Open Thread and Link Farm, Aged Typewriter Edition

typewriter-aged

  1. For My Son, In The Event That The Police Leave You Fatherless
  2. Confidential Informants – CBS News
    Police unfairly pressure kids in their late teens or early twenties to wear a wire, in some cases leading to the informant being murdered.
  3. Mortality inequality: The good news from a county-level approach
    “… the health of the next generation in the poorest areas of the US has improved significantly and the race gap has declined significantly. Underlying explanations include declines in the prevalence of smoking and improved nutrition, and a major cause is social policies that target the most disadvantaged.” I’m not sure how they established that last bit.
  4. Travesties in Criminal Justice That Are Mostly Ignored – The Atlantic
    “The criminal justice system is the part of society least affected by the Civil Rights Movement. 95 percent of all elected prosecutors in this country are white.”
  5. New study proves fetal tissue needed for research | Dr. Jen Gunter
    The title is a stretch, but she still makes some good points.
  6. Clarence Thomas Has His Own Constitution – The New Yorker
    “He is so convinced of the wisdom of his approach to the law that he rejects practically the whole canon of constitutional law. It’s an act of startling self-confidence, but a deeply isolating one as well.”
  7. New Jersey declares a state of emergency over its crummy roads – The Washington Post
    “…responsibility lies with the majority of people of New Jersey who don’t want to pay for one of the most basic amenities of modern society. In a democracy you get the roads you deserve.”
  8. Here’s How To Do Free Trade Right | Mother Jones
  9. The Typical College Student Is Not Who You Think It Is – The Atlantic
    Our cultural image of the typical college student is wildly unrepresentative.
  10. Abigail Fisher Isn’t an Asian American | Reappropriate
    “Justice Alito mentions white people only ten times in his fifty-one page dissent, and not once does he use the word in reference to Fisher herself. Yet the words ‘Asian American’ appear sixty-two times in his dissent. […] Asian Americans have become a proxy group for white Americans.”
  11. The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Fetal Imaginings
    Images of third-trimester fetuses, or even born babies, are used to discuss the vast majority of abortions – even though most happen in the first eight weeks.
  12. There are too many lawyers in politics. Here’s what to do about it. – Vox
  13. Military Ends Transgender Ban
    Hell yeah!
  14. Sexual harassment and public shaming in the academy | The Incidental Economist
    A case where public shaming might be an appropriate response.
  15. Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  16. The Most Liable Place On Earth: Disney Faces Strong Tort Claim In Child’s Death | JONATHAN TURLEY
  17. Textbooks and the Civil Rights Movement – Lawyers, Guns & Money
    “We should replace this limited narrative, these scholars argue, with one of ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement,’ a national Black freedom struggle rooted in struggles of the 1930s and extended through the 1970s…”
  18. Massachusetts School Sued Over The Use of “Commonwealth” In Its Name | JONATHAN TURLEY
    For your rage-reading needs.
  19. Unfree Labor in American Seafood – Lawyers, Guns & Money
  20. The interesting thing that happened when Kansas cut taxes and California hiked them – The Washington Post
  21. Deriving evil, with reason
    “…if you wake up every morning to listen to right-wing talk radio, or Fox News, or to read Stormfront or white nationalist literature, the inputs to your mind are all skewed. Those outlets are committed to presenting a terrifying picture of the world, in which you, your family, your tribe, your race, your whole damn species is in peril.”
  22. This congresswoman wants the rich to take drug tests to get their tax breaks – Vox
  23. A Very Brief Timeline of the Bathroom Wars | Mother Jones
    “The culture war is one of our grandest achievements of the past half century.”
  24. New Obamacare Rule Prohibits Discrimination Against Transgender Patients
  25. Zootopia – A Physical Accessibility Near-Utopia – Scrappy Deviation
  26. Ex-Fox News Host Gretchen Carlson Sues Roger Ailes For Sexual Harassment
    Striking example of how even great career success and prestige aren’t proof against sexual harassment. UPDATE: Six More Women Allege Ailes Sexual Harassment — NYMag
  27. Hillary Clinton just borrowed Bernie Sanders’s big idea on college costs – Vox
    Another example of why it’s good for there to be a left-wing challenger in Democratic primaries.
  28. This dude freaking out over a chicken sandwich is a Men’s Rights Reddit thread come to life :: We Hunted The Mammoth
    Often when I read the ruder MRAs and cringe I think “well, I’m sure he wouldn’t act that way off the net.” Then I see a video like this… And you know, I hope he’s embarrassed by this video. I think his behavior deserves mockery. But I hope nobody doxxes him and then spends years harassing him.

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46 Responses to Open Thread and Link Farm, Aged Typewriter Edition

  1. 1
    veronica d says:

    28 — I agree the guy shouldn’t get doxxed, although it’s likely some folks who know him in meat-space will see the video. They will no doubt form opinions according to their own values. I’m okay with this.

    That said, I cannot help but be curious about the guy. It’s he a proper “MRA” (or whatever)? Is he a regular on reddit? Have I encountered him online, one of the argumentative jackasses that stink up online discourse? Etc.

    In other words, I have zero desire to harass him, nor see him harassed. But I’d love to know where guys like him “fit into the system.” How common are they actually? Who is this jerk, like in a general sense?

    I suspect he’ll get doxxed and then I’ll know. So it goes.

  2. 2
    RonF says:

    An interesting study from a Harvard professor indicates that while police are more likely to use non-lethal force against blacks than against whites, they are less likely to use lethal force against them.

    One point doesn’t make a line, as they say, and the ‘net is full of debate on this. But the professor has done some solid work and it flies in the face of the current claims. I’d like to see more work done along these lines so that we can examine the “Black Lives Matter” narrative on a fact-based fashion rather than on emotions and possibly erroneously-informed perceptions.

    And, in fact, this is a big issue that I have with the way that the media is covering BLM and the overall issue of recent police shootings. They cover the protests over the shootings, but they don’t examine the underlying theme that BLM is advancing that there is a war against blacks by police or an epidemic of police shootings of black people. Where is the analysis of the overall phenomenon? Buried in various blog postings and obscure stories, but the MSM isn’t promoting any such.

  3. 3
    LTL FTC says:

    If he was so terrible with women, he should have studied Lou Rawls instead of John.

  4. 4
    Charles S says:

    RonF,

    The war against black people is actually in the non-lethal abuse from the police. The higher rate of police murder of black people is, as the study you mention demonstrates, caused by the much higher rate of non-lethal abuse. That study finds that the rate of police murder of black people is lower relative to the rate of non-lethal violent interactions with police than the rate of police murder of white people, but the rate of non-lethal violent interactions is not a neutral baseline.

    If Erik Garner hadn’t been murdered by the police, he might well have been arrested for resisting arrest, but the entire situation was a product of the New York City PD’s policy of continuous harassment and abuse of black people. In the study you cite, Garner’s non-violent objection to perpetual harassment (because it was responded to with police violence) is coded the same as a white bank robber who fires on the police.

    If you actually look at what the larger Black Lives Matters movement proposes, their proposals extend across the full system of police enforcement of white supremacy, not just the events of police murder of black people that that intermittently produces. Police murder of innocent civilians draws (justifiably) a lot of attention, far more than the perpetual drip-drip-drip of harassment and non-lethal violence, but the movement is (and all of us should be) concerned with both and the movement recognizes that it is the drip-drip-drip of non-lethal violence (that the study you point to demonstrates) that is the cause of the higher rate of police murders of black people.

  5. 5
    LTL FTC says:

    Charles S: BLM is not Campaign Zero, which is what you claim they “propose” comes from. In fact, CZ has come under fire from BLM, which is focused much more on expressive actions and discourse policing than addressing public policy. DeRay McKesson, the person behind CZ, has been attacked for his previous work at Teach for America and his work with elected officials.

    The main BLM site doesn’t have any sort of action plan, just “guiding principles” that are as mushy as they are generally irrelevant to the outrages that created the movement in the first place:

    http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/

    Personally, I think Campaign Zero is the way to go. The ideas are out there and people can debate, accept or reject them. Coalitions can be built around specific action items. OTOH, the slippery language of BLM, which reads more like critical theory mush and an Oppression Olympics roll-call than an actual roadmap for change, will devolve into the left’s usual circular firing squad arrangement.

  6. 6
    Kohai says:

    LTL FTC,

    Do you have a cite on your claims on Campaign Zero? Not saying you’re wrong, but doing a Google search, the majority of websites that reference Campaign Zero mention it as a part of BLM. Moreover, even a search for “campaign zero criticism” doesn’t seem to depict a particularly strong backlash. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place?

  7. 7
    Ampersand says:

    Virtually every report seems to see Campaign Zero as affiliated with, and really part of, Black Lives Matter. A few examples:

    Black Lives Matter/Campaign Zero Activists Launch "Police Use of Force Project" – Hit & Run : Reason.com
    Black Lives Matter Publishes ‘Campaign Zero’ Plan To Reduce Police Violence : NPR
    Black Lives Matter Group Outlines "Campaign Zero" – disinformation
    Black Lives Matters activists outline policy goals – BBC News

    DeRay McKesson is one of four people organizing Campaign Zero (not “the person”). You imply he’s not part of Black Lives Matter because he’s been criticized from within BLM. Would you say that Ted Cruz is not a Republican because he’s been criticized within the GOP?

    Some news stories about McKesson:

    Black Lives Matter leader calls for end to violence | TheHill
    ‘I’m under arrest, ya’ll’: Black Lives Matter activist arrested, then released in Baton Rouge – The Washington Post
    Bernie Sanders Will Meet DeRay Mckesson & Other Black Lives Matter Activists As The Candidate Continues To Address Racial Inequality | Bustle
    Black Lives Matter Activist Jumps Into Baltimore Mayoral Fray – The New York Times
    Obama to Meet with Black Lives Matter Leader, Rev. Al Sharpton at the White House | PJ Media

    The idea that McKesson is not part of BLM is ludicrous.

    Campaign Zero is the policy and data arm of BLM.

    And right-wingers saying that BLM is certain to fail – when it’s clearly the best hope of making real change we’ve seen in decades – seems like wistful thinking on their part.

  8. 8
    LTL FTC says:

    Sure.

    https://www.buzzfeed.com/darrensands/the-success-and-controversy-of-campaignzero-and-its-successf?utm_term=.tc8pbDZ0x#.cr2RmrXeE

    “The Black Lives Matter organization, with 26 chapters around the country, is not in regular contact with Mckesson and the Campaign Zero team, nor does Campaign Zero consider itself part of the organization’s network.”

    [CZ leader] Mckesson’s profile in the movement as something of a lone actor has added to the tension. He has repeatedly said he does not wish to join an organization. “You can’t be accountable to folks you are not in community with,” one activist said.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/one-slogan-many-methods-black-lives-matter-enters-politics.html?_r=0

    Campaign Zero, whose agenda centers on ending police violence, quickly embraced the offer for a town hall forum instead and began working to arrange forums for Democratic and Republican candidates. But members of an organization named Black Lives Matter, which first asked for the debates, asserted that only a debate would demonstrate the Democrats’ commitment to their cause.

    http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/08/21/black_lives_matter_coalition_police_brutality_policy_proposals_campaign.html

    Campaign Zero was launched not by the Black Lives Matter organization per se but by four activists involved with the larger movement, including prominent Twitter and protest presences DeRay McKesson and Johnetta “Netta” Elzie.)

  9. 9
    RonF says:

    Charles S. @ 4:

    That study finds that the rate of police murder of black people is lower[er] relative to the rate of non-lethal violent interactions with police than the rate of police murder of white people, but the rate of non-lethal violent interactions is not a neutral baseline.

    Your use of the term “murder” with reference to this study is incorrect. The study looks at police killings. It does not distinguish between justified killings (e.g., in self-defense) and non-justified ones.

  10. 10
    Charles S says:

    That’s true. Which makes that specific aspect (which you highlighted) of the study largely irrelevant to the movement against police murder of black people. The larger finding of the study that the police engage in systemic non-lethal violence against black people remains relevant to the movement’s concerns.

    Also, we’ve created a system in which the police in the US kill people at an enormous rate. We can hide the systemic aspect of it by normalizing the majority of those homicides by calling them justified. Perhaps it would be better to classify them as avoidable or unavoidable. There are a large number of avoidable by “justified” homicides committed by the police (as well as far to many unjustified homicides).

  11. 11
    Grace Annam says:

    Regarding #13, responding to the article linked:

    The logistics of this are going to be challenging, to say the least.

    They’re really not. The military already has doctors who can diagnose and prescribe, including conditions far more difficult than gender dysphoria, like, for instance, multiple amputation, cancer, and heart disease. The military already has an infrastructure to deal with logistical support of service personnel who need myriad medications more difficult to control and issue than hormones, including narcotics. The military already has people capable of assessing uniform requirements and implementing regulations. None of these are difficult problems.

    The difficult problem is in getting service members to treat each other decently, but we’ve already directed our military to integrate people of different race and people of different sexual orientation, and they made that work.

    What’s so remarkable about this to me is that the transgender issue seems to have essentially piggybacked on the gay-lesbian issue. Whereas lifting that ban was bitterly contested for a quarter century and we’re just now integrating women into the infantry, the end to transgender discrimination is happening with hardly a fight at all. Indeed, with hardly a debate at all. The Obama administration has apparently decided that it has the authority to make the change on its own and the normal political process has been all but bypassed.

    You didn’t see the fight because you weren’t paying attention to it. It happened. It happened within the military and not within congress because the bar to trans service was always administrative rather than legislative. Permitting non-heterosexual people to serve in the military would have been easy, too, but for congress putting its foot in with DADT. Trans people were deemed not to need legislation because it was regarded as self-evident already that we were mentally ill and excludable on that basis.

    Who had the authority to make the change? The military. Not congress. The fight happened mainly within the military, and most of it happened prior to six months ago. Ever since then, it’s just been (*ahem*) stonewalling.

    Grace

  12. 12
    nobody.really says:

    You didn’t see the fight because you weren’t paying attention to it….

    Ever since then, it’s just been (*ahem*) stonewalling.

    Speaking of things I may have missed because I wasn’t paying attention: I read a certain amount of LGBT discussion. How have I not encountered “stonewalling”– or (*ahem*) stonewalling–before?

  13. 13
    RonF says:

    Regarding #4:

    95 percent of all elected prosecutors in this country are white.

    Changing that is no guarantee of anything. When Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a cop and a few other cops falsified their reports to try to justify it Anita Alvarez, the Democratic Hispanic Attorney General of Illinois, fought for over a year to prevent the release of the video that put the lie to those reports and helped cover up the whole thing until after the re-election bids of herself and the Democratic Mayor of Chicago’s ran to election day. She lost in the primary, he won re-election. I wonder if the Mayor ever talked to his old boss President Obama about that?

  14. 14
    RonF says:

    Charles S.:

    That’s true. Which makes that specific aspect (which you highlighted) of the study largely irrelevant to the movement against police murder of black people.

    Except that from what I can see this does not seem to be the concern of the Black Lives Matter movement. It first came to my attention because of the riots in Ferguson, Mo. over the shooting of Eric Brown. BLM wasn’t reacting to the murder of Eric Brown for the simple reason that, as was found not only by the State authorities but the Federal ones (the latter being led by a black Attorney General who doubtless had the attention of a black President), he was not murdered. But BLM did not wait for any such determination. They reacted to the killing and did not have – and from what I can see still do not – any concern of WHY he was killed and what the choices the police had at the time. So while there may be a movement against the murder of black people by the police, a cause I certainly support, I don’t see BLM being involved in it. They hit the streets at every killing of a black person by a cop regardless of the circumstances.

    The larger finding of the study that the police engage in systemic non-lethal violence against black people remains relevant to the movement’s concerns.

    It’s certainly relevant, that I’ll grant.

    Also, we’ve created a system in which the police in the US kill people at an enormous rate.

    An analysis I’ve seen shows that for every 10,000 people of a given race arrested for a violent crime, 38 white ones are killed, 21 hispanic ones are killed and 21 black people are killed. Is that enormous? Then consider that while 990 people were killed by police in 2015, so were 51 police – and there’s a hell of a lot fewer police than there are criminals. Much is made of police shooting unarmed people, but 90% of the people they killed were armed, and (as with Eric Brown in Ferguson) being unarmed is no guarantee that they did not pose a lethal threat.

    We can hide the systemic aspect of it by normalizing the majority of those homicides by calling them justified. Perhaps it would be better to classify them as avoidable or unavoidable. There are a large number of avoidable [but] “justified” homicides committed by the police (as well as far to many unjustified homicides).

    That’s the current proposition being advanced by some people. However, in some jurisdictions people who have done so are run through police training and find that the line is not where they think it is. They find that if you are armed but have your firearm holstered and a man with a knife is 7 yards from you, he can stab you before you can shoot him. They find that it’s a lot harder to distinguish between a cell phone and a gun in someone’s hand that they had thought – until they shoot you. They find that a whole lot of cops have been shot dead when approaching a vehicle that they’ve stopped for a minor traffic infraction (illustrated by actual police dash cam videos from the dead officers’ cars). Who gets to make the call on what’s “justified but avoidable”, and on what basis?

    Should we find a way to reduce police killings of people they’re arresting? Absolutely. But it seems to me we should equally find a way to reduce killings of police by people they’re arresting as well, and to be careful about basing police procedures and policies and making a criminal out of a police officer based on an armchair judgement made at leisure of someone who had less than a second to make a decision. The result of doing the latter is being seen in cities across the country right now, as homicide rates climb, arrests fall and police take the steps necessary to protect themselves to make sure that they a) get home at night and b) don’t end up with a ruined career.

  15. 15
    Harlequin says:

    His name was Michael Brown.

    There’s a collection of studies on police violence at Vanity Fair, for those who would like a broader look at the literature.

  16. 16
    Sebastian H says:

    RonF, I don’t think the study is flawed per se, so much as not as useful as I would want out of a study of that kind.

    It has two major issues:

    1) It relies on the incident report to be an accurate sole source of most of the information about the reasons for the interaction. The video evidence we’ve gotten about certain interactions suggests that trusting that source so strongly isn’t wise. Common sense agrees, when you want to investigate if someone is justified in doing something you don’t normally expect that relying on their explanation will be good enough.

    2) It cuts the question at what strikes me as an odd place. Given a shooting it tries to work backwards toward police bias. But I would tend to think that this ends up creating a confirmation bias problem. My intuition is that the police give white people more leeway than black people. This means that by the time you are having an ‘incident’ with a white person you are dealing with on average a much more dangerous person than when you are having an ‘incident’ with a black person.

    Someone on Gelman’s statistics blog put it like this:

    (1) perceived race–>encounter–>escalation–>shoot
    (2) other_stuff–>encounter
    (3) perceived race–>escalation
    (4) other stuff–>escalation
    (5) perceived race–>shoot
    (6) other stuff–>shoot

    I think you’re saying that the combination of (1), (3), and (5) answers the question “how much does racial bias of police officers contribute to shootings?”. But Fryer with his regressions is only looking at path (5) and (assuming he adjusts sufficiently for ‘other stuff’ and ‘escalation’) answering the question “how much does racial bias of police officers contribute to the decision to shoot after an encounter has escalated assuming that it contributes the same amount in all escalated situations?”.

  17. 17
    desipis says:

    Sebastian H:

    Someone on Gelman’s statistics blog put it like this:

    (1) perceived race–>encounter–>escalation–>shoot

    I would be interested in statistics for the causal chain related to anti-cop culture, i.e.:
    (7) encounter->anti cop attitude->escalation->shoot

    RonF:

    Your use of the term “murder” with reference to this study is
    incorrect.

    This is rather like the content of link #1, where the first couple of paragraphs are full of factually incorrect statements, seemingly for the sole purpose of fostering outrage at the police.

  18. 18
    Charles S says:

    RonF,

    “BLM wasn’t reacting to the murder of Eric Brown [sic] for the simple
    reason that, as was found not only by the State authorities but the
    Federal ones (the latter being led by a black Attorney General who
    doubtless had the attention of a black President), he was not
    murdered. But BLM did not wait for any such determination.”

    If BLM waited for an official determination of unlawful homicide before it started protesting a potential murder, it would wait a very long time. If
    there were no gross miscarriages of justice, if the system weren’t
    stacked against justice for people murdered by the police, and if the police didn’t lie and prosecutors back them up and protect them in their lies, there would be no BLM movement. A position of “Oh, let’s wait for the lawful authorities to declare everything hunky dory so we can go on with believing everything is fine,” isn’t going to change shit.

    You yourself bring up the case of the murder of Laquan Williams.
    Without protests and advocacy, the cover up of his murder would never have come to light and his murderer would have gone free, and yet you complain that BLM must not be interested in murders, since it protests before a case has
    been tried and the officer convicted. That makes no sense. BLM protests in order to attempt to get justice. It is not required to hold to an “innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. It doesn’t mete out punishment on the police suspected of committing murder. It just needs to hold to a “probable cause” standard.

    Hell, even after bringing to light the cover up for the murder of Mr. Williams, I won’t be surprised if his murderer goes free even now- convicting a police officer of murder is damned hard, as we are witnessing with the acquittals of the police who murdered Freddie Gray.

    And if Laquan Williams murderer goes free, then presumably you’ll add him to the list of people who weren’t really murdered by the police (just as you’ve parroted people complaining about the prosecution of Freddie Gray’s murderers). I’ll note that that is a theory of murder under which lynchings weren’t murders either, since they too saw an extraordinarily low rate of prosecution or conviction, and were often done with the involvement or cooperation of police.

    Your claim that BLM protests all police homicides of black people is just pig ignorant twaddle.

  19. 19
    Ampersand says:

    Desipis:

    “Full of factually incorrect statements” seems like an exaggeration. I see one factually incorrect (or at the best, highly speculative) statement – it seems unlikely that Mike Brown was “gunned down in cold blood,” and certainly that’s not a fact that we know.

    But the other facts mentioned in those two paragraphs are all either accurate (Brown’s body did lie in the street for hours, Tamir Rice was shot while playing in a park, Eric Garner was choked by police) or inaccurate only in inconsequential ways (Oscar Grant was shot in his back, not in his head).

    I guess you could argue that Tamir Rice’s death wasn’t “murder,” but in context that seems a matter of opinion, not a factual statement.

    Your assumption that those paragraphs are “seemingly for the sole purpose of fostering outrage at the police” is offbase, imo.

    Those paragraphs read like he was using that introduction to set a context for the remainder of the letter, and to explain his own emotional state before he heard about Alton Sterling’s son.

    [Edited to desnark.]

    ETA: Not that there’s anything wrong, in some circumstances, with fostering outrage at police actions. But that really doesn’t seem to be the purpose here.

  20. 20
    kate says:

    Republican Senator, Tim Scott talks about some of the experiences he, his family and friends have had being pulled over by police.

  21. 21
    desipis says:

    Statement #1:

    I’ve seen police choke Eric Garner to death in the street.

    Police did not “choke Eric Garner to death”. A police officer used a chokehold, which in combination with weight put on Garner’s chest, his poor health concerns caused breathing difficulties and eventually a heart attack.

    “Choke to death” would mean the police held his neck until his body was lifeless. That did not happen.

    Statement #2:

    I saw police put a gun to Oscar Grant’s head and pull the trigger.

    No-one put a gun to his head. A gun was pulled out and fired during a physical altercation. The letter’s statement implies the police executed him without a struggle. That did not happen.

    Statement #3:

    I saw them murder Tamir Rice for playing in the park.

    Tamir Rice was not murdered (or killed) “for playing in the park”. He was killed because he was waving an object designed to look like a real gun in a way that caused someone else to fear for their life.

    The “for playing in the park” causal description mean the police officer decided to kill him without a reason to fear for his own life. That did not happen.

    Statement #4:

    I saw Mike Brown’s body lay on the ground for hours after a cop gunned him down in cold blood.

    You’ve already conceded the “cold blood” point here.

    Four statements, four falsehoods. All four of which paint the cops as cold blooded killers when this is far from the case. Coincidence?

    Your assumption that those paragraphs are “seemingly for the sole purpose of fostering outrage at the police” is offbase, imo.

    I’d like to see another explanation why being so reckless with the truth was necessary.

    Based on the cases that the author set out, if he wants to avoid having the police turn his son into a Cameron Stirling, the best thing for him to do is to not physically resist the police and not wave guns around in public.

  22. 22
    RonF says:

    My apologies for getting Mr. Brown’s name incorrect.

  23. 23
    Ampersand says:

    Desipis, I am going to decline to be drawn into a debate of inconsequential detail-mongering – like parsing out the oh-so-consequential distinction between a chokehold and being choked – because that discussion is ridiculous, offensive, and besides the point.

    Garner was selling cigarette singles when he was physically brought down by a gang of four police who put him in a danger, leading to his death. His was an unnecessary and avoidable death. That is the central issue that matters in the context of this letter, and the way the letter puts it is fine for that. don’t try to make excuses for his death by mewling about irrelevant bullshit.

    Oscar Grant was being held face-down on the ground by police officers when one of the officers stood up, pulled his gun, and shot Grant through the back at close range. His was an unnecessary and avoidable death. That is the central issue; don’t make excuses for his death by describing it as “A gun was pulled out and fired during a physical altercation,” as if the gun fired itself, and as if the decision to pull a gun and shoot a young man in the back was reasonable.

    Tamar Rice was a child playing in a park with a toy gun – something I did as a kid, something I’m willing to bet a million adults (mostly but not entirely men) did as a kid. From the Wikipedia page:

    The video briefly shows Rice talking on a cellphone, and sitting at a picnic table in a gazebo. A patrol car moves at high speed across the park lawn and then stops abruptly by the gazebo. Loehmann then jumps out of the car and immediately shoots Rice from a distance of less than 10 feet (3.0 m). According to Judge Ronald B. Adrine in a judgement entry on the case “this court is still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly…. On the video the zone car containing Patrol Officers Loehmann and Garmback is still in the process of stopping when Rice is shot.”

    Neither Loehmann nor Garmback administered any first aid to Rice after the shooting.

    You say that the policeman who shot Rice had “a reason to fear for his own life” – by which you mean, he was within ten feet of a person holding a (apparent) gun, in a state where carrying unconcealed guns is legal. I think that’s obviously bullshit.

    But even it it weren’t bullshit, it was the officers’ own acts which put them in that situation. There was no immediate emergency; nothing prevented them from stopping further away, or from accessing the situation. Instead, they zoomed up and shot a young boy dead before their car had fully stopped.

    Why are you making excuses for this bullshit?

    I’d like to see another explanation why being so reckless with the truth was necessary.

    People can get facts wrong because they’re misinformed or mistaken. You must already know that.

    (Although, again, most of the facts you claim he got wrong either aren’t wrong, or are inconsequential to his argument.)

    Based on the cases that the author set out, if he wants to avoid having the police turn his son into a Cameron Stirling, the best thing for him to do is to not physically resist the police and not wave guns around in public.

    This is ludicrous. The police are not a natural disaster; they are not an insentient force with no decision-making capability. They are people, and like all people they bear moral responsibility for their choices and actions. The people who are designing and maintaining the system – for instance, a system that leads officers to treat “drive up and shoot the child instantly” as a default – are likewise responsible for their own choices.

    It is revolting to blame a 12-year-old boy for the acts of the people who had dozens of other options, but chose instead to shoot the boy dead.

    [Edited by Amp to desnark a bit. This is a topic that gets me a bit heated.]

  24. 24
    Jane Doh says:

    On #23

    Words of wisdom from a 7 year old:
    “They should just remember to lock the stalls and then no one will know what kind of private parts they have. I sometimes forget too.”

    Said 7 year old wanted to know why we need laws about using bathrooms (which of course, we don’t). Trying to explain it all made it just so much more apparent how unbelievably ridiculous the whole thing is, if only it weren’t hurting real live human beings. The part about people’s brains and bodies not always matching was perfectly understandable to a 7 year old. It was everything else surrounding it that was incomprehensible.

    Other comments included: “But why? What if I accidentally use the wrong bathroom? Can my 4 year old cousin still go in to the bathroom with his mommy? Where is North Carolina and do we have to go there?”

  25. 25
    Ampersand says:

    Based on the cases that the author set out, if he wants to avoid having the police turn his son into a Cameron Stirling, the best thing for him to do is to not physically resist the police and not wave guns around in public.

    I think it’s just about physically impossible to not struggle when you can’t breathe because of weight compression on your trunk, by the way. It’s a reflex, and most people would not be able to voluntarily not struggle to breathe for an extended period of time.

    This just happened yesterday, so it’s not one of the examples in link #1, but I think it’s illustrative of how the “if only people didn’t resist they wouldn’t get shot” cliche isn’t true.

    The person with his hands in the air is Charles Kinsey, a therapist. I’m at a loss for how he could have more clearly displayed that he was unarmed and not attacking anyone. The other person is his patient. Kinsey was explaining that both he and his patient were unarmed (the patient is holding a toy truck). And then Kinsey got shot (although, thankfully, he survived).

    charles-kinsey-hands-in-air

    The ordeal went on for a few minutes before Kinsey said one of the officers shot him. “I’m like this right here, and when he shot me, it was so surprising,” Kinsey said. “It was like a mosquito bite, and when it hit me, I’m like, ‘I still got my hands in the air, and I said, ‘No, I just got shot! And I’m saying, ‘Sir, why did you shoot me?’ and his words to me, he said, ‘I don’t know.’”

    North Miami Police said the incident began, Monday, when someone called 911 and said there was a man walking around with a gun threatening suicide. Kinsey said the man was his patient and the alleged gun was a toy truck, which he said was clearly visible to police. “I was really more worried about him than myself. I was thinking as long as I have my hands up … they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking, they’re not going to shoot me. Wow, was I wrong.”

    They handcuffed Kinsey immediately after shooting him, but he didn’t get medical attention for 20 minutes.

    And by the way, black parents tell their kids (especially their sons) not to resist ALL THE TIME. That is literally what “The Talk” is.

  26. 26
    Jake Squid says:

    re #23, too: The NBA has removed the 2017 all star game from Charlotte specifically because of the NC law enshrining discrimination against LGBT.

  27. 27
    veronica d says:

    Good for the NBA.

  28. 28
    pillsy says:

    @Jake Squid, Pat McGrory has already blamed the Clintons for the NBA’s decision because, well, he’s a craven shitbird.

  29. 29
    Ampersand says:

    Update to my previous comment:

    “Fearing for Mr. Kinsey’s life, the officer discharged his firearm trying to save Mr. Kinsey’s life,” said Miami Dade Police Benevolent Union president John Rivera. “He missed and accidentally struck Mr. Kinsey. He thought the white male and his actions were such that he felt Mr. Kinsey’s life was in danger.”

    If this is the case, it’s unclear why officers felt they needed to handcuff Kinsey as he lay wounded in the street.

  30. 30
    desipis says:

    Ampersand:

    Why are you making excuses for this bullshit?

    I’m not making excuses, and I don’t think it’s “detail-mongering” to think it’s important to acknowledge the moral difference between intentional, unjustifiable homicide (murder), and negligence, accident or self defence.

  31. 31
    Ampersand says:

    Sure, that’s an important moral difference. It’s also a matter of interpretation, not a matter of facts – that is, two people could agree on the facts about the Tamir Rice shooting but disagree that it’s murder (or manslaughter).

    I’d say that you and this author are disagreeing on culpability – was the officer who shot Tamir Rice culpable for Rice’s death? In the case of accident or self-defense, he’s not culpable; in the case of murder or manslaughter (and negligence could, if I understand it correctly, come under manslaughter), he is culpable. But the writer can disagree with you about that without being wrong about the facts, or lying, or misleading. He just disagrees with you.

    Speaking of getting facts wrong, earlier you wrote (and I followed suit):

    He was killed because he was waving an object designed to look like a real gun in a way that caused someone else to fear for their life.

    According to the officers and the expert testimony, Rice wasn’t holding the (toy) gun at the time he was shot. They feared that he was reaching for a gun in his waistband, but it wasn’t in his hand.

    I’d ask you for an “explanation why being so reckless with the truth was necessary,” except I assume you just made a mistake. It’s weird that you’re not willing to extend that benefit of the doubt to this writer.

  32. 32
    Jane Doh says:

    Tamir Rice was shot about 2 seconds after the police arrived after they deliberately drove up close to him and one officer got out of the car, rather than stopping some distance away. I also question why they would approach in such an aggressive manner someone who might be an adult in Ohio carrying anything that looked like a gun not pointed at anything (I have this vague memory that the officers involved claimed they thought Tamir was an adult, but that might not be correct). Isn’t Ohio an open carry state? I would say that the officers created the situation in which they feared for their lives all by themselves. Seems like negligence to me.

    The recent incident with Charles Kinsey in Florida more or less shows that there really isn’t anything a black man can do to make himself less of a target when faced by poorly trained/overly aggressive police officers going in with guns blazing (and seriously WTF? the officer claims to have been aiming at the other guy? I think something is wrong with the training there on many levels if this is actually a possibility! Someone who is such a poor shot under pressure should not be carrying a gun on patrol.) Vi Hart has a great video about Black Lives Matter and the recent shootings (both by the police and of the police). I think the video gets to the heart of the matter in terms of how the incidents are treated by the public, and brings out that how the deceased (civilian and cop) are treated in the media is yet another form of violation for recent unarmed black civilians who died at the hands of (or under the care of) police officers.

  33. 33
    Mandolin says:

    and seriously WTF? the officer claims to have been aiming at the other guy?

    My husband and I looked at the photos, and if the officer was on the opposite side of the autistic man from the caretaker, and sicne the caretaker had his arms up, it’s possible the shot makes a certain amount of sense, or at least isn’t an enormous miss.

    I am… glad he hit Kinsey? Sort of. I don’t know if the autistic man would still be alive, and Kinsey is, so that’s a better outcome… of some really shitty possible outcomes.

    And disabled and mentally ill people being killed by the police in circumstances that don’t warrant it is also a problem that exists, even if it’s not currently the focus of the dialogue.

    As far as why they hand-cuffed Kinsey, someone in a thread at Pharyngula said that had been part of his police training. Sort of the opposite of the advice “don’t talk to the police” because what you say can only be used to hurt, not help you, regardless of the intention of the cop. Handcuff first, so you have those cards in hand for the defense in case that’s what you need later; work it out after that. I can understand why that’s policy, although it’s a better policy if you can *minimize the number of negligent shootings* so that police aren’t just injuring and handcuffing random people. It’s dehumanizing and a terrible way to salt a victim’s (literal) wounds. Nevertheless, I’m honestly more concerned about the delay in giving him medical attention.

  34. 34
    Ampersand says:

    The comment on Pharyngula Mandolin pointed to was interesting enough so I thought I’d reproduce it here. (Thanks, Mandolin).

    I’ve answered this question a few times before on this blog. There’s a very specific reason for it, and law enforcement are trained to do it. My instructor said clearly, in so many words, again and again, “If you shoot someone, by god you’d better cuff them!”

    The reason is to prepare your defense in any possible trial that may arise out of the shooting. Cuffing them helps in several ways.

    First, it allows you to claim that you were effecting an arrest. Force is allowed not only to defend self or others, but if you’re a cop it’s also allowed when necessary to effect an arrest. “Necessary” is debatable in front of a jury, but if you plan to claim you were effecting an arrest, then by god you’d better effect an arrest. The instructor sometimes added, “I don’t care if they’re fucking dead: handcuff the fucking corpse. Understand?”

    Second, it lets you bootstrap an actual crime out of an illegal arrest. In many jurisdictions, including mine, resisting arrest is a crime, even if the cop and the arrestee both know the arrest was completely illegal. There is no right to defend yourself, even if the cop says, “I’m arrest you for being ugly, and I’ma beat you some more with the ugly stick once you’re cuffed.” You are required by law to submit to the arrest, and wait for your day in court to complain about any misconduct or misfeasance. They can’t resist arrest if you don’t arrest them. You can always claim in court that they resisted; that becomes your word against theirs, and they’re obviously a criminal, so…

    Third, it reinforces a claim of self-defense. You don’t want to claim they were dangerous, and you were in fear for your life, and then leave them lying there shot. “Weren’t you afraid they’d pull a concealed gun and shoot you? Weren’t you afraid they were faking their injuries? If you were so afraid for your life, why did you leave them free to maybe kill you?” It plays better in court to say, “I shot him because I was in fear for my life, and I handcuffed him so he would be unable to attack me while I .”

    This shooting was beyond absurd; beyond obviously wrong. But that doesn’t matter: failing to cuff the victim is as good as throwing away cards the defense could play. It’s the lawyer’s job to decide whether to play that card later.

  35. 35
    desipis says:

    I’d say that you and this author are disagreeing on culpability – was the officer who shot Tamir Rice culpable for Rice’s death?

    I certainly accept there’s room for an argument about culpability in the form of criminally negligent manslaughter for the officer involved. Of course that would depend on what information and training the officer had at the time he made the decision to drive that close. The culpability may be better placed on those who gave that particular officer his gun and badge.

    I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in the way American police forces are run. For starters I think they should all be run at the state level rather that locally. There should also be completely independent institutions for investigating serious complaints against police. I don’t, however, think that cop hate and mob justice are doing anything to help bring these things about, or do anything positive at all.

    But the writer can disagree with you about that without being wrong about the facts, or lying, or misleading.

    He could, but he didn’t. He explicitly linked the shooting caused by being in the park, when it was caused by the replica gun. That is factually wrong.

    Rice wasn’t holding the (toy) gun at the time he was shot.

    There’s video of him waving the gun around. I was connecting the longer series of events to his death, not just the few seconds after the police arrived.

  36. 36
    Ampersand says:

    Rice wasn’t holding the (toy) gun at the time he was shot.

    There’s video of him waving the gun around. I was connecting the longer series of events to his death, not just the few seconds after the police arrived.

    You don’t think that the (toy) gun was never in his hands while the police were approaching, and in the second or so between when they arrived and when he was shot, is a relevant consideration?

    The “it’s okay to shoot a child if he has at any point previously in the day been holding a toy gun in his hands” standard you’re suggesting seems like a terrible standard.

  37. 37
    desipis says:

    The “it’s okay to shoot a child if he has at any point previously in the day been holding a toy gun in his hands” standard you’re suggesting seems like a terrible standard.

    When did I say that the outcome was “okay”? I was talking about the facts that I see as being causal to his death, not the theoretical things that would need to have been true for the death to have been justified.

  38. 38
    Jane Doh says:

    @desipis
    What was happening before the cops arrived has no bearing on why he was shot. You can be arrested for pointing a gun at someone prior to the police arriving, but the punishment for brandishing a weapon is not death. If the police don’t see someone threatening anyone with a weapon, they shouldn’t shoot.

    What the police actually saw was a boy with something in his waistband. They pulled up to within 10 ft of him and shot him 2 seconds after arriving. There was no gun waving or gun pointing during or after the police arriving.

    What I am finding really disturbing about a bunch of the recent police shootings is the role that erroneous or exaggerated 911 calls have played in priming the police for an armed and dangerous assailant where none exists. This is particularly true in the case of John Crawford, where Ronald Ritchie called 911 on him for no particular reason, saying he was loading a rifle and pointing it at children. A racist asshat pointed the police at John Crawford just because, and Crawford died, while Ritchie was not prosecuted for his actions. Incorrect or misleading 911 information was a factor in the shootings of Alton Stirling and Tamir Rice as well.

  39. 39
    nobody.really says:

    An explanation of the Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion.

  40. 40
    lauren says:

    Am I the only one who finds that quote from the Pharygula-thread really disturbing?

    The idea that police officers are being trained to use force – because cuffing somone is a use of force – against civilians not to protect their own health or that of bystanders, but to have a better chance to defend semselves against possible charges of eccessive force ist frightening.The thought that from the beginning, these officers are being tought that it is in their best interest to follow violence with more violence, not because it is sadly neccessary but because it might give them plausible deniability…

    I hope this is not true for all officers. If it is, then how is anybody supposed to trust the cops? Protecting not their lifes but just their carreers at – the expence of the dignity, health and even lives of the people they are sworn to protect.

    (I am more than willing to be convinced that I misunderstood something, English not beeing my first language, but that is truly what I took away from that quote. That cops are being taught that their first thought after shooting someone should not be about minimizing the damage to the person shot, but to their careers,)

  41. 41
    nobody.really says:

    Vox: ”For conservatism to live, the conservative movement has to die.”

    Goldwater won the 1964 Republic nomination by espousing libertarianism. He had supported a number of civil rights laws reforming discrimination by government, but argued that the 1964 Civil Rights Act wrongfully interfered with the rights of private actors to discriminate. In contrast, Johnson supported the Act—and won in a landslide. Republicans celebrate Goldwater’s quixotic campaign as a blow for principle, but it set in motion the circumstances whereby minorities transferred their loyalties from the party of Lincoln to the party of Johnson, and white nationalists transferred their loyalty in the other direction. Republican intellectuals have been able to live in denial about where their votes were coming from. But the Trump campaign has exposed the fact that, at its base, the GOP is a party of white nationalism dressed in the clothes of principled conservatism. Today the party has no clothes.

  42. 42
    Elusis says:

    Since the killing of Tamir Rice is under discussion, this recent GQ article might be of interest, as it looks very closely at the moments before his death and the decisions the police officers made (particularly the evidence vs. their statements.) https://www.gq.com/story/tamir-rice-story

  43. 43
    desipis says:

    What was happening before the cops arrived has no bearing on why he was shot.

    Of course it does. The reports to the police about Rice’s behaviour go directly to the state of mind of the officers when they made their decisions about how to approach the situation. Both those decisions and the reports about Rice’s behaviour would have contributed to the state of mind of the officer, and what reasonable fears he may have had in regards to his own life, at the time of the shooting.

    You can be arrested for pointing a gun at someone prior to the police arriving, but the punishment for brandishing a weapon is not death.

    Observing there’s a causal relationship between do things isn’t the same thing as suggesting moral culpability. When a child runs out on to the street directly into the path of a car and dies, we can observe the child actions resulted in their death without implying that the child deserved to die, or that their death was somehow ‘punishment’ for their misbehaviour.

  44. 44
    Ampersand says:

    Since the killing of Tamir Rice is under discussion, this recent GQ article might be of interest, as it looks very closely at the moments before his death and the decisions the police officers made (particularly the evidence vs. their statements.) https://www.gq.com/story/tamir-rice-story

    Thanks for the link, Elusis; that was a really good article. It’s infuriating how some prosecutors have been misusing the grand jury system.

  45. 45
    Mandolin says:

    lauren,

    Yes, that’s how I read it, too. Of course, that’s only relaying one person’s impression of *part* of their training; hopefully, there are other parts which help compensate.

    But I can see how/why that’s something that would flow from current circumstances, and I suspect the circumstances are what need fixing before you can approach it as a secondary effect. Essentially, the system incentivizes people to do that, and we need to change the incentives.

  46. 46
    Elusis says:

    It’s infuriating how some prosecutors have been misusing the grand jury system.

    The article brought that up for me too. The similarities between the Michael Brown grand jury trial, and this one, are really alarming. Prosecutors are supposed to argue for the prosecution, not the defense, but when police are the accused, there seems to be a hopeless conflict of interest, in addition to whatever influence of systemic racism, biased thinking, problems of evidence or testimony, etc. make it hard to get an indictment. It’s almost impossible to read the account of either prosecutor’s actions and not come away feeling fairly convinced that the prosecutor did not want a trial and therefore did not get one.