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I mean, doesn't this body cam video kind of vindicate a lot of
BLM-type peoplecop 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:
Was it a good idea or not for them to continue investigating after "resolving" the complaint?
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?
Why was the cop so 0 to 100 aggressive in escalating things off of her strange Jesus comment?
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:
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.
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I feel like this is an anecdote worth sharing in full.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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