Banana Boat Crew being so racist.

It's not bad apples, it's orders coming down from the top to harass and ticket poor people and people of color. It generates lots of revenue for the municipality. They have been harassing these people and locking them in cages for a profit for a long time, and this is the natural extension of that. The police departments are designed to produce bad apples. Any good apples that are produced are completely incidental and will probably be pushed out of the department over time anyway.

What do you expect the cops in Dallas to do about a pu**y cop in MN who killed a guy, because he was so scared of the word "gun" that he never should have been a cop in the first place? It's not their job to prosecute that cop. They have their own job to do.

The Dallas cops did what they were supposed to do. They worked to build relationships with the community. They treated citizens of color with respect, by most accounts I've read. They weren't out murdering people or shooting anyone's friend, nor were they defending cops who did. They were just doing their job, protecting people's right to protest peacefully. But because they wear a blue uniform, 5 are dead.

People need to get past seeing "the police" as some monolithic entity that shares the same characteristics. The incidents are tragic but we are talking about a handful of incidents in a violent country of 300+ million people. Some perhaps caused by racist cops, others by simple human error or incompetence.

revots- Bro you think there's a feminazi campaign to discriminate against frat bros because you read one ****ing chain email, who the **** do you think this **** fools? Racism against blacks by cops isn't real, talking about it hurts Baby Revots' and His Cop Friends in their SOULS, but let's definitely talk about the very real problem of an "atmosphere of hatred" against cops?


revots, my Good Man, can you spell out who is creating that atmosphere of hatred? Be specific.

Dead cops:

Dead black people:

I don't think it's been posted in this thread, but Roland Fryer (super famous Harvard economist) just came out with a study on racial differences in the use of police force:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399

Here's the abstract:
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

Some media coverage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/up...shootings.html

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/1214946...shootings-data

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/up...rce-study.html

The punchline that's getting all of the media attention is effectively: There seems to be evidence of bias in non-lethal uses of force, but no evidence of bias in police shootings. Obviously that's a provocative conclusion in the context of high-profile police shootings where the victim was black.

I've only read the introduction of Fryer's paper and skimmed through some of the data section, but I wanted to mention two things: First, Roland Fryer is a very highly respected economist. This isn't a case of some highly questionable guy stepping into a political debate with ideological blinders on (like, say, John Lott on gun control). Second, I thought the NYT article was really thoughtful in summarizing the paper. Rather than giving really flashy headlines, they put graphics up that actually included confidence intervals for the various reported effects, as well as treating the results with an appropriate degree of skepticism. That type of thoughtful reporting on a scholarly, empirical study is uncommon. I also appreciated the Q&A with Fryer that they published.

In contrast, I thought the Vox criticism was pretty weak - the kind of generalized concerns that, say, redditors typically raise when a new study comes out (e.g., "But, but, correlation isn't causation", "small sample size", "correlated omitted variable") without being able to articulate how those general concerns might affect the inferences drawn. The Vox article isn't necessarily wrong, but it's basically saying "This paper doesn't answer every single question we might have about how race affects police/civilian encounters". It's not saying, "The conclusions in this paper are wrong."

I've read some other criticisms of the study, and the only one I've seen that seems like a really important point is here:
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/07/14/a...s-than-whites/

Basically, one of the control variables that Fryer used (only available in the sample data provided by the Houston police department) is whether lethal force may have been justified (attempted murder or aggravated assault of an officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, interfering in arrest). That assessment will obviously be subjective, and will also obviously be correlated with the actual use of force. If police are systematically biased in determining whether someone is resisting arrest (they over apply that label to black suspects), the controlling for that affect will statistically wash away actual bias in police shootings. That's a really important issue that could have a substantial effect on the empirical results.

In any event, I appreciate attempts like this to look at this issue systematically with data, in the same way that I appreciate looking in detail at individual police shootings. And I hope one of the outcomes is that police departments will do a better job capturing this kind of data going forward.

Five dead cops are tragic, sure, but this is a violent planet with over 11 billion people.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/l...nap-story.html


Fresno police release body-camera footage of fatal shooting of unarmed 19-year-old


it seems no matter what you like if you don't obey police orders in the USA that there is a good chance you will get shot

If he was black maybe Chris Paul would have said his name last night

Lol at all the right wing rags falling for this day of rage bull****

Looks to be a pretty apparent suicide by cop

This is actually true. The number of cops that get shot and killed each year in the US is pretty amazingly low, considering the number of armed criminals.

It is still a tragedy whether it's an innocent cop or an innocent civilian, I never said otherwise.

Just as you can't paint all black people based on one sniper in Dallas, you can't paint all cops based on one officer in MN. The only difference is that stereotyping police officers is considered acceptable.

Still got a better chance of not being shot if you're not black though. Nice of you to post this story as a way to show....something?

You made me look up the population of the planet!

Too late to edit my post. This is a pretty balanced critique of the Fryer study:
https://scatter.wordpress.com/2016/0...ice-shootings/

This is an even weirder racial grievance for this dude to run to this thread with.

Now the real racist is Chris Paul(???) for not... I don't even know. I have no ****ing idea what we can do to make you happy here.

Lol, he won't elaborate on this. Just wanted to leave it here and let us come to our own conclusions, I guess.

I'm not entirely competent to critique the work, but I think there are at least two potential points of interest

1) The evaluation of racial bias in officer-involved shootings is limited to data from the Houston PD (p. 21), and it also only looks at a subset of police interactions, specifically ones where lethal force is at least facially reasonable:

One possibility is simply that in Houston there is no racial disparity. But, also I wonder whether limiting the selection of cases obscures an effect that would be noticeable if they were evaluating across all cases where officer involved shootings occur. There's no way to know of course, but at least one other study which uses an alternate data set on police shootings across the country found a racial bias at least in the shootings of unarmed people at least.

(2) I think it could be argued that this study is attempting to isolate a particularly narrow kind of racial bias in policing, but it's not the only possible issue. To quote the author:

In the PU Trump thread, Toothsayer suggested the argument that there was no racial bias in police shootings because the apparent bias relative to population ignores racial disparities in crime rates. In other words, the argument is Black people get shot more, but that's because they also are involved in more of these situations, i.e they commit more crimes. I don't think toothsayer linked this study, but some of his posts seem to be referring to it. In any case, I think the question is essentially the same. Fryer finds no evidence of bias towards shooting Blacks or Hispanics relative to the number of Black and Hispanic suspects in his data set. But his data set is 58% Black suspects, 30% Hispanic, and 12% non-Black/non-Hispanic (Table 1D). In other words, it is tremendously skewed compared to total population of the U.S. This is important in light of the question about possible racial differences in how these interactions occur.

The authors of the PLOS one study claim to find a racial disparity even controlling for crime rates, which I read as an attempt to eliminate the "Black people get shot more because they commit more crime" argument, but I don't fully understand how they did so or how it compares to Fryer's method.

In any case, I think a holistic approach is warranted, especially in consideration of the racial disparities Fryer confirms in the use of non-lethal force from a much larger dataset. The argument about systemic racism in the criminal justice system doesn't hinge on the individual racial bias of police officers, which at least in the subset of data from Houston does not appear. There have been other experiments on the role of individual implicit bias that likewise challenge an explanation that depends too heavily on individual racism.

But, the fact that Black people are so overwhelmingly likely to have these encounters with police in the first place represents its own social problem, and is in itself a consequence of various forms of racism which can be demonstrated in different ways, from the DOJ complaint against the Ferguson PD, to the kinds of non-lethal discrimination found by Fryer, to the legacy of racist policy evident in poverty statistics. Basically, I think it's wrong for people to read Fryer and conclude that BLM is misguided, but it is also useful for people to realize that the problem is bigger than just individually racist cops, even though these certainly exist also.

Agree with everything you wrote, particularly your summation.

Here's the part that I think is interesting. One of the theories I've read (I think on 2+2) is that a lot of these high-visibility shootings are due to officer cowardice - fear of the scary black man. (e.g., Michael Brown, the demon.) I think that's the kind of bias that would likely be evident in a study like Fryer's. If the "cowardice" story is true, I think you'd expect that conditional upon being stopped (and controlling for the nature of the stop), police would shoot black suspects more frequently than white suspects, because they'd be fearful for their lives more often. But that's not what Fryer found.

I assume/believe that blacks are much more likely to get stopped in the first place (even conditional on whatever they're doing), which is something that Fryer's study doesn't look at. And if there's a bias leading to being stopped, and then blacks and whites are treated equally following the stop, then there's still a net bias against blacks in terms of police shooting conditional on behavior. But I think the shooting bias wouldn't be due to a scared cop factor, but rather some other factor. I think it's useful to understand what that factor is.

But yeah, I'm hoping that people don't jump on the "See, BLM is wrong" bandwagon based on this study.

Ya I think fear part is overblown, I bet it's not always they're afraid so they shoot, it's that they don't care enough about not shooting black people. Maybe the eager shooters are the sociopaths of the force?

Not getting the hate for the MN basketball cops.. its childish obviously, but of course they don't want to work for people who support a movement that, the day before, injured 20 of their coworkers and crushed the spine of one.

Also not getting the love for the freeway blocking simply because it'd be very easy to cause serious injury by blocking/delaying ambulances on emergency calls. Do a sit in at the senate or something, preventing travel gets people killed.

Cops get paid more, and a higher caliber of employee ends up in the roles?

The movement did no such thing.

No it didn't

So does shooting them repeatedly.

I think GENTLE GIANT MIKE BROWN was shot because he tried taking the officers gun, not because of his race. That fact that it became an international news story mainly due to the fact that MIKE BROWN was AFRICAN AMERICAN and DARREN WILSON was WHITE

You left out that he was a hulking demon that got stronger with every bullet until he somehow reached the critical mass of lead.