In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Heather Mac Donald observes about the very violent 2020:
The Biden policing agenda is based on a false conceit, however. In 2020 the police killed 15 unarmed African-Americans and 21 unarmed whites, according to the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings. The Post defines “unarmed†to include suspects fleeing the cops in stolen cars who attempted further carjackings en route, who then appeared to threaten the pursuing officer with a gun, and who violently resisted arrest. Those 15 “unarmed†blacks will represent 0.17% of all black homicide deaths in 2020, assuming a black murder toll of about 8,600 victims in 2020, as seems probable.
The police aren’t the problem in the black community, criminals are. The many law-abiding residents of troubled areas know this and beg for vigorous law enforcement. High-profile homicide trials of police officers will take place this year in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Louisville and Rochester, N.Y. If there are acquittals, more riots—followed by an even greater shooting surge—seem likely. It is urgent that public officials stop demonizing the police.
If whites had killed the nearly 2,000 additional murders, mostly of young, black men, that took place in 2020 compared with 2019, it would be proclaimed a genocide and rightly so. I don’t know why the level of deadly violence is accepted so uncritically. Fear? Paternalism? Racism? Indifference?
I think she’s too quick to dismiss the effects of stress. I’m convinced that the underlying causes of the increased crime and violence last year are multi-factorial and include stress, boredom, hobbling of the police, and who knows how many other factors? What concerns me is the possibility that there has been an increase in the number of young people who are just plain feral. It takes time and effort to domesticate a human being and even more to civilize one.
There is so much wrong with this. First, we dont know how accurate this data really is. Police in many parts of the country are not required to report shootings. If they do report there are not uniform standards. For example I always carry a pocket knife. If I get shot, some places would consider me armed. Next, they only count those who die. If you get shot and end up paralyzed, lose a leg, are blind, then those dont count. If you get beaten without cause that doesnt count either. The focus only on shooting deaths is weird.
Then we are equating shootings by people paid to protect us vs shootings by criminals as if they are somehow equal. They are not. Yes, man y minorities want more policing, but they also want policing they can trust. So, if anyone is actually demonizing the police, I agree we should stop that. What we should be doing is constructively criticizing them. Or if not then tell me why the police are the one group we are not allowed to criticize. Then we should also work urgently on having police stop shooting, beating and arresting minorities at higher rates when there is no cause.
Steve
Criticize, yes, investigate, yes.
Defund and prosecute officers? Watch how they will react to protect themselves. Call response times will increase. More officers responding to the most urgent while delaying others so as not to be alone and unobserved. Therefore vulnerable. If the police are the enemy, who will you call?
And entitlement. Read the word on the sweatshirt of this gangbanger:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nypd-releases-video-of-attackers-who-beat-and-stripped-man-in-chinatown
They are in Chicago. For example in 2020 there were more than 4,000 shootings here and police officers used their sidearms fewer than 20 times.
Where are they not required to do so?
Told my wife today, it’s no wonder no one likes your kind. No corporate board quotas for you in silicon valley. No Harvard offers. Your people are xenophobic. Opposing immigration now for 400 years. Original sin you got clinging to you. Angling to keep the land of opportunity to yourselves, whyyyy, time you got yours. Biden’s the man to ferret out every splinter group with a gripe and pass a law to elevate them. About time too, or people might start to be judged by the content of their character, bypassing party affiliation.
Those kind of people would never be unflinching Democratic lever pullers. If you can’t maintain power, you can’t maintain mandated equality. The ends justify the means, at least in the end they do.
Leveraging political power FOR groups engenders unflinching gratitude, hence immigration.
Political power AGAINST groups isolates them , hence an FBI database of 300,000 white supremacists or a reasonable facsimile of them.
Told her, watch out on the Facebook, don’t get on no lists. Biden’s gonna twist Zuckerberger’s arm. Careful.
“I’m convinced that the underlying causes of the increased crime and violence last year are multi-factorial and include stress, boredom, hobbling of the police, and who knows how many other factors? What concerns me is the possibility that there has been an increase in the number of young people who are just plain feral.”
I don’t know how to apportion them either. Its inexact. But feral certainly became acceptable recently “Mostly peaceful,” (as long as the cause was a favored one) don’t you know. I’d go with feral.
This is just bizarre: “First, we don’t know how accurate this data really is.”
This from the guy who routinely just discounts evidence he doesn’t like and puts forth what he does, despite agenda driven “studies” all around us. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the pocketknife homicide rate, or the number of pocketknife carriers gunned down by cops is a national crisis. (snicker)
Almost no one doesn’t believe cops you can trust is a laudable objective. But those who live in the real world know mistakes, and bad apples, exist. And who said cops can’t be criticized? I don’t live in that universe. Bad cops have been the subject of investigations all my life.
“Then we should also work urgently on having police stop shooting, beating and arresting minorities at higher rates when there is no cause.”
No cause? WTFU. With the advent of cell phone cameras and chest cameras (or even a show like COPS) the notion that criminals, black, white or whatever, who get shot or roughed up are not, overwhelmingly, resisting in some form is simply flat damned blind. Alcohol and drug intoxication alone informs that.
If one really wants to deal with murders, and doesn’t just have a malcontent’s or propagandist’s political ax to grind, one first focuses of efficacy. Hiring profile and training practices for police should be tuned up no matter what. But they will have a third or fourth (or more) order effect. Going after cops and not the thousands of common criminals killing each other and innocents sounds like a classic convenient political issue, but not one that will measurably move the needle one bit towards the goal.
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/01/fbi-police-use-of-force-database/
That goes to the most recent effort to have uniform reporting. There are many articles easily found documenting problems in the past. Putting more than one link here seems to cause problems.
Steve
Give it up, steve. You are the guy outside mowing the unkempt lawn while the house is on fire.
A little more plausible when you remember that feral is the default setting for most people.
Not most. All. People must be trained to be civilized or even domesticated. The actual evidence is against Rousseau. That’s one of the problems with a lot of radical thought. It’s ultimately derived from Rousseau and Rousseau was empirically wrong.