Mosby shot Ms. Sampson because of my racism. I’ve been told over and over again by people that hate white people that I’m a racist, so it must be true.
Incidentally, murders peaked back in 2008, locally. I noticed that year that the police, primarily the Orlando Police Department and Orange County Sheriff’s Office, started shooting and killing a lot more suspects at that time. I’ve mentioned a few cases before, especially the egregious ones.
But the local murder rate did drop dramatically. There were also a couple of cases around that time of civilians shooting attackers, including one case of holiday cheer in which a man saved a woman’s Christmas by shooting her attacker in the ass as the suspect attempted a strong-arm robbery in the Fashion Square Mall parking lot. An M1911A in every stocking!
(Actually there was another reason for the murder rate to drop at that time, besides aggressive enforcement by the cops: When the housing market started collapsing in 2007, hordes of Mexicans left for Mexico for a few years. Oddly enough, shooting crooks and removing the illegals made the place safer, just so long as you don’t get shot by the police, that is.
The point of this late night rambling? Such as there is one, that this stuff is complicated, the environment is dangerous, and that a lot of the danger actually gets perpetrated by the criminals and not the police. The police should be held accountable when they fuck up. But pretending that they’re dealing with a bunch of Icelanders instead of a bunch of crazy-assed Americans is just plain stupid.
(The crazy guy with the gun in the last linked story was white by the way. The police officer that shot, but only wounded, Roach was Hispanic. The suspect’s gun, stolen, was not loaded. The woman killed, a cute young woman out to have some fun with her friends, was also Hispanic. Somehow this hasn’t made the big time in the national news even though it happened about ten days after the Brown incident. Wrong victim, wrong cop, wrong criminal.)
@Icepick
The police or sheriff’s office should have a goon squad to deal with the gang and drug crime, but the problem is that law enforcement officers are required to be Girl Scouts. Anybody who whips a childs ass for getting out of line will not have a problem whipping a grown man’s ass when he gets out of line.
The goon squad would be able to tell the difference between the bad guys and non-bad guys, but they would respect everybody. Sometimes when the bad guy is getting into the back of the squad car, he “accidently” hits head. Oops.
If there is a lot of foot traffic, the goon squad works the streets, or if there is a lot of vehicle traffic, they pull over cars for traffic violations. For non-bad guys, they should give a warning, but there needs to be paperwork generated. This is to document their activities, but there would be no followup actions. The good guys could get a warning for an expired license plate every day with no consequences.
I am assuming that the local police and sheriff’s offices are not as corrupt as NOPD has been in the past. In the past, NOPD ran the drug gangs, and they would put out contracts on anybody who went to Internal Affairs. There was one cop who killed another cop while robbing a restaurant.
People who do not live in that type of place have no way to understand it. They imagine the bad things in their life and project them into your community. They have no concept of gunfire as a normal occurrence. Anybody who thinks Abu Ghraib was a horrible place has lived a very sheltered life. Compared to their life, it is, but compared to prison life, it is a resort.