Tips for criminals: if you don't want to get shot, change your vocation.
> Beyond the numbers, interviews with dozens of current and former police officers, shooting survivors, activists, and independent experts described the devastating impact of police shootings on families and communities
How about we start talking about the devastating impact of crime in the communities to begin with ?
> There’s a common misconception that police will try to disable a suspect by aiming for the legs or arms, [...]
This is Hollywood fantasy. Hit an artery (running along the legs or arms), and the suspect will bleed to death in minutes.
> Bruce Franks Jr., a protester in Ferguson who now serves as a St. Louis representative in the Missouri legislature, said cops in his city shoot first and come up with reasons later.
Too bad, in the case which made Ferguson relevant, it was established that Michael Brown tried to wrestle the officer and fired his weapon several time in the patrol vehicle...
Would you mind pointing me towards the law showing which crimes, specifically, are capital offenses? And, if you would be so kind, under what circumstances a death sentence may be carried out on the streets without a trial for those crimes?
I hate to break it to you but even in that case there is still something like due process to be followed and NO OFFICER HAS THE RIGHT TO EXECUTE THAT PERSON ON THE SPOT.
For self defense there usually needs to be some proof of a credible threat. Recent events indicate that this burden of proof is for some reason lower for police officers than for citizens.
No, in that case they should do their damnest to arrest the person risking their lives if need be. If you're not prepared to do that then do not sign up for the police. As a police officer you definitely did not sign up to be judge, jury and executioner at the same time, 'Judge Dredd' is fiction, not an instruction manual.
Self defense doesn't give you the right to execute someone on the spot. On the other hand, what many in this discussion call "execution on the spot" might be legitimate self defense.
I'm trying to picture a nation in which public and cops, both armed-to-the-teeth, coexist within a culture totally smitten with violence, yet by some magic they don't end up shooting each other a lot. I can't do it. No-one can without being ideologically severed from physical reality.
One of these states of affairs must prevail for the US, from most to least likely (and least to most desirable): (1) it continues to lose more of its people than any comparable wealthy nation to violence, (2) it hugely reduces the amount of ready-to-hand weaponry (on one side or both), or (3) it diminishes its love affair with violence. The last can nearly be discounted, as it is by now too deeply embedded in the US's economy, history, culture and ideology. (2) seems like a distant prospect for similar reasons. (1) would be a safe bet.
4. We stop relying on the cultural paradigms that foster this mess and it gets better, likely for reasons people will not understand and will not credit.
Einstein said No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. The odds are good that the current framing of the problem is part of the problem.
I'd concur with less hesitation if not for the fact that many nations are so much more successful than the US (in this respect). There are alternate framings up the wazoo on offer, with hard examples to back them up.
That caveat aside, I suspect you're right: America is stuck, and getting unstuck will need a novel stimulus of some sort. As to what that might be and where it will lead? Not necessarily 'upwards'.
Other nations don't have our exact history and circumstances. I am not aware of another nation that historically used skin color to demarcate slaves from free.* The original pilgrims came here voluntarily because they could not fit in back in Europe, so comparing it to European norms isn't likely to ever work. If Americans could go along and get along with European norms, the country would have never been born.
We are misfits and mavericks and we are coping with an ugly racial legacy that is quite challenging to fully resolve. And maybe part of the answer lies in the current calls for reparations to African Americans. Maybe that will both make Blacks less angry and Whites less likely to feel that Black anger is unjustified, thus ill behaved.
Jane Jacobs wrote that eyes on the street is the key to safety. Fostering a safe and civilized climate means working on ideas like that. Confining these discussions to what should happen at the point where a cop has pulled a gun is pretty much guaranteed to fail to solve it.
Just because some of today's Americans' ancestors may have been misfits in their home country 400 years ago, doesn't mean every American today is a maverick.
And what about Australia? Many Australians descend from actual criminals. Yet when they thought their gun problem was getting out of hand, they decided to fix it... and they did.
Australia was a penal colony. They did not choose to go there. They were sent. American colonists chose the hardship of leaving their known world for a harsh and deadly new world, often on the idea that you could not make them deny their true religious beliefs merely to get along with the rest of society.
OK the settler-historical determinism is getting the dramatic overreach treatment here. Nearly 30% of Australia's contemporary population are migrants. Of those born here, only a minority (estimates vary) are descended from convicts. Of those convicts, many committed 'crimes' (such as cussing their master or stealing a cake) quite deliberately in order to be transported rather than rot their days away in Old Blighty's grinding poverty and injustice. And then there were large numbers of free settlers, during and after the convict period.
Obviously Australian culture has not come out of nowhere, but a simple line from its 'convict' past cannot be drawn as anything other than a very poor caricature.
Whereas there are of course historical/cultural contributors to Australia's sanity re arms (notably: a liking of order, and tolerance of authority where it can help maintain that order), there are many others more contemporary in origin. We don't have a large arms industry (our governments choose instead to be corrupted by fossil fuel corporations; arguably just as dangerous). We have had genuinely courageous leadership at pivotal moments. We are not burdened with an archaic constitution. We tend to dissimulate regarding our violent history rather than valorise it. All of these features have their negative contributions in some policy arenas, but have helped nudge us away from a strong gun culture (which has at moments had the potential to emerge).
This has very little to do with "us" having been "sent here".
I am not suggesting cultural determinism. I am suggesting that culture has roots in past events and that the origin story of the US and Australia are not identical. That they have some things in common, yet have not turned out identical, is not a good rebuttal to or dismissal of the idea that America's current situation has roots in a long, ugly past that we are struggling to live down.
> I am not aware of another nation that historically used skin color to demarcate slaves from free.
The romans did if I recall history class correctly. So did the french for a while and of course pre-WW germany in their colonies (we don't know how the Nazis would have handled it, their black population was so low that they didn't bother to do anything about it other than "if it's a problem, deal with it")
I think you could also count the british since they definitely had skin-color based slaves at times. (Atleast history class told me)
Having some race based slaves is not the same as using race to clearly demarcate slave from free across a nation. We live with the legacy that Black Americans are descended from slaves, slaves who were forbidden from learning to read, so they imposed the grammar of their native tongues on English, resulting in a distinct speaking style that still tends to persist, culturally, even if it is not so in every individual case. The implications are both broad and deep and they mostly aren't nice. It is a terrible legacy that still leaves its mark on the Black American population in ways that are very frequently used to suggest that Blacks are simply morally defective and their lives would work if they would just behave themselves.
So what? I live in a country that killed around 17 million people during WW2, particularly jewish. You think American legacy is bad? Other countries did much worse and still repent for that.
We had a situation in which the birth certificate of your grandmother could decide whether you die under most terrible conditions or live.
And please don't think that the whole "black skin = slave" is unique to america, the egyptians for example enslaved jewish people (as you might recall from some stories in some old, dusty book), some african countries warlords enslaved white people for their skin color, the british enslaved everyone who wasn't european. This is not unique to America.
Well, the police is not supposed to expect a gun in a drunk guy's pocket.
In france they would not. They would not hold their own gun either in that situation.
This situation only exists because it is possible that this guys has a gun in america.
It's even frightening that somebody as smart as you didn't see this elephant in the room. The cultural bubble is strong here, and given the influence of your country, it really makes me uneasy.
Most Americans would disagree with you. Most people don't walk around with guns and don't see other people walking around with guns. The fact that it is theoretically possible for a drunk guy to have a gun in his pants is not an elephant in the room because he is in America. The expectation of the officer that the guy is packing has more to do with the militarized police force the the Second Amendment imo.
I haven't heard of any recent crazy snippers or school shooting in France.
You can't shoot guns if you don't have any.
The US culture IS strange. You even have this word, 'packing', short for being armed. Having a slang for that is very, very weird from an european point of view.
Hell, here, the worst you get for somebody being mugged is that they used a knife.
Guns are only for the mafias, which is definitly not day to day operation.
Don't get me wrong, i like going to the shooting range. But I woulf not like the content of the club safes to be on the street.
But I agree with one thing. I've been to the US 5 times, and the cops are scary. I have to go next year, and I don't feel confortable at all, even just passing the border.
Mind you, that's "white people", much less "white people that also happen to be police officers".
I think what is happening here is something called "availability bias" ( http://www.howtogetyourownway.com/biases/availability_bias ). Basically, events that can be easily recalled are given additional weight in decision making than the alternatives that don't. Daniel Kahneman described it very well in his excellent book "Thinking Fast and Slow", which I highly recommend.
The thing is is, "An unarmed black man shot and killed by white police officer" is often repeated in media stores because, well, there is money in it. And because the reporting is so frequent, our brains pair "black man" with "white police officer" and often we jump to the wrong conclusion. While no one is arguing that police brutality is a "problem", availability bias makes the problem seem far bigger than it actually is.
This is nonsense. You are comparing government officials (police officers) with murderers. Police should be held to a higher standard than murderers, period.
The argument is that availability bias and media sensationalism makes the problem of "unarmed black man gets shot and killed by white police officer" seem a far bigger problem than it actually is.
That sounds like your argument, that somehow other causes of violent death are higher than systematized killings by law enforcement? By what metric are police shootings in America not a huge problem? They are one of the most common forms of homicide by a stranger (representing between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 of all such killings). Nothing about this should be accepted as normal or unconcerning.
As horrid as this problem is, it's also an extension of a much wider and more pervasive problem. One that is hugely corrosive to the foundational principles of rule of law and guarantees of liberty that this nation allegedly holds so dear. That problem is, for lack of a better term, street justice. In principle our criminal justice system works like so: an allegation is made, evidence is collected, a prosecutor decides to press charges, a defendant is placed in custody, a fair and speedy trial is performed, a verdict is made by a jury of peers, and if a guilty verdict was attained then the defendant simply serves out a sentence kept away from society at large with no "cruel or unusual punishments" performed. There are problems with this system but it has a lot of merits. However, today basically every aspect of this system is corrupted and destroyed beyond belief.
Relevant here is that the police, with effectively the tacit approval of the public at large, have created an alternate criminal justice pipeline. One where punishment is not merely meted out at the end of a fair trial, but rather one where every aspect of the system itself is a punishment. Even in the best case scenarios being arrested and detained is a traumatic experience. Indeed, the police have often used just this alone, with or without any charges, as a means to punish. In more common worse case scenarios the police use brutal force and the most extreme dehumanizing and degrading methods of bringing someone into custody. You will be injured, you will be humiliated, you will be reduced to inconsequentiality within the meat grinder of the criminal justice system. It's designed to wear people down, to reduce their resistance, to serve as a punishment all on its own.
And in the very most extreme examples the system extends this system of impromptu extra judicial justice dispensed by police officers to street executions. Failing to comply with police (regardless of the details) is a capital offense that can result in immediate summary execution. Running away from the police (regardless of the details) can be met with immediate summary execution. Talking back to the police can potentially result in immediate summary execution. Being a person of a body type or an ethnicity that causes a police officer to fear for their life can result in immediate summary execution. And for every example of a police officer being fired or, rarer still, brought to justice for these heinous acts there are countless more of police officers experiencing no consequences. For every objectively unjust street execution where the police kill someone "innocent" there are many more where the police unjustly execute a "bad guy" (rapist, thief, what-have-you) in a way that is much harder to prove as objectively unjust.
And that's the core of the problem. The police are out on the street and they have tremendous power in their hands these days. The power to dispense "justice" through their own volition on the spur of the moment, even including executions. So the police spend a lot of time working on how to systematically categorize people on the street into the "good guy" or "bad guy" buckets. They don't have the luxury of letting the justice system figure it out, they are the justice system. Worse, they revel in it. Once the "bad guy" bit is flipped, everything is on the table, including summary street execution. For people with power fantasies this is a gold mine. And they've been living it out for years, decades. The system today is designed to encourage, coddle, and facilitate officers who act this way. If you are rough with the "bad guys" you're a hero. If you are aggressive on the street you will make your quotas. And so on.
Today in the America of 2017 it is very difficult to argue with the fact that we live in a police state. It's a hard truth to swallow but every indication is that it's the case. The vast majority of executions (by m...
For some alternative context: A police officer drawing a weapon - let alone firing it - will have a lot of paperwork to do here in NL and the very few cases where the police take a life are litigated until the very last option has been exhausted.
I feel pretty safe on the streets here and in general have high respect for the police force, something that I did not have in Canada (RCMP excepted, they're very good) or in the United States.
Police in the US have a much looser set of "rules of engagement" than US armed forces do overseas. The police will draw and point their guns for a huge variety of reasons, because they feel afraid, because of the skin color of someone they're approaching, or simply because they want to encourage compliance. And the police are often quite free with using non-lethal forms of violence, from tazers to pepper spray. It's really rather shocking that these things alone are tolerated, but of course in a country where hundreds are killed by police every year it's obvious that the line is well past where it should be.
I think most police officers mean well. They're just trapped in a system that gives them the job of 'hurting people'.
Most of the police I interacted with were good guys. I got pulled over twice - the scottsdale officer bounced over & told me why he'd pulled me over (instead of asking for a confession). The sheriff asked for a confession ("Do you know why I pulled you over?", "I have some ideas..."), but decided I didn't need a ticket for missing that stop sign and gave me a written warning.
A retired cop I know was telling a cop story which included him telling someone "I don't make the rules I just enforce them." I've realized this is probably the origin of the term 'cop out'.
These diaries are two of my recent efforts to better define the tension between police and the public:
Really the politicians need to be held accountable for screwing up the police's job - institutionalized racism was replaced with an unwinnable 'war on drugs'. I learned about 'mens rea' (guilty mind) and 'strict liability' ("crimes" where no victim is required) from some HN comments (thanks, whoever that was):
> Mens rea (/ˈmɛnz ˈriːə/; Law Latin for "guilty mind"[1][2][3]) is the mental element of 1) intention to commit a crime or 2) knowledge that one's action or lack of action would cause a crime to be committed. It is a necessary element of many crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
> A regulatory offence or quasi-criminal offence is a class of crime in which the standard for proving culpability has been lowered so a mens rea (Latin for "guilty mind") element is not required. Such offences are used to deter potential offenders from dangerous behaviour rather than to impose punishment for moral wrongdoing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_crime
> Hey there, I don’t know why you feel so compelled to make things look less worse than they are, lots of anecdotes...
I'm just trying to break through people's echo chambers, and help get to the core of the issue. I agreed with most of what the poster I replied to said, but wanted to point out that not all police are trigger-happy. I think any reform to policing in the United States has to help make non-trigger happy police officers' lives easier. The only way to do this is by ending the drug war.
> VICE News examined both fatal and nonfatal incidents to determine that cops in the 50 largest local departments shot at least 3,631 people from 2010 through 2016.
But then right below that they give a graphic which covers the same period and breaks the shootings down into fatal (1378), nonfatal (2720), and unknown (283). That's a total of 4381, or 750 more than the number give in the paragraph above the graphic.
Also, note that they say their data is for the 50 largest departments. They say 1378 fatal shootings for 2010 through 2016. Add in the 283 unknown shootings because they might have also been fatal, and that gives 1661 fatal shootings.
It's interesting to compare to the data from killedbypolice.net. KBP data starts 2013-05-01, and here are the fatal shooting counts by year:
2013: 779
2014: 1114
2015: 1220
2016: 1165
That comes to 4278 in 43 months, or 99.5/month. Compare to Vice's 1661 in 84 months, or 19.8/month.
Vice says their data covers about 148k police officers serving 54 million Americans. That's about 1/5th of all police officers [1], so it looks like the ratio of fatal shootings per month from all departments to those from the 50 largest departments is about the same as the ratio of number of offices to number of office in the 50 largest departments. That suggests there isn't much difference between large departments and small departments.
[1] Based on numbers I Googled, although I was only able to find 2008 numbers.
In the past, I didn't buy into the Black Lives Matter message because I didn't like their poster child, Michael Brown.
But recently I've become convinced that BLM was right, and the thing that changed my mind was the story of Daniel Shaver. Google it and watch the video if you haven't seen it yet -- it might change your mind, too.
He wasn't armed, hadn't committed a crime earlier that day, didn't disrespect the officers, complied with police orders, and had the same skin color as the policeman who shot him. And they executed him anyway.
It's sobering for sure to realize those biases exist. I am a white man, who was extremely skeptical of the first few police shooting stories, starting with Trayvon Martin, then Michael Brown et al.
Trayvon was killed during a time when I was extremely politically conservative, but later that year I actively participated in a Republican campaign in Florida. That moment is when I really started to criticize my own political and religious beliefs.
Since then, mostly thanks to moving away from my parents and heading to university, I've continued to drift away from my old viewpoints. I can't say I am 100% onboard with every position BLM has advocated but the same story told year after year has started to change my mind.
And this case has a shock factor for a white man that the others did not. I'm ashamed to admit that. It's an uncomfortable way to be woken up to one's own biases. I hope it's not too late to help change things for both black and white Americans. And I hope it's not too late to fix my own thinking.
It's not just shootings, it's also utterly horrible incidents like the killing of Keith Vidal [0], civil forfeiture [1] and the generally increasing militarization of US police, not just in equipment but also tactics [2], like running off-the-book black sites [3].
I'm not even from the US, but these worrisome trends have been obvious for quite a while now, in many different ways. Like the mere existence of crowdsourced maps of police killing family pets [4] and something like "swatting people" actually being a thing, which is reserved in its severity pretty much to the US [5].
Note: I'm not trying to paint a super bleak picture of "all US police are evil", I just think there's a very real problem there. A problem that seems to be mostly driven by a culture of "War", like on drugs and on terror.
There are lots of problems. The black sites in particular have been weighing on my conscience a lot recently. I do find the combination of racism and police brutality particularly vile though. Especially given the for-profit prison subsystem and the exemption given to slavery in the amendment which supposedly abolished it.
The police is just a part of the problem. The real problem here is the jury who let the cop walk. This is the real issue: no accountability for bad police behavior including unnecessary shootings, civil forfeiture, black ops sites, etc. Our political system is designed around balance of power. What we observe now is that the executive branch (including police) got too much power and the other branches of the government have to take it back.
That whole situation was a mess. A scared cop with an assault rifle, an intoxicated suspect. Instructions that are a mess, a victim that can't comply with the instructions because of intoxication. Then the victim reaches for the right pocket while crawling on the floor, despite the warnings that the hands need to be up, visible, or on the floor. Scared cop fires.
I wouldn't really say that there's institutionalized conspiracy against blacks and that everyone is shooting them for no reason. There are obvious instances that individual police officers acted cruel but I wouldn't pin those instances as proof of a system wide corruption and conspiracy against blacks.
Have you seen the video? It's clear beyond any doubt that the officer wasn't "scared", but a sadistic control freak. He had "You're Fucked" engraved into his rifle for God's sake, the guy is obviously far too immature or full of himself to be pointing a gun at anyone.
I agree. But people have been fighting police brutality for years and years. That's not BLM's focus, or they'd be called Stop Police Brutality or something.
That brutality disproportionately affects African Americans. Police brutality and racism are both huge problems, combined they are worse than the sum of said parts.
So, my characterization of the cop might seem like I'm victimizing him. I'm not.
Your characterization of the cop just proves my point. It is not the system wide conspiracy to kill, it's that people who want to kill and are sadistic control freaks love being cops?
So these are all particular instances and not an indication of system wide statistically significant killing spree.
All right, we probably agree on more than I originally thought. But the fact is those sadistic control freaks, as if it weren't bad enough they were cops, are often biased against minorites and exist in a system that is biased. So I wouldn't say there's a conspiracy, but I do argue that the system disproportionately affects non-white Americans. And perpetuates itself with all its biases.
I would not say that the system disproportionately affects non-white Americans. I would also not say that the system is biased, there's not a law, a rule, nothing, creating a bias in the system.
I would also say that bias of the individual is not on a scale to have a statistically significant bias happening within the police.
non-white Americans commit more violent crimes, that's a fact. I would not blame the police for that fact. There's something cultural going on there and I would not even say that is a product of racist culture. IMO, USA is the least racist it has ever been.
Did you even RTFA? Facts are much more relevant than your opinion. I put zero stock in what "you would say" versus the data shown here, which you conveniently ignore.
Why are you even posting on this topic with so little knowledge of it?
I read the article. When I was making "would say" statements I was merely copying the expression parent used.
Facts are that black people commit more crimes. These are not fake crimes, these are real crimes. This obviously makes it very probable that they'll have issues with the cops, including shootings.
It's very simple, groups that commit more crimes, do get shot more often than others by cops.
Yes, there are instances of obvious cop racism and bad judgement but these are instances, not an epidemic.
I've seen the video and I severely disagree. I'm not trying to say what happened is right but the victim of the shooting was reaching, from the point of the officer, possibly reaching for a gun at this point and especially in the given situation I would suggest that someone who likes "You're fucked" on the gun will still be stressed and pumped on adrenaline, hence the confusing and bad instructions. So they see someone reaching for what might be a gun and fire.
Was it avoidable? Definitely. It's a tragedy and not necessary.
In most other civilized countries the police would have handled this much more maturely and with better training.
I'm a private citizen. In most states if I'm in a confrontation with someone I'll need more of a credible threat than a man on the ground touching his hip to shoot him. Why should a police officer be held to a lower standard?
I'm not suggesting that police officers are held to lower standards, quite the opposite. But please recognize that this wasn't some everyday situation in which someone touched their hip, rather, the police was under the believe someone in the building was armed and dangerous, which is quite a different situation.
If the standard isn't lower, where is the evidence for the officer's claim that he was 100% certain the victim was armed? The bodycam footage certainly doesn't seem to back up that kind of claim...
Before this case I would have told you that as long as you were like me (white, male, relatively well-off) it's a fine place. This year I'm not so certain.
To a certain degree it's because of the gun culture in the US. But I support gun rights, enjoy sport shooting, and also would not immediately think "gun". My hypothesis is that police work in the States tends to attract the kind of people who want to be macho and point guns at people but lack the cajones to join the military and actually have those people want to kill them back. This obviously doesn't describe all or even most officers, but I've met enough kids like that in my high school years who dreamed of heading to the police academy that I believe it's significant.
I enjoy going to the shooting range myself. But here if you want to have the right to hold something else than a 9mm in a secured and monitored location you have to work a lot for it, and prove you are not going to go booling for columbine.
A country where sometimes kids can have a hold on an automatic doesn't feel right to me.
BLM is still a harmful distraction because not that many lives are being lost by wrongful police shootings. It would be more beneficial to focus on areas like Chicago where hundreds die every year (overwhelmingly young black men killed by young black men).
Assuming you're not dogwhistling: My impact on the inner city black youth of Chicago is limited since I am a middle class average white dude. I feel that my time is better spent addressing the police problem since it still is a problem.
I'm not criticizing how you spend your time. I'm criticizing BLM for directing our focus onto what is a tiny sliver in the pie chart of how black people die.
If they want to fight police brutality, great, but then why are they called BLM? If they want to save the lives of black people, they're doing a disservice by acting as if police brutality is the area to focus on.
No, I think it can be helpful to criticize if people are being misled into picking up pennies when twenties, fifties, and hundreds are falling out of their pockets.
I'm sure the black community will be immensely grateful to you for alerting them to the problems in inner cities. In fact, you can have all the gratitude for "alerting" them to their "lost twenties". I'll stick to my guns.
I am concerned with the proclivity of police to "empty the clip" into an individual. At some point they seem to just make the switch to a violent video game without remorse or empathy for their actions. Shouldn't this be something that should be asked in gauging a police prospect before "arming" them with a license to kill?
Cops have a scary, dangerous job. There are all kinds of people just waiting to harm them, and now they are politicized.
I've known several cops, they are without exception good people who would never harm someone intentionally. (I do believe there are a few bad ones, but I've never met them.)
I can't wait for this issue to become de-politicized again. Cops are totally undercompensated, under appreciated and deserve much better than this.
83 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] thread> Beyond the numbers, interviews with dozens of current and former police officers, shooting survivors, activists, and independent experts described the devastating impact of police shootings on families and communities
How about we start talking about the devastating impact of crime in the communities to begin with ?
> There’s a common misconception that police will try to disable a suspect by aiming for the legs or arms, [...]
This is Hollywood fantasy. Hit an artery (running along the legs or arms), and the suspect will bleed to death in minutes.
> Bruce Franks Jr., a protester in Ferguson who now serves as a St. Louis representative in the Missouri legislature, said cops in his city shoot first and come up with reasons later.
Too bad, in the case which made Ferguson relevant, it was established that Michael Brown tried to wrestle the officer and fired his weapon several time in the patrol vehicle...
If a man shoots at an officer for no reason.
Sure, bombastic hyperbole. But... http://www.newsweek.com/police-line-duty-deaths-increase-201...
What about the innocent people that are killed and injured by police? Acceptable collateral damage?
One of these states of affairs must prevail for the US, from most to least likely (and least to most desirable): (1) it continues to lose more of its people than any comparable wealthy nation to violence, (2) it hugely reduces the amount of ready-to-hand weaponry (on one side or both), or (3) it diminishes its love affair with violence. The last can nearly be discounted, as it is by now too deeply embedded in the US's economy, history, culture and ideology. (2) seems like a distant prospect for similar reasons. (1) would be a safe bet.
Einstein said No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. The odds are good that the current framing of the problem is part of the problem.
That caveat aside, I suspect you're right: America is stuck, and getting unstuck will need a novel stimulus of some sort. As to what that might be and where it will lead? Not necessarily 'upwards'.
We are misfits and mavericks and we are coping with an ugly racial legacy that is quite challenging to fully resolve. And maybe part of the answer lies in the current calls for reparations to African Americans. Maybe that will both make Blacks less angry and Whites less likely to feel that Black anger is unjustified, thus ill behaved.
Jane Jacobs wrote that eyes on the street is the key to safety. Fostering a safe and civilized climate means working on ideas like that. Confining these discussions to what should happen at the point where a cop has pulled a gun is pretty much guaranteed to fail to solve it.
* http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_s...
Just because some of today's Americans' ancestors may have been misfits in their home country 400 years ago, doesn't mean every American today is a maverick.
And what about Australia? Many Australians descend from actual criminals. Yet when they thought their gun problem was getting out of hand, they decided to fix it... and they did.
Obviously Australian culture has not come out of nowhere, but a simple line from its 'convict' past cannot be drawn as anything other than a very poor caricature.
Whereas there are of course historical/cultural contributors to Australia's sanity re arms (notably: a liking of order, and tolerance of authority where it can help maintain that order), there are many others more contemporary in origin. We don't have a large arms industry (our governments choose instead to be corrupted by fossil fuel corporations; arguably just as dangerous). We have had genuinely courageous leadership at pivotal moments. We are not burdened with an archaic constitution. We tend to dissimulate regarding our violent history rather than valorise it. All of these features have their negative contributions in some policy arenas, but have helped nudge us away from a strong gun culture (which has at moments had the potential to emerge).
This has very little to do with "us" having been "sent here".
The romans did if I recall history class correctly. So did the french for a while and of course pre-WW germany in their colonies (we don't know how the Nazis would have handled it, their black population was so low that they didn't bother to do anything about it other than "if it's a problem, deal with it")
I think you could also count the british since they definitely had skin-color based slaves at times. (Atleast history class told me)
We had a situation in which the birth certificate of your grandmother could decide whether you die under most terrible conditions or live.
And please don't think that the whole "black skin = slave" is unique to america, the egyptians for example enslaved jewish people (as you might recall from some stories in some old, dusty book), some african countries warlords enslaved white people for their skin color, the british enslaved everyone who wasn't european. This is not unique to America.
In france they would not. They would not hold their own gun either in that situation.
This situation only exists because it is possible that this guys has a gun in america.
It's even frightening that somebody as smart as you didn't see this elephant in the room. The cultural bubble is strong here, and given the influence of your country, it really makes me uneasy.
You can't shoot guns if you don't have any.
The US culture IS strange. You even have this word, 'packing', short for being armed. Having a slang for that is very, very weird from an european point of view.
Hell, here, the worst you get for somebody being mugged is that they used a knife.
Guns are only for the mafias, which is definitly not day to day operation.
Don't get me wrong, i like going to the shooting range. But I woulf not like the content of the club safes to be on the street.
But I agree with one thing. I've been to the US 5 times, and the cops are scary. I have to go next year, and I don't feel confortable at all, even just passing the border.
It's not a good sign for your country.
https://i.imgur.com/tOTcCRH.jpg
Mind you, that's "white people", much less "white people that also happen to be police officers".
I think what is happening here is something called "availability bias" ( http://www.howtogetyourownway.com/biases/availability_bias ). Basically, events that can be easily recalled are given additional weight in decision making than the alternatives that don't. Daniel Kahneman described it very well in his excellent book "Thinking Fast and Slow", which I highly recommend.
The thing is is, "An unarmed black man shot and killed by white police officer" is often repeated in media stores because, well, there is money in it. And because the reporting is so frequent, our brains pair "black man" with "white police officer" and often we jump to the wrong conclusion. While no one is arguing that police brutality is a "problem", availability bias makes the problem seem far bigger than it actually is.
Edit: ah, oh yes, I shouldn't have been shocked to find out you're a huge racist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078663
The argument is that availability bias and media sensationalism makes the problem of "unarmed black man gets shot and killed by white police officer" seem a far bigger problem than it actually is.
Black people shootings, relatively speaking.
Relevant here is that the police, with effectively the tacit approval of the public at large, have created an alternate criminal justice pipeline. One where punishment is not merely meted out at the end of a fair trial, but rather one where every aspect of the system itself is a punishment. Even in the best case scenarios being arrested and detained is a traumatic experience. Indeed, the police have often used just this alone, with or without any charges, as a means to punish. In more common worse case scenarios the police use brutal force and the most extreme dehumanizing and degrading methods of bringing someone into custody. You will be injured, you will be humiliated, you will be reduced to inconsequentiality within the meat grinder of the criminal justice system. It's designed to wear people down, to reduce their resistance, to serve as a punishment all on its own.
And in the very most extreme examples the system extends this system of impromptu extra judicial justice dispensed by police officers to street executions. Failing to comply with police (regardless of the details) is a capital offense that can result in immediate summary execution. Running away from the police (regardless of the details) can be met with immediate summary execution. Talking back to the police can potentially result in immediate summary execution. Being a person of a body type or an ethnicity that causes a police officer to fear for their life can result in immediate summary execution. And for every example of a police officer being fired or, rarer still, brought to justice for these heinous acts there are countless more of police officers experiencing no consequences. For every objectively unjust street execution where the police kill someone "innocent" there are many more where the police unjustly execute a "bad guy" (rapist, thief, what-have-you) in a way that is much harder to prove as objectively unjust.
And that's the core of the problem. The police are out on the street and they have tremendous power in their hands these days. The power to dispense "justice" through their own volition on the spur of the moment, even including executions. So the police spend a lot of time working on how to systematically categorize people on the street into the "good guy" or "bad guy" buckets. They don't have the luxury of letting the justice system figure it out, they are the justice system. Worse, they revel in it. Once the "bad guy" bit is flipped, everything is on the table, including summary street execution. For people with power fantasies this is a gold mine. And they've been living it out for years, decades. The system today is designed to encourage, coddle, and facilitate officers who act this way. If you are rough with the "bad guys" you're a hero. If you are aggressive on the street you will make your quotas. And so on.
Today in the America of 2017 it is very difficult to argue with the fact that we live in a police state. It's a hard truth to swallow but every indication is that it's the case. The vast majority of executions (by m...
I feel pretty safe on the streets here and in general have high respect for the police force, something that I did not have in Canada (RCMP excepted, they're very good) or in the United States.
You must be a white male. Minorities have known America was a police state since conception.
Most of the police I interacted with were good guys. I got pulled over twice - the scottsdale officer bounced over & told me why he'd pulled me over (instead of asking for a confession). The sheriff asked for a confession ("Do you know why I pulled you over?", "I have some ideas..."), but decided I didn't need a ticket for missing that stop sign and gave me a written warning.
A retired cop I know was telling a cop story which included him telling someone "I don't make the rules I just enforce them." I've realized this is probably the origin of the term 'cop out'.
These diaries are two of my recent efforts to better define the tension between police and the public:
America's Make-Work Sheriff: The Anachronism of Joseph Arpaio - http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/09/americas-make-work-sheriff-a...
Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire - http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-se...
'Advice from a cop' was one of my earliest diaries at kuro5hin.org (RIP) - http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/04/15-sprinter-addict-advice-fr... - "Officer Steel" (I guess) really put the police's job in perspective for me.
Really the politicians need to be held accountable for screwing up the police's job - institutionalized racism was replaced with an unwinnable 'war on drugs'. I learned about 'mens rea' (guilty mind) and 'strict liability' ("crimes" where no victim is required) from some HN comments (thanks, whoever that was):
> Mens rea (/ˈmɛnz ˈriːə/; Law Latin for "guilty mind"[1][2][3]) is the mental element of 1) intention to commit a crime or 2) knowledge that one's action or lack of action would cause a crime to be committed. It is a necessary element of many crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
> A regulatory offence or quasi-criminal offence is a class of crime in which the standard for proving culpability has been lowered so a mens rea (Latin for "guilty mind") element is not required. Such offences are used to deter potential offenders from dangerous behaviour rather than to impose punishment for moral wrongdoing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_crime
In addition to the cold statistics provided by the Vice story above, check out this counter “anecdote”:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-nation/wp/2...
Warning: this might be the most disturbing video I’ve ever seen - an execution of an unarmed man by police.
Where in the (western) world would this be without consequences for the involved officers?
Isn’t it to serve and protect?
Coming from Austria where we have to extensively learn about the mechanics of fascism in school I can only tell my American friends:
Wake up before it’s too late.
I'm just trying to break through people's echo chambers, and help get to the core of the issue. I agreed with most of what the poster I replied to said, but wanted to point out that not all police are trigger-happy. I think any reform to policing in the United States has to help make non-trigger happy police officers' lives easier. The only way to do this is by ending the drug war.
Actually there was quite a lot of talk at the time about this.
Some places to start: http://mediaviolence.org/media-video-violence-addiction-rese...
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2014/...
Edit: puzzled by the apparent disagreement here?
But then right below that they give a graphic which covers the same period and breaks the shootings down into fatal (1378), nonfatal (2720), and unknown (283). That's a total of 4381, or 750 more than the number give in the paragraph above the graphic.
Also, note that they say their data is for the 50 largest departments. They say 1378 fatal shootings for 2010 through 2016. Add in the 283 unknown shootings because they might have also been fatal, and that gives 1661 fatal shootings.
It's interesting to compare to the data from killedbypolice.net. KBP data starts 2013-05-01, and here are the fatal shooting counts by year:
That comes to 4278 in 43 months, or 99.5/month. Compare to Vice's 1661 in 84 months, or 19.8/month.Vice says their data covers about 148k police officers serving 54 million Americans. That's about 1/5th of all police officers [1], so it looks like the ratio of fatal shootings per month from all departments to those from the 50 largest departments is about the same as the ratio of number of offices to number of office in the 50 largest departments. That suggests there isn't much difference between large departments and small departments.
[1] Based on numbers I Googled, although I was only able to find 2008 numbers.
But recently I've become convinced that BLM was right, and the thing that changed my mind was the story of Daniel Shaver. Google it and watch the video if you haven't seen it yet -- it might change your mind, too.
He wasn't armed, hadn't committed a crime earlier that day, didn't disrespect the officers, complied with police orders, and had the same skin color as the policeman who shot him. And they executed him anyway.
A jury then acquitted his killer of all charges.
I don't know what to think anymore.
Trayvon was killed during a time when I was extremely politically conservative, but later that year I actively participated in a Republican campaign in Florida. That moment is when I really started to criticize my own political and religious beliefs.
Since then, mostly thanks to moving away from my parents and heading to university, I've continued to drift away from my old viewpoints. I can't say I am 100% onboard with every position BLM has advocated but the same story told year after year has started to change my mind.
And this case has a shock factor for a white man that the others did not. I'm ashamed to admit that. It's an uncomfortable way to be woken up to one's own biases. I hope it's not too late to help change things for both black and white Americans. And I hope it's not too late to fix my own thinking.
I'm not even from the US, but these worrisome trends have been obvious for quite a while now, in many different ways. Like the mere existence of crowdsourced maps of police killing family pets [4] and something like "swatting people" actually being a thing, which is reserved in its severity pretty much to the US [5].
Note: I'm not trying to paint a super bleak picture of "all US police are evil", I just think there's a very real problem there. A problem that seems to be mostly driven by a culture of "War", like on drugs and on terror.
[0] http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/07/justice/north-carolina-tee...
[1] https://priceonomics.com/how-police-officers-seize-cash-from...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square...
[4] https://puppycidedb.com/
[5] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/robert-mcdaid...
I wouldn't really say that there's institutionalized conspiracy against blacks and that everyone is shooting them for no reason. There are obvious instances that individual police officers acted cruel but I wouldn't pin those instances as proof of a system wide corruption and conspiracy against blacks.
BLM is definitely not right.
Your characterization of the cop just proves my point. It is not the system wide conspiracy to kill, it's that people who want to kill and are sadistic control freaks love being cops?
So these are all particular instances and not an indication of system wide statistically significant killing spree.
I would also say that bias of the individual is not on a scale to have a statistically significant bias happening within the police.
non-white Americans commit more violent crimes, that's a fact. I would not blame the police for that fact. There's something cultural going on there and I would not even say that is a product of racist culture. IMO, USA is the least racist it has ever been.
Why are you even posting on this topic with so little knowledge of it?
Facts are that black people commit more crimes. These are not fake crimes, these are real crimes. This obviously makes it very probable that they'll have issues with the cops, including shootings.
It's very simple, groups that commit more crimes, do get shot more often than others by cops.
Yes, there are instances of obvious cop racism and bad judgement but these are instances, not an epidemic.
Was it avoidable? Definitely. It's a tragedy and not necessary.
In most other civilized countries the police would have handled this much more maturely and with better training.
The US appear in a scary light when I read that.
As I've mentioned in the past, I feel lucky I don't have to live in the US, it seems to be a terrible place to be.
The problem isn't lack of training, it's the way they're being trained.
A country where sometimes kids can have a hold on an automatic doesn't feel right to me.
Citation needed? That isn't a likely situation outside a carefully monitored range with waivers, etc. signed.
If they want to fight police brutality, great, but then why are they called BLM? If they want to save the lives of black people, they're doing a disservice by acting as if police brutality is the area to focus on.
No, I think it can be helpful to criticize if people are being misled into picking up pennies when twenties, fifties, and hundreds are falling out of their pockets.
I've known several cops, they are without exception good people who would never harm someone intentionally. (I do believe there are a few bad ones, but I've never met them.)
I can't wait for this issue to become de-politicized again. Cops are totally undercompensated, under appreciated and deserve much better than this.