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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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What immediately jumps out at me is that "drop the boiling water" is not the kind of an order that is easy to comply to. Seeing as, you know, dropping a pot of boiling water at your feet will predictably scald your legs.

That's what makes these moments such an obvious win for demagogues.

People spend lots of time debating the minutiae of the encounter which just makes it more visible and talked about.

Instead, as a society, we need to say, "I don't care". The overwhelming evidence from body cams is that almost all police shootings are justified. But there are more than 330 million people in the U.S. There are more than 20,000 homicides. The police are dealing with violent, unstable, and drug-addicted people. There will always be mistakes.

Instead of arguing about this detail or that detail, we should simply frown, ignore, and move on. Whining about police should be considered low status behavior.

This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.

I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.

The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.

And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.

So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.

I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.

Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.

I personally disagree with ACAB and think that police misconduct is vastly overstated, but I understand and sympathise with the reasoning behind it. I expressed this a year ago on this forum:

While I disagree on the object level towards ACAB, I have some sympathy towards people who dismiss all cops as being bastards as I have a similar attitude towards all mainstream journalists. The rationale for that attitude is that even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, as a group my observation is that they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession, and when outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. I can easily imagine someone making a similar argument against the police, that they are unwilling to truly clean up their profession in the eyes of the public, that there is a culture of silence and an anti-snitch mentality within the profession. As with journalists, they are performing a duty to society that is sacred and requires the population's absolute confidence so they cannot afford in-group loyalty when it clashes with their duty.

I guess one distinction could be that one could argue that cops are not always aware of specific actionable, denounceable action by bad apples in their group. I don't think journalists can use that argument.

For jobs that require the public's trust, even a hint of in-group loyalty or preference is poison. Sure, it's human to feel a kinship with other people doing the same job, but it's an instinct that has to be fought back, not leaned into. And cops as a profession reek of in-group loyalty, and an attitude like "you can't understand what our job is like" only makes it worse.

the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation

It being your first use of the acronym in your post, I genuinely did get confused as to why military contractors who are often hired for just such jobs would be unfamiliar with them.

Now I'm picturing Karen from HR having to hobble around in full plates and kit while J. J. Rambo makes Excel templates on a comically undersized laptop.

Hahaha. Crazy how those two worlds collided in a single acronym. Good catch.

Although, actual former PMCs would be some of the people I would want last as Cops. If you take away the Blackwaters and Triple Canopies of the world (who all recruit high end SpecialOps types) you get orgs like Armor Group .... who often collect dudes who are leaving the military for a whole host of what-the-acutal-fuck reasons. Your median PMC (private military contractor) in the Horn of Africa is always running off safe.

Well said. At a minimum I am simply not interested in hearing from anyone who doesn't know any cops or hasn't at least done a ride-along. The moral panic about policing is mostly just ignorance, a symptom of our class-segregated society.

When bad actors (like Kamala in this case) weaponize that ignorance, they damage the fabric of society for their own personal benefit.

The “moral panic” isn’t just about ignorance, though for many people ignorance of policing conditions no doubt plays a role. It’s also about a severe lack of accountability for the police who do abuse their positions of authority. When police who steal money are awarded immunity from both government prosecution and private lawsuits, or when police officers who shoot unarmed suspects, charge them with resisting arrest, and publicly lie about the whole thing are told “no biggie,” people reasonably get pretty upset. It’s one thing when a cop abuses his position—that’s bad, but you’ll never get a force that’s made up of 100% moral, upstanding officers. It’s quite another thing when a cop abuses his position—and his department, the local prosecutor, and the courts all protect him from punishment. That’s the sort of thing that reduces public support of cops, no different than how the Catholic sex abuse coverup led to greatly reduced trust in bishops and priests. Every time a cop abuses his position and gets a nice paid vacation out of it, protected from any legal or personal financial harm, while the taxpayer pays to settle lawsuits on his behalf, people look at it and say, “The system is broken.” They don’t need to have ever ridden in a squad car to know that.

But what about all of the times when a Cop abuses his power and is absolutely punished for it?

What about all of the times a case falls apart at trial for what are really, really minor technical errors usually in evidentiary handling? If I see the killer of my husband go free because there was "reasonable doubt" about how the pistol recovered from the trunk was found, do I get the same level of sympathy as these "taxpayers paying to settle lawsuits."?

More importantly - what if the truly heinous abuses of police power represent <1% of all cops while the other 99% are just trying to get home safe and not fuck up their cases.

(Side note: You cited Catholic clergy sex abuses and the up-the-chain indictment of Bishops and Cardinals. Do you feel the same way about public school teachers and administrators where the sexual abuse rate is multiple times of the general public (which, itself, was multiple times of that in the Catholic church)?)

You're making kind of a wild argument - Cops should be incredibly close to perfection and, if they fail, we should feel justified in indicting the entire system of policing for multiple years at a time. How do you expect positive changes to be made?

If I'm a police Commissioner and I discover real malfeasance, hold a press conference and say "Yeah, I'm totally going after these crooked cops" but then you stand up and say "It happened on your watch. You should resign, maybe be prosecuted. This whole department is suspect" .... when does corrective change actually occur? Everyone seems to be too busy indicting the entire system into oblivion .... despite it's working so incredibly well most of the time.

But I suppose you have history and precedent on your side. This all ends with "defund the police" which has resulted in a murder rate among the most vulnerable demographics skyrocketing.

I’m on board with this. It’s a problem for all kinds of reform projects— you don’t know what that job is like and want to reform it based on silly ideas from academia that only work on people who behave in statistically correct ways.

a symptom of our class-segregated society.

It's a little unusual for a wealthier family in my filter bubble to have a son enlist or go to the police academy, but not that weird.

You’re a red triber from Texas, where the police and military are presumably still considered respectable, medium-to-high-status career paths. Of course it doesn’t seem that weird to you. To see the class divisions, you need only look at how many well-off blue tribe sons join the military or police.

Wealthy red tribe families aren’t exactly unusual, though, and I’m not sure that red/blue segregation towards the top of the ladder is that comprehensive- presumably the PMC still likes country clubs.

Could be wrong though, I’ve only been at country clubs to fix things. Servants entrances still exist.

This is an area where I think the typical American approach to class distinctions—defining class solely by income—falls short. (Scott also talked about some of the shortcomings of our usual definitions several years ago.)

I don’t admittedly have as much experience with wealthy blue tribers as I do wealthy red tribers, but based on what experience I do have, I’d say the blue tribers would find it acceptable though perhaps mildly disappointing if one of their children became a schoolteacher, musician, or humanities professor, but they’d be confused and upset if one wanted to become a cop, soldier, or clergyman. Vice versa for the red tribers.

The clergy is a high status career in the red tribe, and not something seen as potentially disappointing- unless of course that clergyman winds up in a scandal.

Likewise, high status military careers, even enlisted ones(like special forces, helicopter pilot, sniper etc) are totally acceptable for a red tribe boy from a well off or even elite family. Cop, tradesman, etc might be mildly disappointing if the family is wealthy, although it is respected; prison guard definitely is. A girl is probably not going to be encouraged towards those careers, of course. Teaching is an acceptable career path for both sexes, although a boy might be advised to pick a career which pays better. Indeed there are lots of red tribe teachers, they’re just a lot more likely to quit when they get married. Musician is not even viewed as a real career, but humanities professor is an acceptable normal job assuming you’re talking about something like history or English- gender studies would not be.

In any case I was assuming that there was enough red/blue mixture at the top end of the ladder through rich people stuff that running into eg a marine officer, pilot, pastor, or policeman in the fringes of one’s social circles isn’t implausible for a wealthy blue triber, just like running into a symphonist or whatever is plausible for a wealthy red triber(although probably not a poor one).

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I mean, doesn't this body cam video kind of vindicate a lot of BLM-type people cop critics? We have a house call with slightly weird vibes that gets escalated -- BY the cops -- and someone ends up dead in their own home literally 10 seconds after what was previously a peaceful discussion. That kind of background impression, as a Black person especially, would be legitimately terrifying, right? That you could be having a rough night, maybe jumping at shadows, feeling a little off, you call people whose job is to protect and help communities feel and be safe, but you say or do the wrong thing in a moment of panic and you could end up literally dead?

It's sadly a bit self-reinforcing too of course. Nervousness around cops leads to irrational behavior around cops, so you could probably make the argument that demonizing the police is self-defeating behavior. But saying "almost all police shootings are justified" in a non-justified shooting moment is a weird take.

With that said I don't want to be too uncharitable. You're right that if we think about it in a false positive/false negative/etc. kind of sense, the false positives are usually very obvious and often overshadowed by the large amounts of true positives, so to speak.

And there are actually useful takeaways from the body cam video beyond "cops bad" or "cops racist" or something like that. I clearly see gaps in cop training here:

  1. Was it a good idea or not for them to continue investigating after "resolving" the complaint?

  2. Why didn't the cop in the first half of the bodycam video speak up more and act as a counterbalance to his clearly annoyed and apparently on a hair-trigger partner?

  3. Why was the cop so 0 to 100 aggressive in escalating things off of her strange Jesus comment?

  4. Was the cop's warning/threat to the lady effective in its actual purpose?

1 might have a larger discussion, but 2-4 show some clear missteps by the police - the partner was ineffective at his job, the cop escalated needlessly, and in a bad and ineffective manner even if he was going to escalate.

Edit: changed vocab to more accurately convey my point

The anti-BLM position has never been that every police shooting is justified. I see anti-BLM as making two claims:

  1. Unjustified police killings are rare.
  2. That blacks are killed by police disproportinate to their population is a function of their being disproportionately likely to present themselves as a deadly threat, not police racism.

None of points 2-4 are incompatible with this at all. They are all imply at least one takeaway that indicates the cops have work to do and improvements to be made. I never at any point made any claim that unjustified killings were anything other than rare!

The attitude that we should ignore these improvements and instead circle the wagons around police who we should portray as doing no wrong almost always is a problematic one, and doesn't logically follow!

Speaking as somebody who used to appeal to BLM'ers to include Tony Timpa in their press materials, I did so because I also don't like dickhead cops and argued that BLM's best path forward was to deracialize the issue and get broad buy-in with a patchwork of murder-by-cop horror stories. This was rejected near-totally. And in the years since, I think the ethos they represent is a larger threat to the country across multiple levels than what hotheads with badges occasionally do to people in the lower class.

I've also had a drop in sympathy for many (though not all) of these victims due to their sheer inability to 'act right' with law enforcement, based on some personal experiences. Let's just say that if I can keep calm, respectful, cooperative, and stationary with a cop while tripping balls on several psychedelic substances at once in the middle of a crime scene I am culpable in (a power I did not realize I had until that moment!), then I have less and less patience for the kind of low-level disdain and noncompliance I see in these stories that always increases the risk of LEO escalation.*

*This particular comment is not directly relevant to Massey's story. Just further explanation as to why any common cause with your stereotypical anti-cop activist was left to wither and die.

If they didn't want to hold onto the racial angle so tightly, they could also use Justine Damond.

Let's just say that if I can keep calm, respectful, cooperative, and stationary with a cop while tripping balls on several psychedelic substances at once in the middle of a crime scene I am culpable in

I feel like this is an anecdote worth sharing in full.

This is the exact type of microscrutiny of a single incident that I don't wish to engage in. Were cops in the wrong here? I don't know since I didn't watch the video. Also, I don't care. Worse things happen every day.

Instead of focusing on a single incident, we should aggregate the statistics and present those. When we do, we see that the problem is vanishingly small. But we will never get to zero in a country of over 330 million with 20,000 homicides per year. And yet that is what Kamala Harris is demanding.

I'm just done with caring. My only opinion now is that people who bring up police violence are either bad thinkers or have bad motives.

Instead of focusing on a single incident, we should aggregate the statistics and present those. When we do, we see that the problem is vanishingly small. But we will never get to zero in a country of over 330 million with 20,000 homicides per year. And yet that is what Kamala Harris is demanding.

And yet police violence could almost certainly be reduced dramatically by levelling up competence. Peter Moksos (who did 2 years as a beat cop in the rough bits of Baltimore as participant-observation research for his PhD) has collated statistics on the massive unjustified differences in police shooting rates between jurisdictions. Why are cops on the west coast more trigger-happy than on the east coast? If all big-city American police had the trigger discipline of the NYPD, then killer cops wouldn't be a political issue.

Reminds me of similar "Vision Zero" initiatives for traffic deaths to be reduced to exactly zero. Those weren't successful, either.

Some are surely inevitable for baseline physics / kinetics reasons, but near-enough zero is possible with self-driving cars tied to ubiquitous traffic monitoring systems.

We don't actually know that. We're far from cracking meaningful autonomy, and we have no idea what would be the impact of widespread adoption.

Zero is just a dumb target for almost anything. Instead of taking interventions that improve QALY's the most, we do stupid shit because "even one person dying of X is too many".

That's assuming that interventions are even positive at all. Post 2020 interventions to reduce police shootings very quickly and obviously made the world a much worse place for almost everyone.

The only way we get to zero is by eliminating the police entirely and just letting gangs run society.

While Kamala has bad motives probably, I'm not convinced that the aggregate statistics show what you say they do. Like, biased source, but here we see that we're getting 1 million people on the receiving end of force per year, 250,000 injuries including 85,000 of those requiring hospitalization. I'm not including deaths here because I agree those are inherently tricky to generalize from, though the source does emphasize that in some areas. More interesting to me is the second chart here which showed (caution y-axis) a very significant upswing from the early 2000s to ~2012 after which we see a decline back to middling levels. Still, those numbers I don't consider "vanishingly small". I think they are large enough to merit examination -- especially in the context of other countries not having quite the same issue with police as we do, speaking broadly. You could argue part of it lies in media attention, but I think most observers agree there are some actual differences, such as if we compare it to let's say the UK.

Also from a philosophical standpoint, high responsibility roles require high trust and high scrutiny. As the only force allowed a virtual monopoly on mostly-legal violence in the country, I think it's weird to just instantly give cops a pass. Personally, I really think that police departments should be given both increased funding as well as increased accountability in a structural way, which sadly most BLM-aligned "reform" groups seem to miss despite being probably the best and most moral solution. Because if you look carefully, it's pretty obvious that the accountability structure is broken. From an economic/incentives perspective, that's something important to fix.

Some police shootings are unjustified != all claims of BLM are true

Sorry, I've edited my comment to acknowledge the 'false positive' aspect. I perceive this kind of exercise as at least somewhat one of those tests where two people can see two different things in the same picture. So I think you really should be viewing both sides on some level.

I mean, doesn't this body cam video kind of vindicate a lot of BLM-type people?

No? "Some cops are trigger-happy" does not, in any way, validate the BLM's claim about systemic racism.

I don't think you even need to squint to see some potential grounds for profiling and unequal treatment going on here (such as their decision to keep investigating, and how they treated her which was not really very compassionate), though I'd attribute more of it to, like, I guess classism rather than racism, so I don't think it's really a great fit for BLM claims beyond the surface level. Just to be clear.

Sure, you can see some potential grounds for profiling and unequal treatment, but the potential for such things is basically ever present in every circumstance ever. To actually say that this vindicates or even provides any support for the kind of systemic oppression narrative espoused by BLM, one would have to, at a minimum, have 2 different events that are very similar except for the race of the person interacting with the cops. This would be anecdotal but at least provide some minimal support. A single incident like this just fundamentally can't provide support for - much less vindicate - such a narrative, at least from an empirical perspective.

I think specific incidents can provide useful frameworks and relatable examples for talking about broader issues, though I agree there's often a methodological kind of issue if we make a habit of starting conversations from individual incidents, rather than bring up an incident as an illustration of a larger problem as I mentioned. Bayes' rule type considerations are absolutely something that should be front of mind.

I mean maybe the location of my replies in this thread might imply otherwise, but fundamentally I'm not one who thinks racial inequity is the biggest problem in policing. I think far bigger problems are principally ones that have to do with the general accountability structure, which is straight up broken. No organization can ever do well indefinitely without these checks and balances. And smaller problems with police mindset and training. For example, cops seem to generally lack some de-escalation skills, though my vague impression is that they've gotten slightly better. Recruiting from the military has always struck me as a problem too, because the fundamental mindset and paradigm are IMO mostly incompatible. I'm also moderately concerned about privacy type issues, though this is rarely a popular concern.

BLM claimed that the intensity of the racism justified burning down police precincts, and rioting throughout the country. "Potentials grounds for profiling" that are "not a great fit beyond the surface level" strikes me as a qualitatively different claim than the ones being made during the last round of BLM.

No, you're right, I probably should have been more specific. To the extent that racial justice people and cop critics are separate groups, I suppose I was really talking about the second group, and the related arguments there.

The body cams are for scrutinizing them collectively, as a society, to be sure that the mistakes are rare, rather than "ignore and move on".

And it worked! We've confirmed that they are indeed rare. We will never get to zero. It's time to move on.

Trust is a continuous thing and is updated continuously.

Scrutiny of this kind is probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy.

I agree, but it's also true that a lot of local attempts at change have been stonewalled. Does that mean going national is the logical thing to do? I don't really think so, but I somewhat empathize. It happens with things like housing too, right?

Does charging the cop with first-degree murder count as "stonewalling" and justify going national?

I’m referring more to things like how NYC set up a whole board to review use of force cases and then the police refused to give them the actual footage or even allow them to interview cops thus making their job almost impossible. That went on for several years IIRC. So things like that, and union resistance, and systemic opposition. I don’t like relying on high profile lawsuits to regulate behavior when there are better more long-term accountability schemes.

So literally nothing to do with a choice of whether scrutiny in this specific case is "probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy" or otherwise. Got it.

Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.

However, exploiting such a case for national politics is unleashing a Pandora's Box, as we saw with the George Floyd hysteria. So it's not generally a justified strategy.

Going national in such a case could be a rational strategy, if you want the cop to be convicted, since it creates more embarassment for anyone who wants to "protect their own" etc.

This is a fully-general argument for taking literally any case national, no matter how local and how inconsequential to national issues. So long as you "want". Why would you want? For what purpose? What problem are you actually solving by taking it national? You're preemptively getting in front of some hypothetical injustice? Again, there can be hypothetical injustice that you could conceivably be getting in front of in literally any case ever. The system, in general, tolerates some non-zero percentage of actual, not hypothetical, injustice. It is not hard to have exposure either to the day-to-day workings of the system or even just exposure to those who have exposure to the day-to-day workings of the system and know that there is routine actual injustice (though 'routine' in a nation of almost 400M people is still a tiny percentage). Why even bother with hypothetical when you could spend your time on actual?

Yeah this becoming a Big Issue in the summer of election year is right on time. Very hard to even want to talk about it. Are we gonna actually fix this at the national level or not? What's the specific policy proposal? Why hasn't it been implemented or at least proposed in Congress in 4 years of Democrat rule? Etc etc.

My contempt toward the use of this event as a political strategy threatens to overshadow my raw spontaneous personal feelings about the event itself, which is a shame.

I have a half baked idea. Nationalise and centralise the training of state police under a 'National Police Bureau' (a joint exercise between say the FBI and US Marshal Service) similar to how the National Guard operates.

Then once trained, the police are deployed to their home state to operate under local command and control (eg police chief under the mayor/governor) to allay fears of federal control of the police forces. It could also be an avenue for internal investigation so local cops can't cover up bad shootings/dirty cops. Certain incidents automatically escalate to a review from out of the state investigators.

This standardisation of best practice vetting and training will eliminate some low hanging fruit leading to bad shootings and other incidents. Much less hiring of people that should never have become cops. Much less crazy bad training methods (like training your cops that kneeling on people's necks is a legitimate restraint technique).

You can't fix it. For one, cops are people, so some of them will make mistakes, or panic, or even simply be malicious. You can, and should, minimize this with proper hiring and training, but it will never be entirely zero, because cops are people. Meanwhile, racial tensions are not driven by the deaths but by the media coverage, and the media coverage is not driven by the deaths either but by political expediency.

According to the Washington Post the police killed 245 black people last year. That's pretty much one per work day. We certainly don't get national attention for every one. That only happens when it's convenient.

Suppose we had some magic way to lower police violence by 9/10ths. By this point the US would have the nicest police in the world by far. But there would still be more than one black person killed by the police each month. Today, there is much less than one big news story per month even though they could do this multiple times a week if they wanted. One or two a month would still be more than plenty to keep going as they are going.

US police killed 1161 people in total in 2023. If it were lowered by 9/10ths, you'd save 1045 people a year (assuming this lowering of police violence doesn't just increase the rest of the violence), but you would otherwise change nothing. For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths. So even that is only a small drop in the bucket. You can round that down to nobody. (After all, one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.)

The actual police violence doesn't matter at all in the big scheme of things, and not even with literal magic could you do something about police violence and thereby change anything about society.

For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths.

Ironically, in our rush to deem police as morally bad in 2020, traffic deaths rose from 10.99/100k in 2019 to 12.89 in 2021, around 8000 additional deaths, with no appreciable change in total miles traveled. It's pretty clear to me (and anecdotally, comes up in conversation occasionally as generally accepted) that they basically stopped enforcing traffic laws at the time, which has lead to more deaths than if police killings dropped to zero. And the number of murders went up quite a bit too. I'm fairly confident that, overall, Black Lives Matter has a negative count of (Black) lives saved, but I'm glad (/s) they feel good about their advocacy.

IMO one of these cases where systems are more complicated than they seem. Something about Chesterton and fences, even though I think there's substantial room for improvement in how we do policing and criminal justice overall.

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New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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