Well, you can recognize that these instincts are harmful and confront them, or you can loudly insist that your fear of black people is not at all racist.

Hmm. Broken tail lights are more visible at night, but there's no longer a racial disparity in who gets pulled over at night. Almost as if "people get pulled over because they're poor" is missing another, additional component that explains it...

By the way, you missed some posts!

I did not miss them. I'm not allowed to respond the way I want, you are being protected.

Okay. You can keep railing against the existence of systemic racism while repeatedly ignoring inconvenient evidence you don't like, such as resume callback studies that devastate your precious "unconventional name" narrative or drug arrest rates being wildly out of whack with your claims, and I'll keep pointing out that according to the premises you laid out it's been shown to exist in this thread.

In your defense, I would agree that it is quite human to have biases. And I would agree that the job of police officer may tend to reinforce biases more than some other jobs.

You are catching hell because you implied that black people bear most of the blame for whatever biases police officers may have against black people, and that those biases are likely to persist until "the overall demographic improves their behavior."

No, I want to be clear, I'm ignoring you.

Look at this narcissist, always making everything about himself instead of the argument at hand. "NO", he cries, "you don't UNDERSTAND, I am IGNORING YOU! The moderators are UNFAIRLY SILENCING ME!"

Like I said, go for it, doesn't affect me or my fact checking of your attempts to deny systemic racism exists after it's already been shown to according to the premises you laid out.

This is what I gather I'm hearing from some of the left here in this scenario. Say the police have set up a random breath test station and say for every 3 cars that come by they grab one. That if they have grabbed 50 of those cars and if 5 of them have had drivers that have either tested positive to drugs or over the limit amounts of alcohol in their system and they are all people of colour then because they believe that the police have got their "representative quota" of those that end up in prison that if the next car that comes by of that every third car is a person of colour driving it then they should be waved past.

Congratulations on managing to butcher both language and mathematics in the same post.

Yeah you're right because of those 50 cars it would be a much higher percentage of those that would be found to have failed their drug test and be of colour

I understood the gist what you were trying to say, you just can't count. To the extent that what your post was even decipherable, your numbers were wrong.

If there is anything that I have learned from poker, it's that a sample size of 5 is a representative sample.

I suspect the omerta has more to do with the fact that the guy you may have just witnessed doing something terrible is likely to be watching your back one day soon.

As you point out. As employees police have a very stressful and often dangerous job and they deserve (have the right, in fact) to be unionized just like any other employee.

The problem as I see it is with oversight. Mayors need to be on good terms with the police because they're 'the muscle'. Civilian oversight is probably what's needed. Especially in bigger cities. Perhaps even well paid elected positions.

The donor class would love to break police unions. The system, as it is now designed, assumes workers will have a voice via collective bargaining. There is no other option. And with unions all but gone the middle class is paying the price.

I see the problem with too much power but throwing the baby out isn't normally wise.

And that's like the 5th least wrong thing with his "calcs".

I suspect the omerta has more to do with the fact that the guy you may have just witnessed doing something terrible is likely to be watching your back one day soon.

As you point out. As employees police have a very stressful and often dangerous job and they deserve (have the right, in fact) to be unionized just like any other employee.

The problem as I see it is with oversight. Mayors need to be on good terms with the police because they're 'the muscle'. Civilian oversight is probably what's needed. Especially in bigger cities. Perhaps even well paid elected positions.

The donor class would love to break police unions. The system, as it is now designed, assumes workers will have a voice via collective bargaining. There is no other option. And with unions all but gone the middle class is paying the price.

I see the problem with too much power but throwing the baby out isn't normally wise.

I have a relative who is a retired police officer, who was an officer for 30+ years. He is actually a Democrat and hates Trump FWIW. So this isn't political per se.

Anyways, when he first started out in the 1960s he said there was a lot less of cops going for their guns when things got physical. If you fought the cops they would fight you back, and they would normally severely beat you in reprisal. And if it was a 1 on 1 fight and you (the civilian won it) the cops would hunt you down and beat you very badly for it.

And everyone knew that was what was going to happen if you decided to lay hands on a cop, and whatever you think about the "right" or "wrong" of such things, it actually worked (depending on how you define worked) and there was relatively very little fighting the police, and relatively little cops going for their guns.

Anyways, now society has evolved (for good or bad) and the police are generally not allowed to use physical force they way they once did, and civilians have become more emboldened to fight police, and we have a lot more physical confrontations.

And many police are not trained for this and not comfortable doing this, and are cognizant that so many civilians are armed themselves, and so they are much quicker to go to their gun. And we have the results we have.

And (this is me, Kelhus talking) I am skeptical the police reform that is going on right now by itself is going to fix things very much, and is very likely to just make things worse. I think the European countries policing works differently because their social dynamics are different. I dont think the Swedish or English style of policing (or fill in the blank any country) would work at all with our dynamics. And I think you would need to change the social dynamics first, and everything else would flow down from there.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the entire "conservatives try to do math to justify their idiotic positions" genre. I've elicited some great additions to the corpus myself. Ones with multiple mistakes are obviously the best.

I don't believe this.

Or this

Or this.

We have a lot more people carrying video recorders on them at all times. That's the difference.

To the extent that this is a problem, it's a fixable one!

I suspect a society where a substantial part of the population feels entitled to fight police officers, and the police officers are just expected to take it, and even risk being shot at in the process, is not going to be a very functional, stable society.

But it looks like that is the way things are going. So I guess we will find out.

I didn't realize that video markksman (I think?) posted the other day of a cop successfully taking some guy to the ground in a supermarket wrestling match represented the breakdown of society. I guess 50 years ago cops never had to do that!

Literally no one is proposing this, and you have zero examples of this ever having happened.

I'm would be surprised if data does not show officer involved shootings have decreased over the years. Such incidents falling under mandatory investigations have probably led to superior understanding and subsequently better procedures and training. We've also had developments in non-lethal weaponry that was simply not available to police-officers in the past.

That said, data was not easy to find. It is my understanding that older such material is lacking, especially prior to the civil rights era. Nor was it easy to find US national data. So what I had to check it against was data from New York from 1971 to 2020. It is unlikely that this is properly representative of the US as a whole. The public perception has probably gone the other way around, since new technology allows for a more detailed reporting of news and a shooting is always a high interest case.

Other than that, the US has a ton of civilians with guns, a lot of civilians more willing to use guns and, for a western country, an extreme availability of guns. This does of course affect policing and how you should police.

This is given from a purely practical point of view; guns make it a lot handier for people to kill each-other than other similarly sized weaponry. They greatly affect at what range, angles and geometry encounters become dangerous. There is also a psychological aspect; learning to shoot first (at least at ranges above a few meters) is fairly easy, learning to strike or stab first is tough. Thus risk assessments, distances and situational approach to interactions must be done differently.

However, most of the above isn't really all that related to a debate on stereotyping and how this affects police interactions. People are guided by our mental schema, simplified heuristics that provide us with quick solutions to situations we find ourselves in. Stereotyping is a true risk here, and it would be a dereliction of duty not to properly investigate it and assess it. Openly denying it as a factor is not doing anybody any favors, least of all the police.

This sounds a lot like the traditional argument for allowing fighting in NHL hockey. That is, we should permit (or even encourage) some amount of extracurricular violence because it will deter worse incidents (often defined in NHL hockey as goons targeting elite skill players).

The argument for encouraging fighting in pro hockey is almost completely discredited now. And it never made much sense. Someone we managed to have Olympic hockey for decades without the fighting that prevailed in the NHL. The argument for encouraging fighting in hockey is best understood as people advocating for the system that they grew up and flourished in. That's a natural human instinct. I suspect that your relative's point about fighting between police and civilians is a product of the same phenomenon.

Also, I agree with tame deuces. I'd be surprised if bad police shootings have not decreased over the last 30 years.

I forget, is this the thread where conservatives laughably claim bad cops are dealt with?

Louisiana cop who beat up a handcuffed black man three years ago is now the police chief, as video of the beating emerges that police had claimed did not exist

Here's the city's statement about their efforts to deal with this bad cop:

Oh boy, I wonder what these "social dynamics" are.