River wrote:Looks like the State of Missouri just took over the municipal court in Ferguson: link. Hopefully more house-cleaning will follow.
Well, good. This might have an effect on other counties where blacks are having their rights violated. "Be careful - we might bring the justice department down on us and Lose our jobs"
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Please bear with my typos & grammar mistakes. Sent from my iPhone - Palantirs make mistakes too.
'You just said "your getting shorter": you've obviously been drinking too much ent-draught and not enough Prim's.' - Jude
So. I'm very confused by what's been happening in the media of late. All the data available has showed that a lot more whites are killed by police than blacks. Yes, proportionally, blacks are killed at much higher rates than whites but since there are a lot more whites, in total there are more white deaths. So how is it that every week or two since Eric Garner I hear a story about a black man (it's always a man, right?) attacked or killed by cops but I have not heard one single such story about a white man? On http://www.killedbypolice.net/ they have confirmed 145 whites killed in 2015 versus 105 blacks. So why haven't I heard a single story on any of those white deaths? Is it because it is rare for the white deaths to happen under questionable circumstances? Or is it because those stories aren't newsworthy post-Ferguson? If it is a selection bias from the media to maintain and even increase the the sense of controversy...is that okay? I genuinely don't understand what's happening or what to think of it.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
Or it could be that the threshold for being killed by the police when you're white is, on average, so much higher that it's dog-bites-man level news. In other words, if a white guy who's shooting at the police gets shot, it's not as notable a story as a when black guy who isn't shooting at the police gets shot.
Extracting that level of information might be significantly harder. Or not. I do know a lot more attention is being paid to the methodology of these sorts of statistics now.
As I said "Is it because it is rare for the white deaths to happen under questionable circumstances?" So yeah, that's a possibility. But there's definitely been a huge uptick in these types of stories becoming national news post-Ferguson. Like, there didn't used to be big stories about police brutality near-weekly and it's not like like there's reason to believe there's a sudden surge in this kind of stuff. So clearly news outlets are now looking for notable police brutality stories. One could say that this is the news finally reporting on a serious problem. But if not a single of those 145 whites killed by cops is big-news worthy because they're white, well, that's troubling to me.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
One would like to think deaths under questionable circumstances would make the news regardless of the victim's race, but in any case, there are certainly editorial desks out there, whether for print and electronic media, that would be extremely interested in pointing out exactly the trend you describe, if it could be confirmed.
I would say that there is a rise in news sources reporting on these stories. The word of mouth, and the DOJ report, suggest that this has been going on, pretty much, always.
And even when the Ferguson situation began, the media only began taking it seriously when some reporters got harassed, arrested, or teargassed.
If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.
There's definitely more attention being paid to the issue overall, but I'm not sure how much of that is the media picking up what's been going on forever, how much is social media spreading news of incidents too rapidly to be stopped, and how much is increased awareness among a public who all carry cameras that feed straight to the Internet.
So we're agreed that there's more attn. Yet despite the increased scrutiny, the news story is never about a white man. Why? Do we believe that amongst those 145 (at the very least) white deaths, none of them were questionable or worthy of major scrutiny? Or, to put my very cynical hat on, is it because we don't want to hear about white deaths as they don't fit the intended narrative?
ETA: within 3 minutes of scrolling through the http://www.killedbypolice.net/ website, I found this video of an unarmed, unresistant white man being severely beaten by cops. The man later died apparently from his injuries.
I guess my question is, given that all of the links on the website are to media sources, how it is that media are ignoring, well, any of them. Now, if you mean, "why are there more stories at the *national* level about this sort of thing happening to blacks," then the phrase "making up for lost time" comes to mind. Black guys getting killed by cops wasn't deemed newsworthy in most places between the end of the Civil War (because before then we're talking a property crime at worst) and... um... last year?
Yes, I mean at the national level. I mean on NPR as I drive to work or stories popping up on my FB or twitter feeds.
Just last week I read some interview where they said "this never happens to white men". They seemed to mean that literally and the national discourse on this topic for the last 8 months would make it easy to believe that's true. Yet it took me literally 3 minutes to find a pretty bad example from a couple weeks ago proving that wrong. Are we willfully distorting the truth on this?
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I'm sure that it is not true that it "never happens to white men." I am equally sure that it happens much more often to black man.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
I would say--again--that the truth was rather more destructively distorted for much, much longer than the last eight months.
Keep in mind that news, as a business, runs to a great extent on novelty--thus I'm willing to cut media a little slack with this new-found realization of theirs that there might be something wrong with black people getting killed by cops after all.
I have said for some time now--possibly here, definitely in exchanges elsewhere--that there are two overlapping problems at work here: systemic institutional racism in U.S. society, and inculcation of an authoritarian mindset within the law enforcement and judicial spheres. One may see examples of the former by itself in any number of areas that don't require anyone getting killed. One may see examples of the latter whenever some poor white person crosses some line and ends up hospitalized or killed for no apparent reason.
But the intersection of the two problems is a special kind of hell.
Not to be uncivil, but I've siphoned away more time than I should from the story I'm trying to finish, so feel free to continue without me.
There are trends in news, bought about by single stories making huge waves and media outlets subsequently trying to deliver what they think will interest the public based on the reaction to those stories. This can result in the media's focus seeming kind-of arbitrary - for example, ongoing violence in the Ukraine and Middle East is getting quite a bit of attention, while ongoing violence in places like Somalia and the Congo not so much. What Kim Jong-Un does is usually news rather than what eccentric things dictators in Burma or Belarus do. Certainly the attention given to one 'black man shot by police is questionable circumstances' has been enough to lead to other stories with the same narrative, even if it has been going on for over a century, and even if white people are getting shot in higher numbers.
Voronwë the Faithful wrote:I'm sure that it is not true that it "never happens to white men." I am equally sure that it happens much more often to black man.
And I'm even more sure that you don't know this to be true because, as pointed out here at length last fall, the national data doesn't exist that shows this and what data does exist points towards this being false.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
What "data" do you claim shows that there are more white men being killed by police under suspicious circumstances than black men? You indicated that you were aware of one such circumstance (which you didn't describe or even cite a source for). The fact that there are statistics that claim that there are more white people killed by police in total are pretty much irrelevant (and even those statistics show that in comparison to percentage of population the numbers are higher for African-Americans).
In any event, I'm going to join Ax on the sidelines on this one.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
Voronwë the Faithful wrote:What "data" do you claim shows that there are more white men being killed by police under suspicious circumstances than black men?
All data that I found (and I looked a lot), discussed here at length last fall, while faulty and incomplete, showed that the numbers of blacks vs whites killed by cops seems to be roughly proportional to each of their violent crime rates.
What data do you claim shows otherwise? I'm going to guess none.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
As has been repeated several times, that data (even if it is accurate, which is questionable) doesn't say anything about how many individuals are killed under questionable circumstances, as we have seen repeatedly among African-Americans. You can keep repeating it again and again. I won't be responding any further.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
I definitely get a different perspective in my news feed (on FB, for example) because I subscribe to several pro-law enforcement groups. It's often that I see a story about a white person being killed by the police. It doesn't usually make national news, though. It's often that I read about a police officer being killed in the line of duty; that doesn't often make national news either, even if it is a shooting death rather than a death due to an accident (being struck by a vehicle, e.g.). That's usually at least once a week or more. We had a long stretch at the beginning of the year without any LEO deaths, and that was a huge deviation from the norm. It's typically 1 death every 2.5 days. So about twice a week I'm reading of another officer killed in the line of duty. There are approximately 900,000 LEOs in this country. 126 were killed last year, most of those through gun deaths, though it was just about an even split. 15 of those shootings were ambushes, and that was the leading type of gun death for fatalities. (These stats don't include injured officers. And there were plenty more of those. Those stories also come through my feed. Officers shot in the face and left permanently brain-damaged and impaired, for example.) I don't know. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, which is a problem. There should be more accountability within (and outside of) the law enforcement community to track the statistics of citizens killed by police (and vice versa). I'm seeing estimates at about 420 or so per year. If that's correct, then, clearly, there's a higher risk of death being a police officer than being a citizen. I suspect that number is lower than it should be. But, still. (Doing a rough estimate with possibly faulty math skills, that puts the risk of death as an LEO at 0.014% and the risk of death by police as a citizen at 0.0001317%. That is not taking into account any racial factors, which, again, I agree is a problem.)
I agree with LordM. The media trends and selects.
yovi brings a good point into play about comparing the deaths by race to the type of crime. Is there still an underlying problem with race? Yes. Is it all related to how the police handle the situation? I don't think so, not really. I think there's much room for improvement in that, especially in some of these inner cities. But I also think the problem is very complicated and tied to poverty, culture, lack of good education, and the like. The police only enter into that complicated mess at certain points, usually at the point of trying to deal with a problem or a crime. They can only be so proactive. (However, I think they should always be fair, just, merciful if possible, full of integrity, and subject to the same laws as everyone else. I temper that with the knowledge, though, that split second decisions are not always right, and that is sometimes only seen in hindsight. In the heat of the moment, with lives on the line or the belief that lives are on the line, you can only hope you're doing the right thing. Good training goes a long way towards making wise decisions, but good training is sometimes lacking in police departments.)
From what I've heard about Baltimore PD, they have some issues. They are known for giving their prisoners a "rough ride," (putting them handcuffed in a paddywagon and then driving recklessly to toss them around) which is deplorable, and that kind of crap needs to stop.
I'm not ever going to condone rioting and looting, though, either. As much as I possibly can from my perspective, I understand the anger and frustration behind it all. But I don't think it's the right way to respond. People need to look to the methods of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi or Jesus.
