Yet more problematic stuff

[Brian Peacock]

... a repetitive phrase or theme in music? ...

Earworm

[trdsf]

We have some of the same issues with police here, but I suspect less overall. One reason may be the comparative lack of guns - it seems to me that anytime a policeman in the States pulls someone over, they realise that there is an excellent chance that the person is carrying (legally or illegally) a gun, which is not the case here. (There are some guns around, but in almost all shootings, it's underworld figures shooting other criminals...)

Knowing that, even for a relatively decent cop, would tend to make you nervous and paranoid, I imagine...

True. The point is, though, that cops very, very likely would not have formed an opinion that something untoward may be going on, had the person they saw tidying a front yard with the use of a bucket and a pickup tool been Caucasian. He certainly would not have pulled a gun on him and called for backup in a 16 minute confrontation. It would have been a case of "Good morning, sir. Nice job picking up that rubbish, sir. Have a nice day, sir."

To some extent, it depends on the individual cop. I (a white male) wandered up to the front door of my college library one evening after hours having heard that it was going to be open 24/7 through finals week. The door was closed, the lights were off, I didn't even try the door, I turned around to head back to my dorm. I can't have been on the landing at the door more than five seconds.

Up comes campus security, screeching to a halt diagonally the wrong way across three parking spaces. I forget the officer's name, but he proceeds to have a shitfit because I'm on the steps of the library after the library is closed. I explain that I thought I'd heard somewhere that the library was going to be open, but it obviously wasn't, so I was going to go back to my dorm. He has a double shitfit over, so far as I can tell, the fact that I exist and demands that I wait there until the police show up -- which they do while he's demanding it of me. Two police cars, in fact.

The city police promptly converge on... the security officer. I remain standing there somewhat dumbfounded.

Meanwhile, two sheriff's deputy vehicles pull up. One deputy proceeds to deal with the shitfitting security officer, who has gotten even less rational since real authorities have arrived. The other takes me aside and says, "We'll handle this, go on back to your dorm." Which I did, while the security officer proceeds to have even more of a shitfit while real police and real deputies tried to talk him back to some semblance of sanity.

Some time later, after printing a piece in the college paper detailing his abuse of a pizza delivery person on campus, I got a threatening call from him wherein he tried to accuse me of driving my car while drunk and that he'd have to turn me over to the city police. I wished him luck finding the car I did not have and hung up on him.

Some people just want a badge because they think it's a license to be a fucking asshole. The campus rumor was that he had been a cop but got fired for excessive force and that's how he ended up as campus security. I don't know if it's true, but I had no evidence it was false. I did have some evidence it wasn't unlikely, at least.

Heh. And now I remember the security officer's name... but it's of no relevance. A fucking asshole like that deserves the damnatio memoriæ so I shan't repeat it here.

[JimC]

Was it Jedediah Fucknucle?

[Hermit]

We have some of the same issues with police here, but I suspect less overall. One reason may be the comparative lack of guns - it seems to me that anytime a policeman in the States pulls someone over, they realise that there is an excellent chance that the person is carrying (legally or illegally) a gun, which is not the case here. (There are some guns around, but in almost all shootings, it's underworld figures shooting other criminals...)

Knowing that, even for a relatively decent cop, would tend to make you nervous and paranoid, I imagine...

True. The point is, though, that cops very, very likely would not have formed an opinion that something untoward may be going on, had the person they saw tidying a front yard with the use of a bucket and a pickup tool been Caucasian. He certainly would not have pulled a gun on him and called for backup in a 16 minute confrontation. It would have been a case of "Good morning, sir. Nice job picking up that rubbish, sir. Have a nice day, sir."

To some extent, it depends on the individual cop. I (a white male) wandered up to the front door of my college library one evening after hours having heard that it was going to be open 24/7 through finals week. The door was closed, the lights were off, I didn't even try the door, I turned around to head back to my dorm. I can't have been on the landing at the door more than five seconds.

Up comes campus security, screeching to a halt diagonally the wrong way across three parking spaces. I forget the officer's name, but he proceeds to have a shitfit because I'm on the steps of the library after the library is closed. I explain that I thought I'd heard somewhere that the library was going to be open, but it obviously wasn't, so I was going to go back to my dorm. He has a double shitfit over, so far as I can tell, the fact that I exist and demands that I wait there until the police show up -- which they do while he's demanding it of me. Two police cars, in fact.

The city police promptly converge on... the security officer. I remain standing there somewhat dumbfounded.

Meanwhile, two sheriff's deputy vehicles pull up. One deputy proceeds to deal with the shitfitting security officer, who has gotten even less rational since real authorities have arrived. The other takes me aside and says, "We'll handle this, go on back to your dorm." Which I did, while the security officer proceeds to have even more of a shitfit while real police and real deputies tried to talk him back to some semblance of sanity.

Some time later, after printing a piece in the college paper detailing his abuse of a pizza delivery person on campus, I got a threatening call from him wherein he tried to accuse me of driving my car while drunk and that he'd have to turn me over to the city police. I wished him luck finding the car I did not have and hung up on him.

Some people just want a badge because they think it's a license to be a fucking asshole. The campus rumor was that he had been a cop but got fired for excessive force and that's how he ended up as campus security. I don't know if it's true, but I had no evidence it was false. I did have some evidence it wasn't unlikely, at least.

Heh. And now I remember the security officer's name... but it's of no relevance. A fucking asshole like that deserves the damnatio memoriæ so I shan't repeat it here.

That's a truly awful encounter with a badged psycho. Our security personnel was collectively known as 'the grey mice', and they pretty much behaved like them; scuttling around in the recesses of the campus, rarely seen, never heard.

I'm not sure what your anecdote is meant to illustrate, though. That individuals differ from each other, even when compared to each other within any particular cohort? Not exactly news, is it?

I'm thinking more along statistical lines. The expression "very, very likely" is a bit of a hint.

Around about the time of the Ferguson shooting I googled for information about police shootings in the US. Unfortunately I can't find the notes now, but going by my unreliable memory, on a per capita basis black men are 2.4 times more likely to be shot dead by police than white men. Keeping in mind that black men are more likely to be felons than white men, I controlled for that too. Turns out that male black criminals are also about 2.4 times more likely to be shot dead by police than male white criminals.

[Forty Two]

Of the people killed by police in 2014 and 2015, 51 percent were white, 28.1 percent were black, 19.3 percent were Latino, and 1.7 percent were Asian. The remainder came from other ethnic backgrounds.

fewer than 1 percent of the killings we found were of people who were unarmed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mon ... 85ff815a32

So, with about 13% of the population being black, there is a "disproportionate" number of killings of black people as compared to their overall percentage of the population. However, they are also very disproportionately involved in violent crimes, so they are disproportionately likely to have encounters with police in the first place, and disproportionately likely to have encounters with police while armed and in risky situations.

Some say that the disproportionate involvement in violent crime and resulting disproportionate number of encounters with police is itself a result of racism of the community, rather than a cultural issue within those communities. But, frankly, given where the gangs and drug crimes, and the vast number of firearms crimes, occur in this country, it is not surprising that there would be a disproportionate number of difficult encounters with police.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. So, that's 13% of the population committing 52% of the homicides. So, we have a real disproportionality there. That's going to generate a fair bit of disproportionate (to the population) police interest. More contacts with police means more police shootings, even if the rate of shootings per encounter is the same. I.e., the 13% of the population receives 28% of the shootings, but that 13% also commits most of the homicides (and other violent crimes, too), resulting in a massively disproporationate number of police encounters.

[Hermit]

[snip]Turns out that male black criminals are also about 2.4 times more likely to be shot dead by police than male white criminals.

[Forty Two]

Not accurate - at least I've never seen any data to show that. If you'd like to present a source, that would be great.

"We benchmark two years of fatal shooting data on 16 crime rate estimates. When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. ... Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings. For unarmed shootings or misidentification shootings, data are too uncertain to be conclusive." https://osf.io/2btyn/

Professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. concluded: "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." https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publi ... -use-force

[Joe]

Was it Jedediah Fucknucle?

For some reason, Seth comes to mind.

[Sean Hayden]

S.C. Mayor Says ‘Yellow Sticky Substance’ on Her Car Was Sprayed by Vandals, Police Say It’s Just Pollen

--ah, this was too good

[Brian Peacock]

Christonabike. They're vandalising people's property with pollen now. Are there no depths the SOCIALIST SCUM won't stoop to?

[L'Emmerdeur]

The Fryer paper is considered problematic on a number of levels.

'Why it’s impossible to calculate the percentage of police shootings that are legitimate'

We want to reform policing. But we want those reforms to be informed, based on good data. The problem is that nearly all the data we have on incidents involving police officers using lethal force comes from reports written by police officers, and nearly all of those reports were written by the officers who were actually involved in those incidents.

For the purpose of the discussion, let’s break shootings and killings by police into three categories: incidents that were illegal and unnecessary, incidents that were legal and necessary, and incidents that were legal but unnecessary. If you’re asking whether current laws and policies allow for too many police shootings, looking at how many shootings are justified under current law and policy is just question begging. It’s that last category — legal but unnecessary — that we want to explore. Unfortunately, it’s also a category that is plagued by subjectivity and the simple fact noted above: Most of the data we have comes from police reports themselves.

If we were to compile statistics on, say, medical mistakes in an effort to make policies that would improve the state of medicine, we wouldn’t get all of our data from written statements by the accused doctors or hospitals. If we wanted to compile data on conflicts of interest in politics, we wouldn’t rely on politicians to self-report and adjudicate when their vote may have been influenced by a campaign donation. But this is essentially what we do with shootings by police officers … The argument here is not that there’s something uniquely untrustworthy about cops. The argument is that almost every police officer who has just shot and killed someone will defend his or her decision to kill. It’s human nature. It could be because the killing was entirely justifiable. It could be because the officer wants to believe it was justifiable. It could be because the officer knows it wasn’t justified, but fears the consequences.

'Why It's so Hard to Measure Racial Bias in Police Shootings'

Fryer wants to know if race plays a factor in the decision to shoot, separate from whatever role race plays in the decision to initiate contact with the person in the first place by, for instance, deciding to make a traffic stop.

Some have already criticized the paper because of the way Fryer has formulated his query, saying that this narrow version is not useful: If the police are more likely to shoot black people out of racism, then it doesn't matter where the racism enters into their decision-making. But I disagree with these critiques. If it were true that racism only played a role in the cop's decision whether to interact with a civilian, that would be valuable information, not only for directing policy to reduce police killings of black people. It could mean, for instance, that getting rid of racism in police killings just means reducing the amount of discretion we give officers in their decisions to stop people. This would be much easier than rooting out a subconscious, deeply embedded fear of black people, which could be part of the task if the decision to shoot is itself racially motivated. The point is, Fryer is trying to answer a useful and important question.

But here's the tricky part: How do we observe a police officer deciding not to shoot someone? The data on officer-involved shootings, obviously, only includes situations in which the officer shoots. The way Fryer tackles this is to create a category of crimes for which lethal force is likely to be justifiable — attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in an arrest. If an officer arrests a civilian for one of these crimes without using lethal force, then Fryer counts it as an officer deciding not to shoot.

You can probably see one problem already. Whether someone fits into a category like "resisting arrest" or "assaulting a police officer" isn't a neutral question imposed by some objective third party. It's the police officer who makes the decision whether someone is resisting arrest at the time of the incident, and it's the police officer who decides whether to write down in their report afterward that someone was resisting arrest. If the police are racially biased against blacks when making either of these decisions, then the results will skew downward — they will show less discrimination than there actually is. Think of it this way: The probability of being shot at by the police is a fraction. In the top part of the fraction, the numerator, we've got the number of police shootings. In the bottom half, the denominator, we have the number of times the police could have shot. We can be reasonably sure that the numerator is right — it's relatively difficult to cover up the fact that a police officer fired their weapon. But if we overestimate the size of the denominator, then we'll underestimate the size of the whole fraction.

There are more critiques of the paper available should anybody care to explore the issues further. I understand the desire to bring some formal analysis to bear, but one questionable study doesn't settle the matter.

[JimC]

Christonabike. They're vandalising people's property with pollen now. Are there no depths the SOCIALIST SCUM won't stoop to?

The yellow stuff is probably bee shit; bees are well known to be MARXIST!

[Sean Hayden]

I want to know how you become the mayor of a city without having lived there long enough to have seen pollen on cars? Do you think she just forgot?

[JimC]

Someone should tell her to go pollinate herself!

[Svartalf]

can't unless she's a complete androgyne, pollen is the male part of the flower sex system.