How Problematic is "All Lives Matter?"
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Thanks!OSF
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Ask, and the internet shall provide.
I wonder if this new research will cause people to reevaluate their claims? HAHAHAHA Nah, people are dug in to their trenches, convinced that the problem is what they think it is, and even more people will die and more lives will be ruined. They're not going to let facts get in the way of feelings.
We should also talk about the Retraction they issued.OSF
Ask, and the internet shall provide.
Possibly this part, especially.
That's a completely different study.
The retraction was for:
“Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings"
Not: "Is there evidence of racial disparity in police use of deadly force? Analyses of officer-involved shootings in 2015-2016"
The former focused on the race of the officer. The latter focused on use of deadly force when adjusted for crime as opposed to population.
Obsidian probably has me on ignore, so if someone could point out his error to him, that'd be great
OSF
Ask, and the internet shall provide.
There is still a problem.
For the sake of argument (As Obsidian Jones for instance is skeptical of these types of stats): On a per capita basis, unarmed black people are more likely to be shot and killed by police than white people because black people, on a per capita basis, are more likely to commit crime.
Crime is a social control issue. Why, if the statement I just wrote, is true, DO black people on a per capita basis commit crime? For starters, income disparity. What reasonable and fair things can be done to narrow that disparity? I have a lot of radical right wing reptile ideas on that better left to another thread but for starters, I would suggest our ruling, corporate and media elites stop dismissing the ideas out of hand.
Thank you for bringing up a different point of view.
But to add to that, we have things like Quota policing causing Police Officers to invent Criminals and crimes that gets added to these databases that everyone takes as gospel.
Like I said before, I'm under no delusion that Blacks are a completely crime-less people. Blacks are humans, and humans have criminals. Often due to reasons of poverty such as Gorfias is addressing.
All I'm saying is that Police are human as well. And they have a vested interest to have crime to be higher than normal.
It's like a Scientist who needs results to ensure grant money still flows. If they can't make results, they lose funding and they are out of luck. Or they have to find another person to fund the research and have the 'results' suggest a favorable outcome, like how the Alcohol Industry gave our government money to declare moderate drinking to be safe.
You do not trust Data collected by the party who directly benefits from the findings.
I brought that point of view up in page 4... It's not a different point of view. It's what I've been saying the whole time!
Regarding: "we can't trust this data!", the counter-argument to that is this:
If you can't trust the police's data about crime statistics, you also can't trust the police's data about fatalities. The data comes from the same place. You can't dismiss one without dismissing the other.
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I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’m not attacking you or your argument. I’m saying dismissing BLM out of hand for its apparent lack of inclusion is dismissing the reason for the movement. It dismisses that SOMETHING needed to be done; at the very least, it’s a start for a people in dire need whose voice has gone lethally unheeded for centuries. Expecting that they be inclusive within a system that has historically excluded them mitigates their struggle. Yes, income disparity is a very real issue that could resolve a lot of problems, but blacks can’t afford to wait out a likely decdes-long, long-term fix while we’re being shot and choked to death with impunity right NOW. We have to ensure we live long enough to benefit from income equality! And to that end, how do we achieve income equality when we’re regarded as lesser-than by the very system we have to declare our worth to?
Yes, I know this; I was being facetious. I was simply pointing out that change sometimes starts with a revolution, a radical standing up to the powers that be. It’s not always pretty, but sometimes it’s necessary to get the attention of those who ignore or deny the existence of a problem. I’m not saying everything BLM does or everyone that associates themselves with it is de facto “correct” or doing so for the correct reasons; I’m saying the movement exists for a very real reason.
That's fair. It could be that their goals are laudable, but just that the way they're going about it is flawed. If that's the case, then maybe it doesn't deserve to be "dismissed out of hand".
However, I don't believe that having laudable goals would justify whatever dirty thing you do in order to reach those goals. I don't believe that the ends justify the means.
That's up to them. How quickly do they want to solve this problem? The sooner they tackle the REAL issue, the sooner they fix the problem. Attacking symptoms won't help. The numbers won't drop. BLM won't be able to solve any problems or effect real change. This is statistically certain.
Unless you prohibit police from carrying any sort of weapon, and unless you prohibit them from touching people, there is a non-zero chance that you will be killed in any sort of police interaction. Dropping 4% to 2% won't be a significant difference because there are hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of police interactions a day. A small percentage of a big number is still a big number.
Poverty-stricken communities have higher numbers of police encounters, which means higher numbers of fatalities, which leads to the disproportionate statistics that people look at. The numbers will STILL be disproportionate, and they will ALWAYS be disproportionate until the root problem is solved.
But people will just look at the disproportionate statistics and say "we still haven't solved the problem! Riot harder! Break more windows! Burn down more businesses!" until the other shoe drops. I'm more afraid of that than getting killed by an officer.
It's that easy, huh? Just up and fix the institutional income disparity that has literally existed and perpetuated since we were finally allowed to own things and not ourselves be owned? It's not "up to us." We can't alone change the minds of the people in power who, for +400 years, have not been us. We can't make people colorblind. We can't just pluck better pay and equal opportunity out of the sky. But what we CAN do is assert ourselves, humanize ourselves in this rat race we're told is a fair one despite the majority having a substantial head start.
Nobody said it would be easy.
That's a nice feel-good thing to do, but it doesn't solve any problems.
If you're in an abusive marriage, the obvious solution is a divorce; that doesn't mean defending yourself until you can talk to an attorney is wasted effort.
This analogy should be disproved by the following:
To put it in terms of an abusive marriage, it would be like your only plan is to stop the abuse, and give no thought to getting a divorce, all the while you instigate a bunch of fights because you're stressed from working 2 jobs, have five kids to feed, and you're an alcoholic.
Are you suggesting victims of police violence deserved it or were otherwise at fault? I really don't want to dignify that. BLM has an immediate agenda because there's an immediate threat; a "big picture" mindset isn't the only way to address the issue. If I'm drowning, my immediate course of action should be keeping my head above water, not learning to swim.
I’ve already conceded that poverty in majority black communities is a deeper, root issue; never said it wasn’t. Unfortunately, while we can continue to work on it, it’s an issue that cannot be resolved in the near-term. So movements like BLM are insisting that while black communities are be over-policed, those police should not be empowered to use lethal force with abandon, and they should be held accountable to their use of excessive force. Why do you take issue with that? You’ve used the analogy of BLM “treating the symptom and not the disease;” I can agree with that, but will counter that when no cure is in sight, sometimes treating the symptom is the best you can do; it’s certainly better than nothing and more than those complicit to the status quo have done.
That's one study. Numerous others show other things, and studies are constantly criticised and reevaluated by others.
In a field with as much research as this, finding one study that suits you and then looking up none of the critical responses to it is not the way to go. It doesn't represent the breadth of data on the topic, and it's got various procedural issues with it.
I'm saying that it's not such a simple thing to assign blame one way or the other.
Many of the deaths included in the statistics are caused by people committing suicide-by-cop, people harming others, people harming cops, people resisting arrest, people disobeying police orders, and people reaching for objects out of view of the officer. And then there's people with mental illness and people on drugs.
In determining whether a killing was "lawful" or not, you have to do it case by case. It's unhelpful to make sweeping generalizations against either the police or black people and paint either of them as "to blame".
It's just not that simple.
It's like BLM is blaming emergency aid shipments for causing fatalities, since, whenever a location receives emergency aid, there's always a lot of deaths. No, that's obviously wrong to anyone who thinks about it for more than one second. Locations receive emergency aid BECAUSE there's some huge disaster that warrants it.
The "immediate threat" isn't the police. BLM is wrong about that.
Communities with a disproportionate amount of crime are "the threat". They are the "huge disaster".
Police are only responding to the threat, and when they do, there is going to be a disproportionate amount of fatalities.
BLM looks at these fatalities, and decides that the police must be the threat. BLM is oblivious to the issues which caused these fatalities in the first place.
I don't take issue with that, not at all.
Feel free to bring up the critical responses to the study, if there are any. The more the merrier.
This is one, I think: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10...?icid=int.sj-challenge-page.citing-articles.2
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Yet you proceed to do exactly that:
BLM isn't claiming that all police-induced black fatalities are unlawful; they're highlighting the ones like Eric Garner, killed for selling loose cigarettes. George Floyd, killed for passing off a fake $20 bill. Treyvon Martin, not killed by a cop, but a child literally hunted down by a “concerned citizen” who was subsequently let off scott free. Or Ahmaud Arbery, also hunted down by “concerned citizens” who went unarrested for MONTHS and only AFTER the video went viral. Or Botham Jean, gunned down in his OWN HOME by a sleepy police woman who stumbled into the wrong apartment and instead of realizing like 99.9% of rational people would have that she was in the wrong, saw a black guy and shot before asking a single question. BLM is protesting the kinds of cops and “concerned citizens” who abuse/misuse their authority and the institutions that empower such individuals to do what they feel is within their right in taking black lives with impunity. This is a rhetorical question because I know the answer and don’t expect you to answer honestly (not a judgment of you as a person, I just know how Internet debates go: give the answer that deflates the other person’s point,) but can you honestly imagine replacing any of those few names listed with a white 40-something suburban housewife? Could you imagine a cop kneeling on the neck of a “Karen’ for over 8 minutes, the final three of which she’s unresponsive with no pulse? If you say “yes,” you’re being willfully disingenuous. I can however find a multitude of pictures with a group of proud white guys standing around the corpse of a black man hanging from a tree, some even in color lest we forget that racial violence and discrimination in this country are alive and well. What better profession to be in for a power-hungry hatemonger than a cop: here’s a gun; go where “the most crime happens” and enforce the law…
So you default to the side of the police; you’re welcome to feel that way and therefore unqualified to speak to the plight of black people with any authority when it comes to the tenuous relationship blacks and the police have had since forever. Read my first paragraph again.
Selling loose cigarettes.
Passing off a fake $20.
Jogging.
Walking home with Skittles and an iced tea.
Sitting in his own home eating ice cream watching TV.
Which one of those is a capital offence?
If the police are just doing their job and responding to criminal “threats,” I would like to think they have the wherewithal and onus to respond with the correct amount of force. As a black person, I’ve never committed a crime in my life, yet on two separate instances, I found myself engaged with the police for literally having done nothing: a spent taillight led to my car being literally stripped clean by two cops insisting I had weapons or drugs because I said I didn’t have any weapons, but the officer’s flashlight landed on a safety box cutter I used at work every day. During a traffic stop in Louisiana, the cop stopped half way between his car and mine on a busy highway and use hand gestures instead of words; when I tried to approach him with my license and registration in hand (which is what I thought his mime show was indicating,) he put his hand on his gun and commanded me to return to my vehicle. Turns out his gesturing was to “close my door.” And that’s just little ol’ me; I can think of countless friends and family with stories of their own; I can turn on the TV and see innumerable stories from strangers.
The police and justice system ARE a proven threat; you’re fortunate you don’t have to experience that way.
The problem is that they don't make a distinction. It's just "Black Lives Matter". Not "Innocent Black Lives Matter". Their mission statements say nothing about the difference between lawful and unlawful fatalities.
The two groups are combined when people spread the "3 times as likely!"" statistic as proof that a problem exists.
If we're NOT using those statistics, then what are these international protests/riots based on? A handful of anecdotes elevated by the media?
Okay, that's not represented by the statistics. That's a vague and moving target. Anyone can become the next "George Zimmerman" in the heat of the moment. You can't target that. You can't protest that which has not even happened yet.
If your protest is "Justice for Trayvon Martin!", great. Tried and failed.
If your protest is "Justice for George Floyd!", go for it. Absolutely.
If your protest is "Justice for all black people, everywhere", That's way too vague to be actionable. This is what BLM seems to be doing.
You're right, I can't.
Yeah, that's fair to say. Given any random police shootout, I'll, by default, think that the police are in the right.
I think this is a safe assumption to make. How many police are there? How many encounters are there, daily? How many of them end like George Floyd?
I would like to think so too. And I would like to think that, a majority of the time, they do. And this is statistically proven to be true, isn't it?
If you want to think that the police are just a pack of roving thugs looking to make your life worse, that way of thinking might get you killed.
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Ok, this is just silly semantics.
"Oh hey, because you didn't SPECIFICALLY say 'Innocent Black people killed on purpose or by accident by law enforcement', then CLEARLY you mean 'all black peoples lives inherently matter more than anyone else" is a REALLY eyebrow raising argument.