This article doesn't seem to make the case that the police kill too many people. It's just observations that the police sometimes kill people.
What nobody ever seems to discuss is how many we should expect the police to kill. If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year? Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. I'm not saying we should excuse the murders or murderers, but obviously we expect some to happen in the same we expect some number of truckers, taxi drivers, programmers, whatever to commit murder every year.
Can't you make a reasonable comparison to other countries? At the least, it should be possible to see if there is a relationship between police killings and murder. Seems an even chance that they are rather unrelated.
No, the police dept in USA deals with alot more than what other police departments do in the world. For example, you can argue that the NYC police department is bigger than several countries.
At those density levels, how can you compare a city to an entire country?
This is silly. If you have to, compare different states to get some signal. If there is a relationship as implied, it should be easy to prove it. At the least, decent correlation could be displayed to hint that a causal relationship could be found.
It's not unreasonable to demand a higher standard of the police.
The real flaw is in assuming that all "police killings" are murders. You would expect some proportion, and a higher number than the general population because of the nature of the job, to be legitimate self-defense or defense of others. So then you need to distinguish those cases from wrongful killings.
Which is hard, because the usual way to do that would be to look at how many of them are convicted of murder. But if the case you're trying to make is that not enough of the actual murders are successfully prosecuted, that's not satisfactory. And then what? Data not available, so everybody assumes what they want based on their own politics.
I think it is unreasonable to demand a higher standard of the police. "Don't murder" is what we ask of everyone in society. If we had a reliable way to preemptively detect murderers we'd solve a lot of problems. Given that we don't, how could we expect to prevent murderers from being police officers?
On top of that police are typically younger men - the demographic that commits almost all murders. Police always have guns. They are the kind of people willing and able to deal with hostile and potentially violent people. They have natural inclination to violence, to be able to deal with and dispense it. Personally, I'd expect the police to be more likely than average to become murderers, not less.
> If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year?
Right now, police in the US kill about 1000 people each year. That amounts to about one in 15-20 non-suicide deaths caused by gun violence. You can argue that 40 is too many, but it's two orders of magnitude lower than the current number. 40 is the number of people killed by the Chicago police alone every 2-3 years.
You're conflating police murder with police homicide. The difference is that some (hopefully almost all) of the time the police kill someone, they are justified in doing so. 40 is what we should expect for murders - i.e completely unjustifiable killings.
This is also blurred a bit further because we can imagine a class of killing that's "kind of justified" that we'd expect the police to sometimes engage in. Something like killing through negligence or incompetence. A certain fraction of people are likely negligent or incompetent. If you're an incompetent plumber, pipes may burst. If you're an incompetent, lazy, whatever police officer you may cause someone to die. We should also expect some level of this too.
If you've for some reason been listening exclusively to the anti-BLM garbage being spewed by right wing media, sure, I guess that's a reasonable thing to believe.
But there's a massive difference in saying "Policing in this country is broken - cops kill too many people" versus "Cops and lot of white _and_ black people.. see? BLM is a pointless movement". Right wingers seem to love to pretend they're saying the former when they actually mean the latter.
Projecting in the sense that.. my personal experience with this viewpoint has been exclusively made by friends, family, and randos on social media parroting this exact viewpoint for the exact reason I posited. Sure.
But yeah such political content is unfortunately bound to be flagged in HN unless it has some sort of explicit tech connection.
I think there's actually a case to be made that there is widespread soft corporate censorship enforcing a new orthodoxy on race discourse (and other things), I'm just waiting on somebody to make it rather than just firing another blind volley in the culture war.
I would agree that there has been a lot of problematic race rhetoric posed by certain BLM aligned folks.. and would definitely posit that such soft censorship is a problem for the development of a mutually beneficial understanding of the racial problems plaguing this country between members of different races (there might be a more elegant way to state this).
An example of this aggressive, non-empathetic, censoring attitude that grinds my gears would be when that FB employee tried to publicly shame a colleague for opting not to put a BLM banner on the developer docs of RecoilJS. The whole mantra of "Silence is violence" can apparently now be used to accuse anyone of the terrible thoughtcrime of not talking about racism at all times.. even in places and situations where it doesn't make sense or wouldn't help the cause.
Extrapolate this out to how many people are unwilling to consider or merely listen to viewpoints that aren't in complete alignment (with whatever the accuser holds to be the absolute truth of non-racism).. yuck.
"US police officers are seen mocking a 73-year-old woman with dementia as they watch video of her shoulder going "pop" during her forcible arrest,"
How they enjoy themselves and congratulatory fist-bump each other on achieving that "pop" tells everything one needs to know about police brutality. All that while the woman with all those injuries to her shoulder (and still handcuffed - basically being subjected to medieval torture) was sitting right around the corner - something like for more than 2 hours before getting medical attention.
That psychopathic-level lack of empathy resulting in the culture of total disregard for human life and wellbeing is why other police were standing guard while Chavin was enjoying himself torturing Floyd to death for almost 10 minutes. One can imagine all the fist-bumps and high-fives he got after that.
exactly. If committing horrible things is a business as usual that is the firm basis for getting organizations listed as terrorist, criminal (RICO), etc.
It’s not just one video. It’s just the latest example of many such videos. It’s another example of police committing crimes and getting away with it. For other examples lookup police officers and the domestic violence they routinely get away with.
Group X is horrible when there are consistently minor consequences when these things are exposed. In this case the brutality occurred months ago and only came to light through a lawsuit being filed. It was only then that the officers faced some repercussions. This is common and widespread. So called good police routinely coverup and protect the bad ones. Consequences only occur if there is publicly released video and even when there is released video convictions and real consequences are rare.
There is widespread usage of extra-judicial punishments by police with little to no consequences. Citizens exercising Constitutional get arrested where the only charge is resisting arrest. There is a policing problem in the U.S. Let’s not pretend that there isn’t one.
I rather liked the meme that police shouldn't kill guilty people either.
So, the ideal number is clearly zero. Just the same as the ideal number of people to die in car crashes. Yes, you can acknowledge that zero is likely not going to get attained. No, you don't give up and argue over the number as a distraction.
Ideally criminals wouldn’t kill people either. If you had the choice of the police killing a criminal or same criminal killing you or a loved one, which would you choose?
I certainly can’t. I can readily imagine scenarios where I would be unable to stop a criminal from taking lives without using deadly force.
Perhaps that’s just a failure of my imagination though. Please elaborate on how you would effect the arrest of a criminal who is actively using deadly force in an attempt to cause grave bodily harm or death to yourself or other innocent persons?
I’m quite serious by the way. Using deadly force in self defense is a nightmare of legal fees and moral anguish under the best circumstances, so I’m very interested in reliable and reliably non lethal methods to stop, which is to say “arrest,” someone who is physically my superior and in a frame of mind where he intends to do grave bodily harm to me or persons I’m meant to protect.
Most police shootings are not in scenarios where the individual being shot is actively taking lives. Almost all of the situations in the linked article describe cases where the person killed was running away, was complying with orders, or otherwise could have been apprehended without the need for lethal force. There are numerous non-lethal weapons that police are equipped with that could be used to subdue an alleged criminal: pepper spray, rubber bullets, tasers, etc.
Even folks who are threatening the lives of others are entitled to a fair trial. Lethal force may be allowed, but that doesn't mean that the police should use it. The right to a fair trial applies to everyone, not just the folks who police don't shoot to death.
The [dangerous] implication behind saying "[...] Police Kill too many Innocent people" is that police have a right to kill criminals, which is not true. Whether or not you are innocent, police still don't have a right (and shouldn't) kill you, so I personally am rejecting your re-interpretation of the title.
Police are responsible for for apprehending the criminals and only are supposed to use deadly force in self-defense or in protecting other people.
> Moreover, many would argue that disproportionate poverty levels among black people render them more likely to encounter police officers in the first place—vastly unfair, but different from the problem being simply cops’ standing racist bias
Actually that's exactly the problem of systemic racism. Racism is at the level of the system and not the individual (though there are still individual racists out there for sure).
Cops kill and injure way too many people (of all races) (without due cause), and encounters with Police escalate much too quickly. This is a problem, and that's why a big conversation on the role and responsibility and methods of policing is happening. Though Police too exists within a system, such as the possibility of any civilian to be armed and carrying at any time, and so all that context must be considered.
Blacks are disproportionately a victim of this, so obviously they are more invested in this conversation, and leading the charge on pushing for changes.
It turns out that one of the likely reason for their disproportionate encounters with Police is their disproportionate socio-economic situation, which was likely created as a result of the racist history of the country and the heritage and legacy (or lack thereof) it left their communities with. And that would make it a systemic racism issue.
The amount of policing in this or other community does not change the fact that black people do commit a lot of crimes and more policing is at least to some extend justified. I'm not talking about bullshit, almost petty in comparison crimes like drugs or theft, but serious crimes like murder. There is a dead body and you have to find who did it and police can't just ignore it or turn a blind eye if it turns out that the murderer was white.
Poor people commit a lot of crimes, and black people are disproportional poor due to centuries of racism.
This is besides the point. We have a real policing problem in America which we can see by the rate that U.S. police injure and kill citizens as compared to other countries. It's not even close.
There are many reasons for this, but we have to start by recognizing that there's a problem.
US population is at over 300 million people and police kills about a thousand people yearly. It might sound heartless, but those kinds of numbers is what I'd realistically expect from such a huge country with legal firearms.
I don't recognize any problem, but people in power seem to and if I'm not mistaken the police was defunded and there is overall less police in some places, so you're already getting what you wanted. I think as a result there is a rise in homicide, but truth be told I didn't care enough to verify any of those claims.
Ways of thinking about individuals just don't scale to populations of millions. Those groups do things for reasons.
Reducing the funding of police is not meant in a vacuum. The idea is to use that money to do other things that reduce crime. Police funding in the US is way past the point of diminishing returns in general, and that money is much better invested in other approaches to the same issue.
Equally, armed police do things they shouldn't have to do, like wellness checks, or mental health calls.
The use of word "problem" implies here that it's something that can be fixed. I don't believe it can be fixed, I think this amount of killings is something you should expect no matter what. Just prosecute whoever's guilty and move on.
I don't care enough to verify if there was a rise in homicides, I just heard about it. But yes, anyone who's not an activist for your righteous cause is a part of a problem. I'm a terrible person, I know.
I disagree and this is probably pointless given your comments.
Prosecuting police is basically brand new, and still a tiny tiny % so that's not enough.
I disagree we can only deal with it after the fact. I'm pretty pessimistic but I just can't get on board with your worldview of utter futility. even if tilting at windmills 99% of the time, even tiny increments, change does happen.
I's also important to look at violence police perpetrate and escalate that isn't bullets.
One thing I think HN could get into is body cameras which <i>have</i> made a big difference and an area tech and law can improve.
maybe use an ASIC and ML like Blink to enable all on 'smart' recording and storage with lower battery usage (and cops can carry larger batteries + storage that is a lame excuse). low power bluetooth can recognize when inside a cop car to save space etc.
Couple that with changing laws to make all the now-fully saved video automatically public for accountability. Could use technology again to blur faces until legal proceedings determine to unmask.
> the likely reason for their disproportionate encounters with Police is their disproportionate socio-economic situation
Seems odd to omit the more direct cause - disproportionate homicide and violent crime rates [1] - and skip to socio-economics as the reason for police encounters. Especially since the black homicide rate is ~10x higher even compared with the same income brackets [2].
>Actually that's exactly the problem of systemic racism. Racism is at the level of the system and not the individual (though there are still individual racists out there for sure).
This is a neat explanatory theory but it is only one potential explanation and the reason that the modern movements that are predicated upon it are so dangerous is that it is treated as though it is the only explanation.
>It turns out that one of the likely reason for their disproportionate encounters with Police is their disproportionate socio-economic situation
There is absolutely nothing outside of correlation to indicate that this is a "likely" reason. The influence of a totally broken culture is drastically understated in socially acceptable discourse. This disproportionate rate of police encounters is unique to blacks and not nearly as prevalent among virtually any other low income socioeconomic group. It's trivial to blame injustices of the past (which plenty of other groups have experienced to various degrees) but even discussing the necessary, drastic change in culture required to solve this problem is taboo. And, ironically, such a position is incompatible with the modern progressive framework, within which such a solution would be seen as whitewashing or gentrification. And rightly so, ghetto black culture is inseparable from glorification of crime and violence.
So instead we blame the issue entirely on "systemic racism", the only proof of which is disparate outcome, and the solution will invariably lead the rest of society to suffer the effects of rampant criminality before leaders from black communities will, as has happened repeatedly in the past, later switch to complaining that black communities are underserved by police services, starting the cycle anew. Biden's now unpopular crime bill, along with disproportionate penalization of crack, had strong support from black leaders and black politicians, but today's ideologues class them with the same boogyman of so called systemic racism.
> The influence of a totally broken culture is drastically understated in socially acceptable discourse
What do you think the "socio" in "socio-economic" refers too?
Obviously culture plays into it, the racist treatment of blacks over history didn't just affect financial capital and heritage, it had direct effects on social aspects, restricted access to education, broken family dynamics, cycle of abuse, religious indoctrination, ancestral cultural erasure, and probably contributed directly to a glorification of crime as a means to upward movement, since nothing else seemed to work or be offered to them. All these in turn affects economic outcomes as well, but also economic outcomes have affected those social aspects.
Your culture is a result of your environment, and if you take someone and force them into an environment of abuse and discrimination like was the case of afro-americans, whose culture is it really? In my mind, afro-american culture is American culture, this is all our culture. Our culture has put a race at an absolute disadvantage for generations, resulting in a lack of economic and social prosperity for that race today. You can't then go and say, that's their fault, their culture, not mine, when your culture had a direct impact on theirs. So now it's time to say, let's grow our culture to one of healing, inclusion, and reconciliation together.
And here's where it matters, the next time someone is caught with possession or selling of drugs, will you choose to incarcerate them for years? Or will you decide to reinvest in their education, rehabilitation and support them for whatever led them there.
The next time a budget is voted on, will you vote to build more prisons, or to invest the money in services and safety in communities of color. Will you choose to more heavily invest in education, employment, housing, and health services in the country, or in police funds?
And here's where it matters even more, the next time you encounter a black person, will you treat them with an underlying bias that they are probably more violent and crime driven just because of your association of their skin color you've made with your belief in their culture leading to crime? Will you have your guards up, and will you likely favor another race over them due to this?
Racism used to mean something related to human conscious , motivation, psychological leaning. Now any measured discrepancies in race is "systematic racism".
If a big asteroid dropped from the sky and killed thousands of people, it could turned out to be a racist asteroid.
This is uncharitable. Sometimes systems disproportionately favor certain outcomes, and systemic racism describes a subset of those systems.
If you were playing a boardgame, and the rules said I get to role 2 dice for every 1 dice you roll, at that point the game wouldn't be fair. If we were playing chess and I got to start with 2 queens, then you would be within your rights to complain that the game wasn't fair.
And if you complained about the rules of the game, and said that game wasn't fair, and I hand-waved that by saying that you were misusing fairness to push back against "any outcome where you lost", it would be reasonable to take issue with that.
Systemic racism isn't just any outcome where Black people get hurt, it describes a reinforcing mechanic in society where Black people are repeatedly hurt and where their disadvantages perpetuate themselves. Crime drives people into poverty, which imposes social and economic disadvantages which keep them from rising out of poverty, which drives them into crime -- increased attention on those neighborhoods leads to preconceptions and biases among officers, it leads to fewer opportunities for the people in those neighborhoods, and the cycle continues. It's reinforced by the system itself, and by people inside the system who mean well but contribute to it, and by people outside of the system that use it to support their own racist agendas.
It's a lose more mechanic that reinforces unequal outcomes for Black communities, and its a mechanic that was very obviously set in motion by redlining, voter and wage suppression, by explicitly racist housing policies, and by slavery itself. It is not an accident that poor neighborhoods tend to be predominantly Black, that happened deliberately. "Racist" is a perfectly fine word to describe the outcomes of that system, it's nothing like an asteroid.
The word "racism" or any "xxxism" always indicate the underlying intention or psychological leaning. You can say there are systemic reasons to explain the current racial discrepancies, but unless the reasons are intentional, such like the policies are directly explicitly demanding a differential treatment on the basis of race, use the word "racism" is just to obscure different levels of mechanisms in the society and try to use the language to confuse people.
The users of the word "systemic racism" on the one hand claim it does not necessarily mean there is intentional racism, on the other hand they ride on the listeners' emotional response of intentional racism.
As the matter of fact, the only racist policy nowadays demanding a differential treatment on the basis of race is Affirmative Action promoted by the left. But the left doesn't care Asian kids are heavily penalized by their skin color.
> always indicate the underlying intention or psychological leaning
You can say that all you want, but words have cultural meanings, and it's just not true. We're not going to get very far if your argument boils down to "the way that people commonly use the word racism is wrong." Society disagrees with you, and they get to choose what words mean.
More to the point, I think it's a little naive to say that the current situation with Black neighborhoods doesn't have intentionality behind it. Redlining was on purpose, it was not an accident. Regardless of whether every single person participating in that system today is trying to be racist, the position we're in exists because of intentional action during America's history.
If you want to argue that the intentionality goes away or should be ignored as soon as a law is passed, first I disagree that racism is completely absent in modern policy decisions, but second, it's just a silly thing to argue even if racism had ended when we passed civil rights.
It's like if I start a chess game with 2 queens, and halfway through the game I throw one of my queens away. Is the game suddenly fair? No, because I've built myself a structural advantage during the first half of the game, pushed you into a worse position, captured more pieces, and that advantage can't suddenly be ignored during the second half just because I'm no longer actively cheating.
> the word "racism" is just to obscure different levels of mechanisms
People say this, but I have noticed a strong correlation between people understanding what the words "systemic racism" means and understanding a lot about how these systems operate. If people using the words "systemic racism" were just running around doing nothing, and it was everyone else trying to get rid of problematic housing policies or qualified immunity, then I might be more sympathetic to this concern.
But that's not what I see. The people who understand the racial origins of ghettos are also the people on the ground working hard to reform housing policies. They're very much not using systemic racism as a distraction, they're using it as a motivation to examine how our modern systems work and to try and make them more equitable. That's unequivocally a good thing for everyone, regardless of race.
> Society disagrees with you, and they get to choose what words mean.
Lol. Society disagrees with you. Vast majority of people knows racism mean intentional. "Systemic racism" is just a political jargon throw around by one side of politics.
> People say this, but I have noticed a strong correlation between people understanding what the words "systemic racism" means and understanding a lot about how these systems operate.
If you really understand how the systems operate, you would have known the biggest issue with Black Americans is more than 70% single parenthood of Black kids.
"In the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households had two parents.[15] When Moynihan warned in his 1965 report on the coming destruction of the black family, however, the out-of-wedlock birthrate had increased to 25% among the black population.[12] This figure continued to rise over time and in 1991, 68% of black children were born outside of marriage.[16] U.S. Census data from 2010 reveal that more African-American families consisted of single mothers than married households with both parents.[17] In 2011, it was reported that 72% of black babies were born to unmarried mothers.[11] As of 2015, at 77.3 percent, black Americans have the highest rate of non-marital births among native Americans.[18]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...
Unfortunately, people like to throw "systemic racism" around are the same people try their best to avoid addressing the real issue here.
> are the same people try their best to avoid addressing the real issue
Okay, I'll bite.
What are you personally doing to address the issues leading to single parenthoods in Black communities, since the rest of us are just avoiding the issue? Are you lobbying to support better sex education? Better healthcare coverage? More social safety nets for single-parent children who need additional help? More school resources for schools in those areas that have an outsized number of students struggling with family issues at home? You support those policies, right?
And do you think that monetary issues might have anything to do with family stability? Might money coincidentally be the single leading cause of divorce in America today? Out of curiosity, might financial stability be one of the single most significant leading indicators of family stability?
Before make any policy suggestions, first honestly admit its existence and admit it has nothing to do with slavery. And then you might find what caused it and how to fix it.
Admit that single parent families often struggle? Yes, admitted. Single parent families often struggle and they need more support.
That it has nothing to do with slavery? You haven't been paying attention. Black communities do not magically have higher single-parent rates because God ordained it. They have higher rates because of literally everything I've been talking about in the past 3 comments.
> and how to fix it.
And this is exactly what I mean. You can look at the comments in this thread, and one group of people are proposing policy solutions, and the other group is complaining that words make them feel bad.
There's some weird tiptoeing around the issue here, which I sort of suspect is because you're hesitant to publicly say what you believe the solution really is. So I'll ask it directly: how do you think we should help single-parent kids who need additional support?
Now you are just bluntly making stuff up. How did something exploded in 1950-60s was a result of slavery? So anything happened to African Americans is a result of slavery? Just throwing the word systematic racism is sufficient for you.
And how the heck of helping single-parent kids solve this problem? What kind of dishonest question is that. Yeah, let government be the daddy.
> Just throwing the word systematic racism is sufficient for you.
No, but understanding the history of this country in the 1950-60s, including purposefully racist systems like redlining that were still rampant -- that is sufficient.
> And how the heck of helping single-parent kids solve this problem?
What? You said that single-parents families were the problem:
> the biggest issue with Black Americans is more than 70% single parenthood of Black kids.
But whatever. You tell me what you think the problem is and what you think the solution is. Stop dancing around the question, do you have any plans or actions you're taking right now to make the situation better, at all?
Because you've spent three comments now complaining that everyone except you is avoiding the real issue, and you seem very hesitant to state exactly what you think the real issue is and what you think we should be doing to "fix" it. And to be completely honest, I suspect the reason is that you don't actually believe the current outcomes are a problem, and you don't actually think that they warrant fixing.
I run into a lot of people who tell me that focusing on racism and systems is a distraction that's preventing the Black community from getting help, but when I dig into their beliefs, what ends up surfacing in the majority of cases is that they don't believe the Black community should have help.
So you don't want the government to help with setting up community programs? You don't want more money for schools in that area? Okay fine, are you donating money to charities in inter-city areas? Are you supporting or investing in local businesses in those areas? You tell me what you're doing to help.
Systemic racism means the system discriminates against race and that it does so as a result of racism.
So yes, it does imply the intention was always to discriminate against black people, because that was the explicit intent of a large number of people over centuries in the country is why the current system shows discrimination against a particular race.
It's possible the current policies no longer harbor direct racism, but that the effect of prior policies and attitudes still lingers. Thus it is necessary to recognize their residual effect, and find ways to mitigate it, otherwise it is not true that the current system isn't racist, if racist driven intentions of the past still have an effect on the outcomes of the system today.
It's very likely the current system's inequalities in the black population are a direct result of actual racist individuals from the past. For example, when you had a law in the 1950 that said:
“No dwelling shall be used or occupied except by members of the Caucasian race, but the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”
Slavery, redlining, race segregation, displacement, racial slur, racial biases are all real racist practices that were the result of a large number of racist individuals in the past. Maybe most of that is gone at the individual level today, but a lot of the systems were put in place from before and still harbor a legacy from that racist past, such as a black child likely having poorer parents, living in a worse community, thus starting off at a disatvantage in equity and opportunity.
That means the inequalities we see generated in the systems today are not the result of randomness the way an asteroid would, but of a racist legacy, and that's why we say it's systemic racism caused by a history of systematic and individual racism.
Now, other people, some white as well, similarly suffer from lack of equity and opportunity. The system is similarly unfair to them, and that can be due to other factors, a white child can be born poor, from parents with addiction issues, in a bad neighborhood, and the system similarly won't be as fair to them and make things harder. Those are issues we should also solve, and maybe how we solve systemic racism can solve other forms of systemic issues, in fact that be a great outcome of all this. Still, that doesn't change anything about the fact that some of the disproportionate inequalities in the black population (in the US) is likely due to systemic issues caused by past racism, making systemic racism an issue that still needs solving.
> For example, racial differences in marriage rates may be largely due to racial income disparities, which lead to stiffer marriage penalties for black adults.
And my argument is that it's very likely the reason for these racial income disparities is the racist legacy of our systems. I see no contradiction, in fact this is supporting evidence to my claim.
Systemic racism causes socio-economic inequalities that disproportionately affect blacks. As your article suggest, it seems this even causes issues with marital engagement and family structure.
> And my argument is that it's very likely the reason for these racial income disparities is the racist legacy of our systems. I see no contradiction, in fact this is supporting evidence to my claim.
I find that unlikely, because you see similar results in Germany, and Germany does not share the US' history of slavery.
> Systemic racism causes socio-economic inequalities that disproportionately affect blacks.
The socio-economic inequalities are just as well explained by cultural differences though, and you don't need a conspiracy that set up a racist system but then decided to hide it very well, and set it up in such a way, that it doesn't affect all Black people, but filters by ethnicity [1].
Poverty doesn't really work as an explanation for delinquency either. Germany has had many Vietnamese immigrants come with literally nothing, not speaking the language etc. A generation later, they're hard to distinguish from the native population with regards to education, have low unemployment and are creating moderate wealth (lots of self-employed/entrepreneurs). Culture is a much better explanation than poverty.
First, I can't find any stats online that claim marriage rates in Germany among Black communities are identical to marriage rates in the US. Maybe you do have a source, but you need to be more specific if you're going to make claims like this.
I also can't find any stats online that claim that wealth inequality in Germany is identical to wealth inequality in America. This would be a really good thing for you to cite, because your whole argument seems to be that there's something inherent in the Black community that means it will make less money no matter where it goes or what the context is. If Germany doesn't have comparable wage gaps to the US, then we don't even need to continue with the rest of your comment.
> and Germany does not share the US' history of slavery.
Second, can you think of any event that happened in Germany that might have had bad outcomes for Black people? Maybe one that happened during the 1940's? Do you know the date that Germany's current constitution was ratified? How can you possibly say with a straight face that Germany has no history of racism?
Germany's history with racism was different from the US, and we'd expect that to manifest in different ways. We don't expect racism in Germany to look identical to racism in the US. But WW2 was recent, my own grandfather fought in WW2. We're barely a full generation away from a Germany that was trying to exterminate different races.
> The socio-economic inequalities are just as well explained by cultural differences though
It's poor reasoning to assume that Black communities are a monolithic culture with the same beliefs and behaviors everywhere in the world. Are you really saying that German wage gaps were caused by the way Americans halfway across the world raised their kids in the 50s and 60s?
It's also kind of interesting that you assume Black culture would be the same across multiple continents, backgrounds, and national origins, but that you don't assume the same of the treatment of Black people or the attitudes of the cultures that surround them. There's a lot of inconsistency here, and you need to decide whether or not you really believe that all countries are homogeneous.
Unless you're claiming there's a genetic factor at play, but I'm sure you wouldn't claim that, right?
> that it doesn't affect all Black people, but filters by ethnicity
Are you trying to say that results that vary greatly depending on ethnicity can't possibly have racial factors at play? The way that people experience racism differs depending on both their origins and where they live.
> A generation later, they're hard to distinguish from the native population with regards to education, have low unemployment and are creating moderate wealth
I know people like to hold up Germany as an inclusive utopia, but Germany absolutely does have a problem with people being racist to immigrants, and not just Black immigrants. Germany's past with racism is different from America's and the outcomes aren't identical. But this completely rosy view of immigration in Germany that you're pushing just isn't true. If you read actual reports of immigrants to Germany, they do struggle with racism and cultural alienation.
> Poverty doesn't really work as an explanation for delinquency either.
Finally, you will be hard-pressed to find any serious study about divorce that doesn't mention money as a contributing factor. I don't understand how anyone could claim that poverty doesn't have an effect on family/childhood statistics.
You want to talk about conspiracies, then which scenario is more likely? That all of that research is wrong and all of the sociologists are being paid off? Or that there are some additional contributing factors in Germany that you don't understand?
> "Blacks are disproportionately a victim of this, so obviously they are more invested in this conversation..."
while i actually agree with most of what you said, the focus on (disproportionate, but few) deaths by police is misdirectional. like much media reporting, it's premised on an emotional trigger meant to short-circuit rational thinking, which is decidedly a diservice to public discourse. arguments against racism can, and should, stand entirely on the merits of racism (systemic or otherwise) simply being unjust and irrational, not on outrage-bait like this.
that's to say that the murders of black folks by police should direct our attention towards racism, not the numbers of murders by police, because we'll end up trying to solve "murders by police" rather than racism, and then pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, when it was anything but.
Blacks are more involved in crime also in the UK and many other European countries where there was no slavery of blacks, so I am not sure that is the reason. They are just immigrants like any other group of immigrants. Maybe there is some special racism against them but racism is not always a cause for criminality as we have seen in other communities in Europe in the past which suffered from racism, like Jews for example.
This seems to go against your claim of systematic racism[1]. More whites than any other race have been shot and killed by the police in the last 3 years.
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
The USA is an outlier, by quite a margin, amongst rich countries. Of course there are differences in methodologies etc etc but nonetheless: USA is 34.8 per 10 million people. That puts it between Uruguay and Angola. Canada is 9.7. France, which has plenty of armed officers, is 3.8. The UK is 0.5. I come from the UK, it has plenty of violent people in it.
It's not enough to say this-is-just-how-it-is in the US, because the US is weird here. It's not normal for the security services to kill so many people in a rich country.
The US has probably one of the most disrespectful and outlandish fringe populations with higher crime overall than other rich countries. Compare the US to how people behave in Australia, Norway, Germany, etc... Have a feeling this will get down voted but you know its true.
As someone who actually likes and owns guns, I really think most (it's obviously complicated and multi-faceted) of this can be explained simply by saying "guns"
I mean... yes. That does seem to be it basically. Or not just guns (the Swiss have A LOT of guns) but guns + an attitude to them. The closest equivalent where I'm from in the UK (and I do live in the US now) is boy racers. Young men driving obnoxiously and thinking they have every right to drive obnoxiously. And they definitely do kill people, though as a side-effect, as it were. Seems like there's a similar attitude to guns in the US, but legally buttressed. My outsider's perspective anyway.
> Seems like there's a similar attitude to guns in the US, but legally buttressed.
There really isn’t. Almost no gun owners do anything unsafe with guns or ever shoot anyone. US gun culture is extremely safety focussed.
The media paints a completely bizarre and distorted picture of gun owners in general, picking the stupidest or most outlandish examples they can.
Most people who are involved in shootings in the US are in deeply underprivileged areas where there is a lot of crime in general, and ineffective policing and a dearth of opportunity.
It is often not irrational for young men in these circumstances to get involved in gang or crime related activities given the lack of alternatives, and it’s also not irrational to carry a gun under these circumstances, and it does lead to a lot of shootings.
This has very little to do with gun ownership and gun culture in the US in general.
I say this as someone who owns a good amount of guns, enjoys shooting, collecting, and has formal training in them.
Gun culture in the states, imo, needs iteration. The problem is that the people at the helm of gun culture are operating and advocating out of fear. The worst thing that ever happened to gun culture was people started lobbying to cancel 2a, which gave these people their power. It invited people who know nothing about guns, their uses, their purpose, or how to handle them into a world with real world consequences. It inspires buying frenzies and other ridiculous behavior. I'm not sure how many of these people actually kill people as opposed to the loopholes where bad actors purchase weapons they never should've had access to in order to bring violence and chaos into the world for their own gain.
Rather than talking down bad gun culture, I'd like to talk up good gun culture:
- know your weapon safety conditions. They're a community language for communicating safety and awareness. Knowing your weapon condition and confidently communicating something like, "condition 4" instills trust and confidence.
- know your weapons troubleshooting and function check procedures. The worst thing you can hear when you go to use a weapon is "clunk".
- know weapon safety rules. The military has some great ones that are quite universal. Treat, Never, Keep, Keep.
- weapons should be cared for and stored correctly. This is just an extension of good safety procedures.
Having good gun culture isn't just a thing to geek out about. It's a source of pride, much less a necessity.
In US, there is a culture of going out of your way to do something that would be inconsiderate to others. I think its perpetuated by movies, games, social media. Most other countries probably dont have that issue, though France seems like an outlier given how much they seem to try and make muslims miserable over there.
Errr... are you implying that all Muslims are violent and ready to murder people the instant they feel their beliefs aren't sufficiently respected? Because that behavior is being targeted, and there's no general anti-Muslim rhetoric from the president. Nor from most parties.
It's not really something that can be cited and I'm probably going to get some shit for it, but having been in France for a good while if you're a Muslim it really does seem that way, at least compared to Canada or even the US.
French Muslims aren't any less French. Most of them are multiple generations removed from another country than France. Why would you expect them to move to the country of their grandparents and of whose language they often don't even speak?
Beyond that, most immigrants to France aren't Muslim either. Around a third come from the Maghreb, though not all of them are Muslim either. The reason why they go to France is because colonial era French institutions mean that they were taught French, and their countries are quite poor, so they go to the only country they have a solid shot of going to. Often they already have family in France.
But even then, only about 100 000 people from the Maghreb immigrate into France, which is slightly north of a tenth of a percent.
They can't really leave France either for mostly the same reason France is the main source of immigration.
>The UK is 0.5. I come from the UK, it has plenty of violent people in it.
Far, far more violent crime in the US. And there's essentially no guns in the UK.
Even still, rates have been falling in the US to my knowledge.
Edit:
For perspective, I live in Chicago. There are usually 80-100+ shootings a weekend here. Since all US cops have guns that means cops just in 1 city could theoretically shoot 100 people a weekend and technically be justified.
This really isn't the case in any other "rich" country as you put it.
Not that this doesn't mean there's not huge issues with policing and society, it just doesn't make sense to compare US to other countries.
This is an important point. But I also think this mindset that has been instilled in police that every encounter could be a dangerous gun ambush has caused a lot of unnecessary escalation and violence.
Policing isn't even a top 10 most dangerous job. Yes police offers are shot on duty. But the practices they use & their racist bias create confrontation and escalate encounters to violence.
'Warrior', 'killology' training has instilled quick to fire, ready to kill dehumanizing behavior and literally teaches Black neighborhoods are 'battlegrounds.'
Chicago is definitely a hard example combing the worst of our gun fetish, laws, and consequences of racism stealing opportunity and wealth from generations of Black and Brown communities. I'm sure it feels like a battleground for many that live there. No one could argue the situation there is under control or easy to control.
But there are a lot of other examples of bringing guns into peaceful encounters for instance traffic stops where they come up guns drawn as just an example with many recent tragedies created. Briana Taylor no-knock is an extreme example of policies that create deadly confrontation.
Vast majority of policing jobs youre right are pretty mundane and not esp dangerous. Policing in high crime areas can at times be a different ballgame though and more stressful/dangerous than the average would suggest.
That's interesting. One might also just say a lot of evidence points to the US being a "highly developed poor country" (or something) - a third world country for a significant part of its citizens.
But more broadly, the US should be compared to the broad range of countries in the world. Just comparing US indeed just makes the country look "weird". But looking India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, etc shed more light on the situation. Especially, as large country, the US contain a lot of development and underdevelopment (decay, corruption, etc).
Yes -- but. Take the UK for example. The UK is the most unequal major country in Europe. It's a rich country which also contains some of the poorest regions in the continent. And yet, that doesn't translate to killings.
EDIT: to be clear, I am not disagreeing with you, but the same analysis could be applied to other countries, without the same conclusion. The US is not unusual in containing multitudes.
The different regions are the size of countries though.
Instead of comparing it to any European country, comparing it to the EU might make more sense. You have Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, but you also have Bulgaria, Romania, Portugal and Croatia, each with their distinct culture and much more autonomy than a region in the UK, more like US states.
Honestly I'm i
Surprised that the number is as low as it is. There are probably >100,000 cops on the streets at any given moment in the us and most have guns. There's also nearly 300MM guns owned in the country. Police make 10MM arrests for everything from traffic violations to murder.
The fact that this only results in 1k deaths is impressive
You can have massive poverty, guns everywhere, a war on drugs, police as a revenue source and an uber "macho" culture OR you can have a reasonable number of police shootings (eg 10 a year).
A) the US allows for a greater dispersion in economic outcome. More poverty = more crime
B) the US has more citizens owning weapons per capita than any other nation. More guns = more gun deaths
C) When you combine above average crime levels with above average levels of gun prevalence, you get more dangerous police encounters and more deaths
While this is extremely easy for the rest of the world to understand, I’m confident the US will never figure this out because:
D) the US is above-average at monetizing their media industry and creating distracting narratives, so they will spend decades of attention on the wrong things
101 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadThis article doesn't seem to make the case that the police kill too many people. It's just observations that the police sometimes kill people.
What nobody ever seems to discuss is how many we should expect the police to kill. If the murder rate is 4 per 100k in the US, and there are a million police officers in the US, shouldn't I expect something like 40+ police officers murdering a year? Maybe a little higher because police tend to be male, younger, have guns, and are frequently in high stress situations. I'm not saying we should excuse the murders or murderers, but obviously we expect some to happen in the same we expect some number of truckers, taxi drivers, programmers, whatever to commit murder every year.
At those density levels, how can you compare a city to an entire country?
And many are ex-military as well
The real flaw is in assuming that all "police killings" are murders. You would expect some proportion, and a higher number than the general population because of the nature of the job, to be legitimate self-defense or defense of others. So then you need to distinguish those cases from wrongful killings.
Which is hard, because the usual way to do that would be to look at how many of them are convicted of murder. But if the case you're trying to make is that not enough of the actual murders are successfully prosecuted, that's not satisfactory. And then what? Data not available, so everybody assumes what they want based on their own politics.
On top of that police are typically younger men - the demographic that commits almost all murders. Police always have guns. They are the kind of people willing and able to deal with hostile and potentially violent people. They have natural inclination to violence, to be able to deal with and dispense it. Personally, I'd expect the police to be more likely than average to become murderers, not less.
Right now, police in the US kill about 1000 people each year. That amounts to about one in 15-20 non-suicide deaths caused by gun violence. You can argue that 40 is too many, but it's two orders of magnitude lower than the current number. 40 is the number of people killed by the Chicago police alone every 2-3 years.
This is also blurred a bit further because we can imagine a class of killing that's "kind of justified" that we'd expect the police to sometimes engage in. Something like killing through negligence or incompetence. A certain fraction of people are likely negligent or incompetent. If you're an incompetent plumber, pipes may burst. If you're an incompetent, lazy, whatever police officer you may cause someone to die. We should also expect some level of this too.
What's the rate compared to other countries?
Cops in other countries tend to be young males, frequently in high stress situations and have guns.
Also, civilians in the same stressful situation are supposed to keep calm and control over their fears.
But there's a massive difference in saying "Policing in this country is broken - cops kill too many people" versus "Cops and lot of white _and_ black people.. see? BLM is a pointless movement". Right wingers seem to love to pretend they're saying the former when they actually mean the latter.
There's a reason why mentions of studies that are including white victims quickly get flagged on HN, as this article was, obviously.
But yeah such political content is unfortunately bound to be flagged in HN unless it has some sort of explicit tech connection.
An example of this aggressive, non-empathetic, censoring attitude that grinds my gears would be when that FB employee tried to publicly shame a colleague for opting not to put a BLM banner on the developer docs of RecoilJS. The whole mantra of "Silence is violence" can apparently now be used to accuse anyone of the terrible thoughtcrime of not talking about racism at all times.. even in places and situations where it doesn't make sense or wouldn't help the cause.
Extrapolate this out to how many people are unwilling to consider or merely listen to viewpoints that aren't in complete alignment (with whatever the accuser holds to be the absolute truth of non-racism).. yuck.
IMO
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56897186
"US police officers are seen mocking a 73-year-old woman with dementia as they watch video of her shoulder going "pop" during her forcible arrest,"
How they enjoy themselves and congratulatory fist-bump each other on achieving that "pop" tells everything one needs to know about police brutality. All that while the woman with all those injuries to her shoulder (and still handcuffed - basically being subjected to medieval torture) was sitting right around the corner - something like for more than 2 hours before getting medical attention.
That psychopathic-level lack of empathy resulting in the culture of total disregard for human life and wellbeing is why other police were standing guard while Chavin was enjoying himself torturing Floyd to death for almost 10 minutes. One can imagine all the fist-bumps and high-fives he got after that.
Like, Google is blamed for bad copyright enforcement on HN right now.
Group X is horrible when there are consistently minor consequences when these things are exposed. In this case the brutality occurred months ago and only came to light through a lawsuit being filed. It was only then that the officers faced some repercussions. This is common and widespread. So called good police routinely coverup and protect the bad ones. Consequences only occur if there is publicly released video and even when there is released video convictions and real consequences are rare.
There is widespread usage of extra-judicial punishments by police with little to no consequences. Citizens exercising Constitutional get arrested where the only charge is resisting arrest. There is a policing problem in the U.S. Let’s not pretend that there isn’t one.
It's inhumane behavior, like one would see Roman soldiers in a movie or soldiers in game of thrones.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/30/us/loveland-police-officers-k...
Also, what would be the right amount of innocent people for the police to kill?
Edit: I reacted instinctively without thinking it through. I agree with the comments below that the word ‘innocent’ should have nothing to do with it.
So, the ideal number is clearly zero. Just the same as the ideal number of people to die in car crashes. Yes, you can acknowledge that zero is likely not going to get attained. No, you don't give up and argue over the number as a distraction.
Perhaps that’s just a failure of my imagination though. Please elaborate on how you would effect the arrest of a criminal who is actively using deadly force in an attempt to cause grave bodily harm or death to yourself or other innocent persons?
I’m quite serious by the way. Using deadly force in self defense is a nightmare of legal fees and moral anguish under the best circumstances, so I’m very interested in reliable and reliably non lethal methods to stop, which is to say “arrest,” someone who is physically my superior and in a frame of mind where he intends to do grave bodily harm to me or persons I’m meant to protect.
https://samharris.org/podcasts/246-police-training-police-mi...
Even folks who are threatening the lives of others are entitled to a fair trial. Lethal force may be allowed, but that doesn't mean that the police should use it. The right to a fair trial applies to everyone, not just the folks who police don't shoot to death.
Police are responsible for for apprehending the criminals and only are supposed to use deadly force in self-defense or in protecting other people.
Actually that's exactly the problem of systemic racism. Racism is at the level of the system and not the individual (though there are still individual racists out there for sure).
Cops kill and injure way too many people (of all races) (without due cause), and encounters with Police escalate much too quickly. This is a problem, and that's why a big conversation on the role and responsibility and methods of policing is happening. Though Police too exists within a system, such as the possibility of any civilian to be armed and carrying at any time, and so all that context must be considered.
Blacks are disproportionately a victim of this, so obviously they are more invested in this conversation, and leading the charge on pushing for changes.
It turns out that one of the likely reason for their disproportionate encounters with Police is their disproportionate socio-economic situation, which was likely created as a result of the racist history of the country and the heritage and legacy (or lack thereof) it left their communities with. And that would make it a systemic racism issue.
This is besides the point. We have a real policing problem in America which we can see by the rate that U.S. police injure and kill citizens as compared to other countries. It's not even close.
There are many reasons for this, but we have to start by recognizing that there's a problem.
US population is at over 300 million people and police kills about a thousand people yearly. It might sound heartless, but those kinds of numbers is what I'd realistically expect from such a huge country with legal firearms.
I don't recognize any problem, but people in power seem to and if I'm not mistaken the police was defunded and there is overall less police in some places, so you're already getting what you wanted. I think as a result there is a rise in homicide, but truth be told I didn't care enough to verify any of those claims.
Ways of thinking about individuals just don't scale to populations of millions. Those groups do things for reasons.
Reducing the funding of police is not meant in a vacuum. The idea is to use that money to do other things that reduce crime. Police funding in the US is way past the point of diminishing returns in general, and that money is much better invested in other approaches to the same issue.
Equally, armed police do things they shouldn't have to do, like wellness checks, or mental health calls.
Even looking beyond shootings?!
To the second part less police != rise in homicide
and that you don't care to verify that yet you still hold those beliefs is a part of the problem e.g. the first part.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9133.12...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/02/1...
I don't care enough to verify if there was a rise in homicides, I just heard about it. But yes, anyone who's not an activist for your righteous cause is a part of a problem. I'm a terrible person, I know.
Prosecuting police is basically brand new, and still a tiny tiny % so that's not enough.
I disagree we can only deal with it after the fact. I'm pretty pessimistic but I just can't get on board with your worldview of utter futility. even if tilting at windmills 99% of the time, even tiny increments, change does happen.
I's also important to look at violence police perpetrate and escalate that isn't bullets.
One thing I think HN could get into is body cameras which <i>have</i> made a big difference and an area tech and law can improve.
maybe use an ASIC and ML like Blink to enable all on 'smart' recording and storage with lower battery usage (and cops can carry larger batteries + storage that is a lame excuse). low power bluetooth can recognize when inside a cop car to save space etc.
Couple that with changing laws to make all the now-fully saved video automatically public for accountability. Could use technology again to blur faces until legal proceedings determine to unmask.
Seems odd to omit the more direct cause - disproportionate homicide and violent crime rates [1] - and skip to socio-economics as the reason for police encounters. Especially since the black homicide rate is ~10x higher even compared with the same income brackets [2].
[1] African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 41.1% - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/9... - Table 6
This is a neat explanatory theory but it is only one potential explanation and the reason that the modern movements that are predicated upon it are so dangerous is that it is treated as though it is the only explanation.
>It turns out that one of the likely reason for their disproportionate encounters with Police is their disproportionate socio-economic situation
There is absolutely nothing outside of correlation to indicate that this is a "likely" reason. The influence of a totally broken culture is drastically understated in socially acceptable discourse. This disproportionate rate of police encounters is unique to blacks and not nearly as prevalent among virtually any other low income socioeconomic group. It's trivial to blame injustices of the past (which plenty of other groups have experienced to various degrees) but even discussing the necessary, drastic change in culture required to solve this problem is taboo. And, ironically, such a position is incompatible with the modern progressive framework, within which such a solution would be seen as whitewashing or gentrification. And rightly so, ghetto black culture is inseparable from glorification of crime and violence.
So instead we blame the issue entirely on "systemic racism", the only proof of which is disparate outcome, and the solution will invariably lead the rest of society to suffer the effects of rampant criminality before leaders from black communities will, as has happened repeatedly in the past, later switch to complaining that black communities are underserved by police services, starting the cycle anew. Biden's now unpopular crime bill, along with disproportionate penalization of crack, had strong support from black leaders and black politicians, but today's ideologues class them with the same boogyman of so called systemic racism.
What do you think the "socio" in "socio-economic" refers too?
Obviously culture plays into it, the racist treatment of blacks over history didn't just affect financial capital and heritage, it had direct effects on social aspects, restricted access to education, broken family dynamics, cycle of abuse, religious indoctrination, ancestral cultural erasure, and probably contributed directly to a glorification of crime as a means to upward movement, since nothing else seemed to work or be offered to them. All these in turn affects economic outcomes as well, but also economic outcomes have affected those social aspects.
Your culture is a result of your environment, and if you take someone and force them into an environment of abuse and discrimination like was the case of afro-americans, whose culture is it really? In my mind, afro-american culture is American culture, this is all our culture. Our culture has put a race at an absolute disadvantage for generations, resulting in a lack of economic and social prosperity for that race today. You can't then go and say, that's their fault, their culture, not mine, when your culture had a direct impact on theirs. So now it's time to say, let's grow our culture to one of healing, inclusion, and reconciliation together.
And here's where it matters, the next time someone is caught with possession or selling of drugs, will you choose to incarcerate them for years? Or will you decide to reinvest in their education, rehabilitation and support them for whatever led them there.
The next time a budget is voted on, will you vote to build more prisons, or to invest the money in services and safety in communities of color. Will you choose to more heavily invest in education, employment, housing, and health services in the country, or in police funds?
And here's where it matters even more, the next time you encounter a black person, will you treat them with an underlying bias that they are probably more violent and crime driven just because of your association of their skin color you've made with your belief in their culture leading to crime? Will you have your guards up, and will you likely favor another race over them due to this?
If a big asteroid dropped from the sky and killed thousands of people, it could turned out to be a racist asteroid.
An asteroid can't be racist, but the response to it might be.
If you were playing a boardgame, and the rules said I get to role 2 dice for every 1 dice you roll, at that point the game wouldn't be fair. If we were playing chess and I got to start with 2 queens, then you would be within your rights to complain that the game wasn't fair.
And if you complained about the rules of the game, and said that game wasn't fair, and I hand-waved that by saying that you were misusing fairness to push back against "any outcome where you lost", it would be reasonable to take issue with that.
Systemic racism isn't just any outcome where Black people get hurt, it describes a reinforcing mechanic in society where Black people are repeatedly hurt and where their disadvantages perpetuate themselves. Crime drives people into poverty, which imposes social and economic disadvantages which keep them from rising out of poverty, which drives them into crime -- increased attention on those neighborhoods leads to preconceptions and biases among officers, it leads to fewer opportunities for the people in those neighborhoods, and the cycle continues. It's reinforced by the system itself, and by people inside the system who mean well but contribute to it, and by people outside of the system that use it to support their own racist agendas.
It's a lose more mechanic that reinforces unequal outcomes for Black communities, and its a mechanic that was very obviously set in motion by redlining, voter and wage suppression, by explicitly racist housing policies, and by slavery itself. It is not an accident that poor neighborhoods tend to be predominantly Black, that happened deliberately. "Racist" is a perfectly fine word to describe the outcomes of that system, it's nothing like an asteroid.
The users of the word "systemic racism" on the one hand claim it does not necessarily mean there is intentional racism, on the other hand they ride on the listeners' emotional response of intentional racism.
As the matter of fact, the only racist policy nowadays demanding a differential treatment on the basis of race is Affirmative Action promoted by the left. But the left doesn't care Asian kids are heavily penalized by their skin color.
You can say that all you want, but words have cultural meanings, and it's just not true. We're not going to get very far if your argument boils down to "the way that people commonly use the word racism is wrong." Society disagrees with you, and they get to choose what words mean.
More to the point, I think it's a little naive to say that the current situation with Black neighborhoods doesn't have intentionality behind it. Redlining was on purpose, it was not an accident. Regardless of whether every single person participating in that system today is trying to be racist, the position we're in exists because of intentional action during America's history.
If you want to argue that the intentionality goes away or should be ignored as soon as a law is passed, first I disagree that racism is completely absent in modern policy decisions, but second, it's just a silly thing to argue even if racism had ended when we passed civil rights.
It's like if I start a chess game with 2 queens, and halfway through the game I throw one of my queens away. Is the game suddenly fair? No, because I've built myself a structural advantage during the first half of the game, pushed you into a worse position, captured more pieces, and that advantage can't suddenly be ignored during the second half just because I'm no longer actively cheating.
> the word "racism" is just to obscure different levels of mechanisms
People say this, but I have noticed a strong correlation between people understanding what the words "systemic racism" means and understanding a lot about how these systems operate. If people using the words "systemic racism" were just running around doing nothing, and it was everyone else trying to get rid of problematic housing policies or qualified immunity, then I might be more sympathetic to this concern.
But that's not what I see. The people who understand the racial origins of ghettos are also the people on the ground working hard to reform housing policies. They're very much not using systemic racism as a distraction, they're using it as a motivation to examine how our modern systems work and to try and make them more equitable. That's unequivocally a good thing for everyone, regardless of race.
Lol. Society disagrees with you. Vast majority of people knows racism mean intentional. "Systemic racism" is just a political jargon throw around by one side of politics.
> People say this, but I have noticed a strong correlation between people understanding what the words "systemic racism" means and understanding a lot about how these systems operate.
If you really understand how the systems operate, you would have known the biggest issue with Black Americans is more than 70% single parenthood of Black kids.
"In the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households had two parents.[15] When Moynihan warned in his 1965 report on the coming destruction of the black family, however, the out-of-wedlock birthrate had increased to 25% among the black population.[12] This figure continued to rise over time and in 1991, 68% of black children were born outside of marriage.[16] U.S. Census data from 2010 reveal that more African-American families consisted of single mothers than married households with both parents.[17] In 2011, it was reported that 72% of black babies were born to unmarried mothers.[11] As of 2015, at 77.3 percent, black Americans have the highest rate of non-marital births among native Americans.[18]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...
Unfortunately, people like to throw "systemic racism" around are the same people try their best to avoid addressing the real issue here.
Okay, I'll bite.
What are you personally doing to address the issues leading to single parenthoods in Black communities, since the rest of us are just avoiding the issue? Are you lobbying to support better sex education? Better healthcare coverage? More social safety nets for single-parent children who need additional help? More school resources for schools in those areas that have an outsized number of students struggling with family issues at home? You support those policies, right?
And do you think that monetary issues might have anything to do with family stability? Might money coincidentally be the single leading cause of divorce in America today? Out of curiosity, might financial stability be one of the single most significant leading indicators of family stability?
That it has nothing to do with slavery? You haven't been paying attention. Black communities do not magically have higher single-parent rates because God ordained it. They have higher rates because of literally everything I've been talking about in the past 3 comments.
> and how to fix it.
And this is exactly what I mean. You can look at the comments in this thread, and one group of people are proposing policy solutions, and the other group is complaining that words make them feel bad.
There's some weird tiptoeing around the issue here, which I sort of suspect is because you're hesitant to publicly say what you believe the solution really is. So I'll ask it directly: how do you think we should help single-parent kids who need additional support?
And how the heck of helping single-parent kids solve this problem? What kind of dishonest question is that. Yeah, let government be the daddy.
No, but understanding the history of this country in the 1950-60s, including purposefully racist systems like redlining that were still rampant -- that is sufficient.
> And how the heck of helping single-parent kids solve this problem?
What? You said that single-parents families were the problem:
> the biggest issue with Black Americans is more than 70% single parenthood of Black kids.
But whatever. You tell me what you think the problem is and what you think the solution is. Stop dancing around the question, do you have any plans or actions you're taking right now to make the situation better, at all?
Because you've spent three comments now complaining that everyone except you is avoiding the real issue, and you seem very hesitant to state exactly what you think the real issue is and what you think we should be doing to "fix" it. And to be completely honest, I suspect the reason is that you don't actually believe the current outcomes are a problem, and you don't actually think that they warrant fixing.
I run into a lot of people who tell me that focusing on racism and systems is a distraction that's preventing the Black community from getting help, but when I dig into their beliefs, what ends up surfacing in the majority of cases is that they don't believe the Black community should have help.
So you don't want the government to help with setting up community programs? You don't want more money for schools in that area? Okay fine, are you donating money to charities in inter-city areas? Are you supporting or investing in local businesses in those areas? You tell me what you're doing to help.
So yes, it does imply the intention was always to discriminate against black people, because that was the explicit intent of a large number of people over centuries in the country is why the current system shows discrimination against a particular race.
It's possible the current policies no longer harbor direct racism, but that the effect of prior policies and attitudes still lingers. Thus it is necessary to recognize their residual effect, and find ways to mitigate it, otherwise it is not true that the current system isn't racist, if racist driven intentions of the past still have an effect on the outcomes of the system today.
“No dwelling shall be used or occupied except by members of the Caucasian race, but the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”
Slavery, redlining, race segregation, displacement, racial slur, racial biases are all real racist practices that were the result of a large number of racist individuals in the past. Maybe most of that is gone at the individual level today, but a lot of the systems were put in place from before and still harbor a legacy from that racist past, such as a black child likely having poorer parents, living in a worse community, thus starting off at a disatvantage in equity and opportunity.
That means the inequalities we see generated in the systems today are not the result of randomness the way an asteroid would, but of a racist legacy, and that's why we say it's systemic racism caused by a history of systematic and individual racism.
Now, other people, some white as well, similarly suffer from lack of equity and opportunity. The system is similarly unfair to them, and that can be due to other factors, a white child can be born poor, from parents with addiction issues, in a bad neighborhood, and the system similarly won't be as fair to them and make things harder. Those are issues we should also solve, and maybe how we solve systemic racism can solve other forms of systemic issues, in fact that be a great outcome of all this. Still, that doesn't change anything about the fact that some of the disproportionate inequalities in the black population (in the US) is likely due to systemic issues caused by past racism, making systemic racism an issue that still needs solving.
Not necessarily true. The destruction of black families is not a result of slavery or any racist policy. Read: https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-wel...
> For example, racial differences in marriage rates may be largely due to racial income disparities, which lead to stiffer marriage penalties for black adults.
And my argument is that it's very likely the reason for these racial income disparities is the racist legacy of our systems. I see no contradiction, in fact this is supporting evidence to my claim.
Systemic racism causes socio-economic inequalities that disproportionately affect blacks. As your article suggest, it seems this even causes issues with marital engagement and family structure.
I find that unlikely, because you see similar results in Germany, and Germany does not share the US' history of slavery.
> Systemic racism causes socio-economic inequalities that disproportionately affect blacks.
The socio-economic inequalities are just as well explained by cultural differences though, and you don't need a conspiracy that set up a racist system but then decided to hide it very well, and set it up in such a way, that it doesn't affect all Black people, but filters by ethnicity [1].
Poverty doesn't really work as an explanation for delinquency either. Germany has had many Vietnamese immigrants come with literally nothing, not speaking the language etc. A generation later, they're hard to distinguish from the native population with regards to education, have low unemployment and are creating moderate wealth (lots of self-employed/entrepreneurs). Culture is a much better explanation than poverty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
> similar results in Germany
First, I can't find any stats online that claim marriage rates in Germany among Black communities are identical to marriage rates in the US. Maybe you do have a source, but you need to be more specific if you're going to make claims like this.
I also can't find any stats online that claim that wealth inequality in Germany is identical to wealth inequality in America. This would be a really good thing for you to cite, because your whole argument seems to be that there's something inherent in the Black community that means it will make less money no matter where it goes or what the context is. If Germany doesn't have comparable wage gaps to the US, then we don't even need to continue with the rest of your comment.
> and Germany does not share the US' history of slavery.
Second, can you think of any event that happened in Germany that might have had bad outcomes for Black people? Maybe one that happened during the 1940's? Do you know the date that Germany's current constitution was ratified? How can you possibly say with a straight face that Germany has no history of racism?
Germany's history with racism was different from the US, and we'd expect that to manifest in different ways. We don't expect racism in Germany to look identical to racism in the US. But WW2 was recent, my own grandfather fought in WW2. We're barely a full generation away from a Germany that was trying to exterminate different races.
> The socio-economic inequalities are just as well explained by cultural differences though
It's poor reasoning to assume that Black communities are a monolithic culture with the same beliefs and behaviors everywhere in the world. Are you really saying that German wage gaps were caused by the way Americans halfway across the world raised their kids in the 50s and 60s?
It's also kind of interesting that you assume Black culture would be the same across multiple continents, backgrounds, and national origins, but that you don't assume the same of the treatment of Black people or the attitudes of the cultures that surround them. There's a lot of inconsistency here, and you need to decide whether or not you really believe that all countries are homogeneous.
Unless you're claiming there's a genetic factor at play, but I'm sure you wouldn't claim that, right?
> that it doesn't affect all Black people, but filters by ethnicity
Are you trying to say that results that vary greatly depending on ethnicity can't possibly have racial factors at play? The way that people experience racism differs depending on both their origins and where they live.
> A generation later, they're hard to distinguish from the native population with regards to education, have low unemployment and are creating moderate wealth
I know people like to hold up Germany as an inclusive utopia, but Germany absolutely does have a problem with people being racist to immigrants, and not just Black immigrants. Germany's past with racism is different from America's and the outcomes aren't identical. But this completely rosy view of immigration in Germany that you're pushing just isn't true. If you read actual reports of immigrants to Germany, they do struggle with racism and cultural alienation.
> Poverty doesn't really work as an explanation for delinquency either.
Finally, you will be hard-pressed to find any serious study about divorce that doesn't mention money as a contributing factor. I don't understand how anyone could claim that poverty doesn't have an effect on family/childhood statistics.
You want to talk about conspiracies, then which scenario is more likely? That all of that research is wrong and all of the sociologists are being paid off? Or that there are some additional contributing factors in Germany that you don't understand?
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So...
You can't honestly believe that if an asteroid hit that anyone would all it racist.
That's just a distraction at best; my read is that's an example of the implicit bias in our society that you disregard flat out.
while i actually agree with most of what you said, the focus on (disproportionate, but few) deaths by police is misdirectional. like much media reporting, it's premised on an emotional trigger meant to short-circuit rational thinking, which is decidedly a diservice to public discourse. arguments against racism can, and should, stand entirely on the merits of racism (systemic or otherwise) simply being unjust and irrational, not on outrage-bait like this.
that's to say that the murders of black folks by police should direct our attention towards racism, not the numbers of murders by police, because we'll end up trying to solve "murders by police" rather than racism, and then pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, when it was anything but.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
It's not enough to say this-is-just-how-it-is in the US, because the US is weird here. It's not normal for the security services to kill so many people in a rich country.
There really isn’t. Almost no gun owners do anything unsafe with guns or ever shoot anyone. US gun culture is extremely safety focussed.
The media paints a completely bizarre and distorted picture of gun owners in general, picking the stupidest or most outlandish examples they can.
Most people who are involved in shootings in the US are in deeply underprivileged areas where there is a lot of crime in general, and ineffective policing and a dearth of opportunity.
It is often not irrational for young men in these circumstances to get involved in gang or crime related activities given the lack of alternatives, and it’s also not irrational to carry a gun under these circumstances, and it does lead to a lot of shootings.
This has very little to do with gun ownership and gun culture in the US in general.
Gun culture in the states, imo, needs iteration. The problem is that the people at the helm of gun culture are operating and advocating out of fear. The worst thing that ever happened to gun culture was people started lobbying to cancel 2a, which gave these people their power. It invited people who know nothing about guns, their uses, their purpose, or how to handle them into a world with real world consequences. It inspires buying frenzies and other ridiculous behavior. I'm not sure how many of these people actually kill people as opposed to the loopholes where bad actors purchase weapons they never should've had access to in order to bring violence and chaos into the world for their own gain.
Rather than talking down bad gun culture, I'd like to talk up good gun culture:
- know your weapon safety conditions. They're a community language for communicating safety and awareness. Knowing your weapon condition and confidently communicating something like, "condition 4" instills trust and confidence.
- know your weapons troubleshooting and function check procedures. The worst thing you can hear when you go to use a weapon is "clunk".
- know weapon safety rules. The military has some great ones that are quite universal. Treat, Never, Keep, Keep.
- weapons should be cared for and stored correctly. This is just an extension of good safety procedures.
Having good gun culture isn't just a thing to geek out about. It's a source of pride, much less a necessity.
Citation needed here.
Beyond that, most immigrants to France aren't Muslim either. Around a third come from the Maghreb, though not all of them are Muslim either. The reason why they go to France is because colonial era French institutions mean that they were taught French, and their countries are quite poor, so they go to the only country they have a solid shot of going to. Often they already have family in France.
But even then, only about 100 000 people from the Maghreb immigrate into France, which is slightly north of a tenth of a percent.
They can't really leave France either for mostly the same reason France is the main source of immigration.
Far, far more violent crime in the US. And there's essentially no guns in the UK.
Even still, rates have been falling in the US to my knowledge.
Edit: For perspective, I live in Chicago. There are usually 80-100+ shootings a weekend here. Since all US cops have guns that means cops just in 1 city could theoretically shoot 100 people a weekend and technically be justified. This really isn't the case in any other "rich" country as you put it.
Not that this doesn't mean there's not huge issues with policing and society, it just doesn't make sense to compare US to other countries.
Policing isn't even a top 10 most dangerous job. Yes police offers are shot on duty. But the practices they use & their racist bias create confrontation and escalate encounters to violence.
'Warrior', 'killology' training has instilled quick to fire, ready to kill dehumanizing behavior and literally teaches Black neighborhoods are 'battlegrounds.'
Chicago is definitely a hard example combing the worst of our gun fetish, laws, and consequences of racism stealing opportunity and wealth from generations of Black and Brown communities. I'm sure it feels like a battleground for many that live there. No one could argue the situation there is under control or easy to control.
But there are a lot of other examples of bringing guns into peaceful encounters for instance traffic stops where they come up guns drawn as just an example with many recent tragedies created. Briana Taylor no-knock is an extreme example of policies that create deadly confrontation.
Vast majority of policing jobs youre right are pretty mundane and not esp dangerous. Policing in high crime areas can at times be a different ballgame though and more stressful/dangerous than the average would suggest.
But more broadly, the US should be compared to the broad range of countries in the world. Just comparing US indeed just makes the country look "weird". But looking India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, etc shed more light on the situation. Especially, as large country, the US contain a lot of development and underdevelopment (decay, corruption, etc).
Each comes with its own set of problems. Urban poor tends to be violent. Rural poor tends towards suicidal.
If you break it apart, we’ll off America doesn’t have a violent crime problem.
EDIT: to be clear, I am not disagreeing with you, but the same analysis could be applied to other countries, without the same conclusion. The US is not unusual in containing multitudes.
The different regions are the size of countries though.
Instead of comparing it to any European country, comparing it to the EU might make more sense. You have Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, but you also have Bulgaria, Romania, Portugal and Croatia, each with their distinct culture and much more autonomy than a region in the UK, more like US states.
You can't have both.
A) the US allows for a greater dispersion in economic outcome. More poverty = more crime
B) the US has more citizens owning weapons per capita than any other nation. More guns = more gun deaths
C) When you combine above average crime levels with above average levels of gun prevalence, you get more dangerous police encounters and more deaths
While this is extremely easy for the rest of the world to understand, I’m confident the US will never figure this out because:
D) the US is above-average at monetizing their media industry and creating distracting narratives, so they will spend decades of attention on the wrong things