Even if everybody involved is white, it's still about race.

The reason the US prefers police who terrorize people and other developed countries don't tolerate it is white supremacy. "Those people are animals who need to be controlled." is a popular idea. For some people the police are a weapon, for other people the police are an unaccountable deadly threat to their existence.

It's all about race.

It doesn't have to be this way. It's not like this in other countries.

Any theory about US policing needs to account for the difference between US police and the police practices of other rich countries. Explanations which don't involve race don't work.

Yes, agreed, you can look at aggregate statistics, do studies, etc. to show that the systemic racism exists but for individual cases it is pretty much impossible to know.

But, again, if the tazing is inappropriate (it was) then you don't need to know how much of a role racism played in it.

This is a pretty good post, but it doesn't disagree with anything I said.

You literally stated in this thread that you do not care about police shootings of white people; only those of black people. You should stay faaaar away from any discussions of racism.

This is a good post. Like the police in South Africa in the 1980s were very militarized and aggro. Obviously that was because of race, but that had to spill over into the way the police treated everyone.

LMAO, **** you Donkey. You didn't understand or didn't want to understand what my point was then so I'm sure your take's only gotten better.

Please list a timestamp in the video that would make it crystal clear that race wasn't involved in this incident. I'm going to say when they tazed him for being polite and following their instructions is when it becomes clear there is something else going on here than strong community policing.

Do you read the English language?

I think this kind of **** is generally more likely to happen to black people than white people. I think discussing the reasons behind that is interesting and important. I don't think trying to parse out what portion of some specific incident is attributable to racism is possible, important, or interesting.

So after you hear about the victims behavior and after you watch the video you still don't know if their was racism involved? Really? I guess we're back to my anti-basketall theory.

Yeah, it's great to not make a judgement without information, but when there is more than enough information available to make the determination and you still want 'more answers' then you just look like part of the problem.

Pretty great deal that apparently no individual can ever be culpable for racism if they commit egregious acts that contribute to racist statistics, but of course, only statistics can be racist. Epistemological uncertainty and all, yo.

I guess the commons are racist but the no one else is...

I don't want more answers. To be honest, unless it was a hate crime, I don't really care how much race played into it.

People who commit egregious acts are culpable for their egregious acts. If you wrong taze a black guy then you are culpable for wrongly tazing a guy. Not being "culpable for racism" makes no difference and is not a "great deal".

Trying to limit this to being an isolated act obscures the bigger problem. Like, you don't have the statistics without a bunch of isolated acts. This doesn't get solved by writing it off as a fluke act by a rogue officer.

But it is an isolated act. It's not a fluke, unnecessary police brutality is apparently happening all the time, but I'm not really sure what you guys are wanting to do? Do you want to prosecute people's unconscious biases?

You have a coin that comes up heads 60% of the time. You flipped heads and you're saying "look an example of the coin's unfairness". Why?

Politically, stats don't move the meter. No one gives a **** about the numbers. Hearts and minds are swayed by particular incidents that exemplify what the stats nerds say is the truth. The stats haven't really changed, but what gets people to rally is Michael Brown, Philando Castille, etc.

idk why anyone's giving TD the benefit of the doubt like he doesn't reflexively jump into every thread where inappropriate police conduct happens towards black people to equivocate with the libs (remember his golfing performance?)

I'm fairly sure they simply want to point to this event as a concrete example of what systemic racism looks like, and that doesn't really depend on an assessment of the individual biases of the officer in the case. That's why the responses to you saying "I'm not sure if it was racial" don't generally involve any argument about the officer's psychology at all. Calling it racism, using the definition being employed, doesn't really depend very much on the officer at all, which is the core of chips' point.

I doubt anyone really disagrees with the point that police brutality is bad regardless of the race of the victim, but obviously the statistical arguments are made up of "isolated cases" and I don't see any reason to object to citing this as an example of the impact of racism in policing, especially using "disparate impact" senses of the word "racism". Especially given that police brutality is not "apparently happening all the time" to white people.

Ok, I agree with this.

???

1. You've got literally one example. "Reflexively jump into every thread" is pretty ******ed.
2. I said the police conduct was inappropriate here. I never said anything different. I'm not arguing about that.

Read the posts or **** off.

My contention is that an "example of systemic racism" is not a thing that exists.

To be perfectly, 100% clear, that is not because systemic racism doesn't exist. It does. But it's basically the cumulative effect of peoples moderate biases. It is a shifting of the probability curve of outcomes. It can only be "seen" through looking at statistically significant samples.

Instead of accepting this, you guys (not you really, but the people you are defending) seem intent on manufacturing "examples". Maybe this is good for political rallying, I don't know.

----

Like "I don't know if it is racial" and "everything is racial" are both true, and they are both the same answer. I accept, and I assume you do to, that white guy gets tazed here x% of the time, and black guy gets tazed y% of the time, and y>x.

The conversation people are trying to have with inso is whether this case is one of the x, or one of the (y-x). No one ****ing knows that. Hence, "I don't know if it is racial".

On the other hand, the additional (y-x) affects every incident, and in that sense "everything is racial".

Like I said, Chips Ahoy's post was good and I don't think it directly contradicts mine.

I am under the impression that police brutality against white people, while significantly lower than against black people, is still above acceptable levels in the US.

the former is probably the wrong way of looking at it. Incidents don't have some definite 'will be tazed' or 'wont be tazed'. Rather, every incident has a probability of resulting in a tazing as it unfold. The probability is higher when the person is black so it's an instance of systemic racism even if they don't actually get tazed (I assume this is what you mean by the later)

The reason the second is better is that the actions of the people involved are likely to be different even if the person doesn't get tazed.

I think you are taking "example" to mean "demonstration", i.e. something that establishes the truth of the claim that systemic racism exists. But that's not what I mean by example and I don't think it's how wookie or others here mean it either. An example is something that is illustrative of the larger point, not something that is a sufficient demonstration or definitive evidence per se.

So, if I wanted to explain what I meant by "systemic racism," or present an argument for it, I wouldn't cite a single incident and say Q.E.D.! I would probably present in parallel some recitation of history to establish context, a number of examples chosen to illustrate various consequences of racism and its qualitative characteristics, supported by various statistics which argue for the representativeness of those qualitative examples. I think all of those components are necessary for a good explanation, but that doesn't diminish the value of the anecdotal examples. They aren't just valuable by way of motivating a political response (although I agree with wookie about that also) but also as explication of "systemic racism" as a concept. Racism may be more than a sum of disconnected anecdotes but it's certainly not less than those same anecdotes, and I think you'd be hard pressed to understand racism while refusing to accept as "examples" of it those same concrete anecdotes.

The TL;DR here is I think you are being too philosophical, or too insistent on a very particular epistemological stance towards the discussion here, and I don't think it actually clarifies anything. But given that you agree with chips I also think you guys are just talking past each other a little bit.

Yeah, kudos to the Latinos in D2 for overcoming their natural brown-person instinct to be criminals. Unlike those BLACKS in District 4, amirite? (ETA: and clearly, the behavior of people in a particular district is a reflection on the entire race of whoever is the majority in the district, right?)

(Inb4 he replies, "Actually the blacks live in District 5")

This is fantastic, as usual.

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I agree with most of what you wrote here, and you may be correct that I am not giving Wookie enough benefit of the doubt with his intent. I also read his (and especially kerowo's) posts as wanting to hold the officers in some way "responsible for their racism" over and above the responsibility they have for tazing a black guy inappropriately.

I love how Inso0 took the time to go through a 120 page study that was not even discussed on the forum and studied the population maps in order to reassure himself that it could not possibly be correct.

TiltedDonkey,


This incident clearly fits the pattern of systemically racist policing. I get the impression you have a unreasonably high burden of proof for calling something racially motivated.


What would need to happen for you to call a single incident racially motivated? Does the cop need to explicitly state "I am going to taze you because of your race"?

Either that or a corroborated history of other racist statements or actions.

Woman thrown to ground in waffle house
This

I never said you said something other than that the police conduct was inappropriate. How about you read the posts or **** off?

I said you come to equivocate with the libs, which is exactly what you're doing with this "well who can really say if individual incidents are racism" bull****. You're like a hellish cross of chezlaw and KEEEEEED.

All you need to know that tells you it was racially motivated is the cop being so interested in asking dumb ****ing questions and giving dickhead commands. All of which came after he decided rather than leaving a parking ticket like any other ****ing parking violation, he'd stand in front of this guy's car door and basically make it impossible that a situation like this doesn't get tested.

He's a ****ing police officer. His job is not to lecture every person he gives a parking ticket. His job is not to, in the most insufferably disingenuous way, question the actions of anyone he comes across that is ultimately just supposed to get a parking ticket. Like, wtf is he asking questions for? It's obvious Sterling Brown parked like that because it was 2am and ****ing nobody is around. Dude was going to a convenience store to grab something and jet, not wait for a ****ing doctor's appointment with a full lot of cars there. Is he inconsiderate? Sure, maybe. Is he a dickhead? Sure, maybe. But people act like he's scum of the earth because he triple parked. Handicap spot. What, you think someone is gonna pull to a Walgreens at 2am to pick up his or her meds? Get the **** out of here with that dumb ****. Cop should've just let him know what he did is stupid af and been done with it. Ticket him or warn him. He's not ****ing stupid, and neither are you.

Cops deal with the most ignorant and stupid ****ing people all the time, day in and day out. If you really wanna tell that 15th thug mother****er off because you've dealt with 14 straight and handled them correctly but it left you with a knot in your head you wanted to unload, then you either need a break or you need a new job. In either case, you could've ended up killed, gotten another cop killed, or in this case, Sterling Brown killed. It's racially motivated in the same way people seem to get just a liiiiittle extra angry about Obamacare instead of the Affordable Care Act.