Thanks for the explanation.

Sure thing :victory:

Can the police line not proceed at a slower, less violent speed, so that the people who refused to clear the area are merely pushed back, with little enough force that they can stay on their feet but enough force that they can’t stay in place, rather than being harshly shoved to the ground risking serious injury?

Can the police line not proceed at a slower, less violent speed, so that the people who refused to clear the area are merely pushed back, with little enough force that they can stay on their feet but enough force that they can’t stay in place, rather than being harshly shoved to the ground risking serious injury? — Pfhorrest

No excuses, but I doubt the officer expected the man to fall back completely defenseless like that. He was old and frail and couldn't balance himself or brace himself. You'd think (or hope) if it were a woman or child, the officer would have better recognized the strength disparity.

It seems to me that it'd be better to implement those as concessions if they want everyone to return home. — Moliere

Although I completely agree with the principles of your analysis; this is not just about the police, that was just the trigger.

Indeed, ironically, the police are, in my opinion, the least of the problems in terms of state legitimacy.

When visiting the US, what is the most clear thing about the police is that the job is in anyway impossible. The war on drugs, the lack of social programs, the judicial system that makes corruption legal and police brutality legal.

As you point out, the state isn't implementing the laws it already has fairly, and if we look at those laws more closely there a long list of clearly absurd "laws" upon which no society can function. By "laws" I mean SCOTUS going through several levels of insane reasoning to create new laws directly opposed to the purposes of the law they are considering.

How is law enforcement supposed to do their part to preserve the integrity of political process if corruption is simply declared legal by the judiciary?

How is law enforcement supposed to "police themselves" if the SCOTUS declares the crazy notion that the constitution does not apply if it has not already directly been applied for the same thing in the same jurisdiction. It's impossible to even make such reasoning up as part of fictional world building.

So, there is indeed a tragic element in the current conflict between the people and police. Of the judiciary, the legislature and law-enforcement, law-enforcement maybe the least to blame and there simply wouldn't be a problem if the judiciary and legislature were doing their jobs (which is an interesting difference with the 60s where the judiciary had a "what do words mean" approach to epistemology and the legislature functioned to reflect the majority "well enough").

Certainly, the issue at hand should be dealt with as best as possible, as you are suggesting; I fear, however, because there are so many fundamental problems that the focus on police brutality, as separate from the other issues, is in a sense wasting time as so many unemployed people will simply continue to rebel until they are satisfied the state has regained legitimacy and genuinely cares about them (of course, solving police brutality would be a part of that caring).

Even on the subject of police brutality as separate the context, so many nominal crimes have been committed that without a mass pardon (such as with the draft dodgers), it may be impossible to police anyway. Everyone who partook in the looting, if they start to fear the police are "coming to get them", will simply embrace a declaration of total war with the police even if some reforms are implemented. This is the "Mexico scenario" that I and @ssu have mentioned as a possibility.

What is also clear is that Trump wants this conflict between the people and the state, and, even if there is a lull in the conflict today, it is likely the president of the United States can get what he wants.

And there is still the pandemic happening.

I am not disputing the connection between psychology and advertising, which is obvious enough. I am questioning to what extend the "values taught in psychology" really affect the society, which I figure would be an extremely difficult question to answer. — Echarmion

I'm fairly confident the main sticking point is "they bring and promote the values and views they have been taught" not the fields of work they go into. — Isaac

Well this is what you retreat to, not your original objections. And I am content to let the disagreement stand and honour your dis agreement. I see the influence everywhere, and you do not. Fair enough.

Can the police line not proceed at a slower, less violent speed, so that the people who refused to clear the area are merely pushed back, with little enough force that they can stay on their feet but enough force that they can’t stay in place, rather than being harshly shoved to the ground risking serious injury? — Pfhorrest

Yes, I think they could, for reasons of prudential self-interest if for nothing else. That looks really bad for Buffalo PD :grimace:

No excuses, but I doubt the officer expected the man to fall back completely defenseless like that. He was old and frail and couldn't balance himself or brace himself. You'd think (or hope) if it were a woman or child, the officer would have better recognized the strength disparity. — Hanover

Yeah, that's a good point too.

What is also clear is that Trump wants this conflict between the people and the state, and, even if there is a lull in the conflict today, it is likely the president of the United States can get what he wants.

And there is still the pandemic happening. — boethius

This is the scary part.

I'd advise people really to look at the way Fox News etc. are covering the events, just to get a feel where Trump is going. It's all about him securing his base. He does have a plan. General Mattis does speak the truth in my view when he said that this President has for three years divided the country.

Yet we should ask ourselves, as this isn't anything new, will history just repeat itself or CAN anything really new come out of this?

I remember well seeing with my own eyes, as a young child, the huge smoke clouds of a race riots in Miami in 1980, that me and my family accidentally witnessed. The riots then were a similar consequence of a black man, then Arthur McDuffie, slain by the police. (The officers were tried and acquitted for manslaughter and evidence tampering, among other charges.) Are we waiting for people just to loose focus and get interested in the next "media frenzy"? Or is Trump and Fox News etc. just hoping for a "Reginald Denny-beating" to surface that then instills outrage so and fear much that the parroted line will be "We condemn what happened to George Floyd, but enough with the rioting" and have the calls for peace, calls for getting along and calls for moving along?

And how then are the things forgotten? Only until next time as with mass shootings? Could things turn different this time?

Via Doug Henwood:

"In New York, we have 5,500 cops in the schools. They’re unarmed but uniformed, and a visual shock for someone like me who grew up in less policed times. That’s ten times the number of school psychologists; almost twice the number of guidance counselors; and four times the number of social workers. With about 1.1 million students in the public schools, the cop/student ratio works out to 50 per 10,000, which is significantly higher than the city as a whole. And New York has one of the highest cop to population ratios in the country. This is brutalizing and perverse."

Now we read in Mike Allen's Axios product this morning:

"A bunch of big cities are rethinking the presence of school resource officers as they respond to the concerns of thousands of demonstrators — many of them young — who have filled the streets night after night to protest the death of George Floyd, AP's Gillian Flaccus reports. Portland Public Schools, Oregon's largest school district, yesterday cut its ties with the Portland Police Bureau. Other urban districts — including Minneapolis, St. Paul and Denver — are considering doing the same."

Anyone who says these protests are ineffective either does not know what they are talking about, or are intentionally lying.

There is no good evidence that there's a trend of systemic racism in terms of police brutality.

For a nice summary see Tucker Carlson, unlike 99% of media sources, he dives into the numbers.

About 1,000 people are killed by police every year in the USA. The biggest group being white.

Any disproportionality of any other group with respect to their population share is simply due to how much violent crime they commit. Otherwise you'd be complaining about "systemic sexism", since it's almost always men getting killed by cops, and nobody is complaining about that.

The Guardian did a project called "the Counted" where they collected the stories of everyone killed by cops for a few years. Take a look at it.
Almost all male.
99.9% of them being stupid, reckless, threatening and uncooperative.

Even the term "unarmed" doesn't really help decipher who is "innocent" in being slain by a cop - the vast majority of those who are unarmed and die were also being stupid - like Mike Brown, trying to grab the officers gun, fighting or charging the officer, etc.

But what about George Floyd, Eric Garner etc! Surely they are evidence of racism in the police?

Nope. There were an equal number of white men, Like Tony Timpa and Daniel Shaver, killed in exactly the same kind of infuriating circumstances as Floyd and Garner.

But you don't know about them because the media chooses not to catapult their deaths onto the front pages for days until it instigates a riot.

So what's the solution? Well, States have wildly varying death-by-cop rates versus their violent crime rates. Some states have high crime rates and low numbers of police killings. I'd recommend starting there. Find the differences.

For example, New York banned the police from using dangerous chokeholds, - like the one that killed Floyd - and that may be the reason that state has fewer deaths by cop compared to other places.

A decent president would have found plausible quick fixes like that based on data from states and signed it into an execute order, maybe that would've quelled the rioting.

see Tucker Carlson — Hallucinogen

Absolutely do not do this.

-

Also anyone who blames people for their own deaths by hands of others is a propagandist and does not deserve to be taken seriously. Kindly rethink your life.

... and I'll add to that by stating that the insistence that this is a racial issue is entirely counter-productive to finding a solution.

Insisting against the evidence that this is racial, so that you can join your political tribe and start beating your chest about it, is what has sucked the entire nation into a never-ending argument where nobody's going to listen to each other and decide on an actual fact-based solution. Even other nations are weighing in on it, based on the false premises that this is all about racism. Then we end up getting side tracked into literally every race-based discussion, about reparations, about slavery, about microaggressions. When actually there's just as many white corpses that were killed by police out of negligence or sheer malice as the black ones.

People just turn the entire issue into something to score status points out of and engage in tribal cheering over.

In fact that's what everything is. Status games and tribalism in a million irritating variations. Screw finding solutions, I guess. Any solution needs to benefit my "group" at the expense of another.

"Controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officers — that they are nearly twice as likely to be killed as a Latinx person and nearly three times more likely to be killed than a white person. Black Americans are also about 1.4 times more likely to be unarmed in fatal interactions with police than white Americans are (and about 1.2 times more likely to be killed unarmed than Latinx Americans).

This disparity is such that in eight US cities — including Reno, Nevada; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Scottsdale, Arizona — the rate at which police killed black men was higher than the US murder rate. And from a criminal justice perspective, there appears to be little connection between police killings and violent crime. Some cities with high rates of violent crime have fewer police killings than those with higher violent crime rates, a situation that can make police killings feel wanton and baseless."

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/anger-police-killing-george-floyd-protests

WhY iS EvErYoNe MaKiNg ThIs AbOuT RaCe?

Controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officers — StreetlightX

What makes you and Vox writers think that population size is important?

Do you think that's also why 95% of police victims are male? Because the population is 95% male?

It's population proportion, not population size. If you need this explained then please find a discussion venue more appropriate for your intellectual capacity, like a kindergarten maybe.

Try answering the question.

Your argument is that likelihood to be killed by police should be determined by population size.

Population share of men: 50%
population share of women: 50%

Fill in the blanks,

Percentage of people killed by police who are male: ___%
Percentage of people killed by police who are female: ___%.

Nobody is disputing that more men than women per capita are killed by police.

The point is that it’s also more blacks than whites per capita, even if it’s equal numbers of blacks and whites absolutely.

If there were 20x more men than women and 95% of victims were men, then that would be equal numbers per capita by sex.

If there were 20x more men than women and only the same number of men and women were victims, that would mean women were victims at a much higher rate than men.

Likewise, since there are many more white people than black, if whites and blacks have the same number of victims, that means blacks are victims at a much higher rate than whites.

Yes, absolutely, all men too should be absolutely furious at the rate at which they die by the hands of police. Why aren't you? With so much in common, why aren't all men in absolute solidarity with BLM?

There's nothing here that contradicts anything I've said.

I'm pointing out the exact same thing using percentages instead of per capita figures.

If there were 20x more men than women and 95% of victims were men, then that would be equal numbers per capita by sex. — Pfhorrest

Literally the point of my post, I simply said "50% men/women" instead of "If 20 times...".

Yes, absolutely, all men too should be absolutely furious at the rate at which they die by the hands of police. Why aren't you? — StreetlightX

This is the first time I've heard this.

I believed everyone understood why many more men die during police encounters than women, it seems I was wrong.

Is there something which, unlike population share, explains both why more men than women are killed and why more blacks than whites are killed?

Well, I said what that might be in my first post - the violent crime rate of each group.

Is the violent crime rate of men higher than women? Yes it is. ☑
Is the violent crime rate of blacks higher than whites? Yes it is. ☑

It seems we've found the variable we should be dividing those per capita rates by

"Controlling for population (that is, looking at killings per million people) shows that it is black Americans who are most likely to be killed by police officers — that they are nearly twice as likely to be killed as a Latinx person and nearly three times more likely to be killed than a white person. Black Americans are also about 1.4 times more likely to be unarmed in fatal interactions with police than white Americans are (and about 1.2 times more likely to be killed unarmed than Latinx Americans). — StreetlightX

Well, I said what that might be in my first post - the violent crime rate of each group. — Hallucinogen

Except this is factually wrong:

"From a criminal justice perspective, there appears to be little connection between police killings and violent crime. Some cities with high rates of violent crime have fewer police killings than those with higher violent crime rates, a situation that can make police killings feel wanton and baseless."

Via the same article.

The paltry two examples you listed - Eric Garner and George Floyd - were certainly not violent criminals. All violence involved in their murder belonged to the police.

The point is why people bring up population sizes. Nobody is saying that blacks are targeted more than whites BECAUSE their population is smaller, like
causally somehow. They’re saying that the numbers being similar DESPITE the black populations being smaller SHOWS that they are target more; the numbers targeted COMPARED TO the population number is where the “more targeted” claim comes from, and that’s why people are mentioning populations.

That entire contingent of cops who stood around while a man lay bleeding from his head has now resigned from being emergency responders - not from being cops, just a particular role. And they did so - in solidarity with their two collegues who got suspended.

Exactly how is anyone supposed to believe there are 'good cops'? How? I don't understand. Because they kneel with protestors? But those cops kneeled too, the day before.

But wait a minute, he wasn’t black.

Well spotted sir. Pack up and go home everyone, captain observation here has done it.

Does it not twig with people that yes - you too will be fucked by a cop, given the chance and circumstance - all the more reason to support what is happening now. Like gosh, please shower me in examples of non-racist police brutality - abuses of authority and brutality against the poor and those seeking to express their right to speech - great, everyone's got a dog in this fight.

I think you know what my point is. These incidents may not be issues of race but of circumstances.

Race is a circumstance.

If you want. You may be right but so far I don’t think you’ve proved your point.

What would it take?