Sacramento Police Department Murders/Executes/Kills Stephon Clark
The Story
On Sunday, March 18, 2018, the Sacramento Police Department received a report that somebody had smashed out a truck’s windows. The SPD sent two officers to investigate, then summoned at least one more set of eyes in the air via helicopter. Upon arriving to investigate, the two officers saw somebody in a driveway, but at no point do they identify themselves. Although ordered to show his hands, the man fled. Police pursued, while the eyes in the helicopter advised that the individual had picked up a “toolbar” and had smashed out a window. The officers cornered Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard. Both officers had their guns drawn. The officers ordered Clark to show his hands, and within seconds, one of the two officers screamed, “Gun, gun, gun!” The officers shot at Clark, ultimately firing twenty times in his direction.
Clark would die shortly after. A subsequent search of the area would reveal neither the reported “toolbar” or the “Gun, gun, gun!” that would justify the officers’ actions.
In a subsequent search, police found a cellphone nearby. Clark’s girlfriend had loaned it to him. It was in a rose-gold colored case and featured a clip for holding onto credit cards. As of this writing, California law does not declare it illegal to be in possession of a cellphone, even a borrowed one. And, even if possessing such a phone were illegal, it would almost certainly not be considered a capital offense.
The Aftermath
All of the following has happened since Clark’s murder/execution/killing:
- The SPD released footage of Clark’s final moments. It can be seen here. It is not easy to watch. It features police officers making an almost instantaneous decision to end a man’s life based on a wildly incorrect assessment.
- The SPD also refused to explain why officers muted their body cameras in the aftermath of Clark’s killing. One of the officers can plainly be heard telling the other to mute their worn cameras – to keep them running, in other words, but with audio no longer being recorded – without any explanation for why such an action would be necessary.
- Sacramento’s mayor, while desperate to calm a tense situation engulfing his community, inexplicably declared that he was not in a position to even question his actions taken by SPD officers, declaring, “Based on the videos alone, I cannot second-guess the split-second decisions of our officers and I’m not going to do that.”
- Protestors shut down the Golden 1 Center, the home arena of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, immediately before a game against the Atlanta Hawks was set to begin. Numerous fans were turned away from the venue as a result. Vivek Ranadive subsequently addressed the few fans who made it into the arena before the protest began, and the accompanying television cameras, with comments that did not make a bad situation worse. Ranadive called the incident a “horrible, horrible tragedy” and acknowledged the power of peaceful protest.
- Protests have been an almost daily phenomenon in California’s capital city, with residents predictably wanting to know why it is exactly that any of this happened, and with a local government doing it everything it can to quell understandable anger without also admitting any fault of any kind.
What Is Next
If one had to venture a guess about how Clark’s story is going to play itself out, the most reasonable guess is this: in the usual way. The officers who murdered/executed/killed Clark will be investigated. Local prosecutors will almost certainly declare that they cannot bring charges against the two officers, whose behavior was justifiable because one of the officers believed that Clark had a gun, even if he actually did not. A less likely outcome is that local prosecutors will charge and prosecute both officers, but local juries will end up excusing both of them, using the same, “It didn’t matter that he didn’t have a gun, because they thought that he did have a gun,” justification that local prosecutors tend to use themselves. Clark’s family will then sue the city, which will settle out of court for several million dollars.
Meanwhile, all of the following questions will never be satisfactorily answered:
- Why did officers pursue Clark with their guns drawn, and why did they not announce themselves?
- Why did officers decide to mute their cameras just as they were figuring out that Clark was unarmed?
- Why did officers decide that Clark’s phone was actually either a “toolbar” or a “Gun, gun, gun!” and why was Clark given no opportunity at all to account for himself?
- More broadly, why is it the case, in all interactions between the police and the policed, that only the police are allowed to feel, and react to, fear? Why are the policed not allowed to fear the police, and why are they expected to, in all cases, give police the benefit of the doubt (at the risk of their own lives), when they themselves receive nothing similar in return?
- And finally, why is it that officers can so often restrain themselves from killing some suspects – Nikolas Cruz, for example, is still alive, and was arrested without a shot being fired, despite having killed 17 people moments earlier – but not others? What is the fundamental difference between somebody like Dylann Roof, who was arrested alive with no shots fired, and Clark? Would it have helped Clark if he had been more like James Holmes, who, like Cruz and Roof, was arrested alive with no shots fired?
Media Coverage
Before police had shot Clark, before they even knew who he was, they had received a description of somebody six-feet tall, in a black hoodie. One of the more popular images circulating of Clark is this one, below:
That’s Clark, in a black hoodie. There is something off-putting about the attempt to so perfectly match Clark to the description of the suspect. It is worth noting that the SPD has not clarified if Clark was, beyond being unarmed, actually the man they were searching for. But it is also off-putting because that isn’t the entire photo. That one is cropped, and although it hopefully was not done with any sort of malicious intent, it does not pack the punch that the uncropped original does:
That is Clark with his younger sister. He happens to be wearing a black hoodie.
A thousand times, this.Report
I’m wondering how long it will take until people start to get the picture that they should only call the cops when they need someone shot and killed.Report
Corey Robin wrote a big book (the Reactionary Mind) proposing the theory that the primary goal of right-wing thought is *hierarchy*. Those above have the right to abuse those below them, who have in turn have the right to abuse those below themselves.
Those below have no rights against their uppers.
In these cases, it’s manifested by the attitude of these people that the amateur must take responsibility in dealings with professionals. The professionals bear no responsibility whatsoever.Report
thanks for this post.
especially for the clarifying photo of the young man with his daughter.
We all should fear the unheroic police.Report
@rich Just wanted to note that I edited the post just now, for accuracy, so people know you didn’t misread it – that young woman was actually his sister. He also has two young sons, as seen here:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/23/us/sacramento-police-shooting-stephon-clark/index.htmlReport
Had. Had two young sons.Report
Much credit to the press who kept the sister out of the story.Report
Geez i wanna slap anyone who says we can’t second guess or Monday morning QB what cops do. That is just dumber that a bag full of hammers. Especially a mayor….crimany. I wonder if he is up for election this year. If not i hope all the other pols up for election in Cali feel the heat from this.Report
I know that 20/20 hindsight thing doesn’t play well to military personnel.
They have to follow all kinds of rules.
Why not the police?
It should be noted that, with all the focus on the police, the trajectory is actually more one of unaccountability in government.
It’s just that the police disproportionately get the press.Report
I went on a hike with a F 15 pilot once. He talked about how arduous the review of every mission was. They went over every detail. Not, “don’t worry about it Chet. We don’t want to second guess your timing there”. More like “this is everything you missed and everyone of those things could have gotten someone killed or lead to mission fail. Got it.”
In fact when i worked in an inpatient psych unit where we needed to safely restrain people we reviewed every incident to learn what to do better. Reviewing actions in critical incidents is the exact way to get better. I can guarantee you that cops are trained to review incidents like this. The phrase monday morning QB is always funny to me in things like this. What does every football team to on monday? Go through game film in a painstaking manner to learn and improveReport
Sure they are, but what is important is what the end result of the review is. If the AAR is just a bunch of high-fiving all- around for a good shoot, and the only criticism is about how people could have done a better job covering their asses…Report
Oh yeah, agreed. There should even be local citizens on every shooting review board to painstakingly second guess the cops.Report
In referring to “that 20/20 hindsight thing,” I meant to understand one of the main reasons courts use to throw out this kind of case; i.e., “20/20 hindsight” is a direct quote from the courts.
A quick search on LexisNexis shows 2503 such cases in the past twenty years.
Typical is the language of Rodarte v. Alameda County, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 129499, which states:
In effect, this states that any degree of oversight whatever of the police is an infringement of state sovereignty.
That whole notion of the Constitution being an agreement of the people, and not a compact between the sates, written by Joseph Story so long ago* appears to be a wash. State sovereignty is supreme.
It was this, and not some imagined resistance to review, that I noted as “not playing well to military personnel.”
If it had occurred to me there might be some other reading than this, I would have preemptively acted in clarification. My apologies, but it simply did not occur to me that this statement might be interpreted in its direct opposite.
* I believe that was Hunter’s Lessee, but I would have to look that up to be sure.Report
Thing is, the courts do not reliably extend this aversion to 20/20 hindsight to civilians acting in self-defense. If they did, we’d not have need of things like Castle Doctrine and SYG laws.Report
The 20/20 hindsight thing typically does not extend to civilians at all. There is an inquiry, a bar to be met; whereas rulings invoking 20/20 hindsight negate all inquiry.
Thinking about this a bit more, there are actually two separate issues here.
It is state law which creates property. Federal law is silent on the matter. Certain things may be property in one state, but not in another.*
Police act on authority of the state. Then, to resist the police is effectively a denial that the state is lawfully organized.**
To shoot and kill an intruder on your property is executing a right to title,*** though this right is subservient to that of the state; similar to the relationship between a baron and a duke (i.e., title is held by the grace of the state).
However, there appears to be a colorable argument there that to shoot and kill a person entering on to your property is actually asserting the right of the state to exist; i.e., enacting a “seizure” pursuant to a citizen’s arrest.
Two different authorities though.
______________________
* Under a Hohfeldian analysis, this is a “Right,” i.e., a claim interest, as opposed to a “Privilege,” i.e., a liberty interest. The distinction here is an important one, because, generally, a claim interest is recoverable in suit, whereas a liberty interest is typically recoverable to the extent to which a claim interest has been impaired.
** The maxim states: The State should observe the Law, for it is the Law which creates the State. Thus, it can be argued that, where the State has acted unlawfully, this is a direct attack on the very foundation of the State; i.e., its formation and organization. (This happens to be my personal view.) This raises concerns of the legitimacy of the State; or, more properly, that the lawful State has been assumed by unlawful enterprise.
*** Of course, the law of trespass distinguishes between anticipated trespass and unanticipated trespass, and imposes duties on the property owner as to the former (i.e., invoking negligence, which, IIRC, must be willful). The duty not to harm an unanticipated trespasser has been strictly curtailed in recent years, and it will probably take a case of AD&D-style pits full of sharpened stakes covered with trap doors for the courts to begin to look in the other direction on that point.Report
“Thing is, the courts do not reliably extend this aversion to 20/20 hindsight to civilians acting in self-defense. If they did, we’d not have need of things like Castle Doctrine and SYG laws.”
And if somebody shoots a police officer executing a no knock warrant, I’ll lay good money that those precedents are flatly never allowed.Report
“I can guarantee you that cops are trained to review incidents like this.”
Has there been any public evidence that any police department actually does this?Report
I’ve known a few cops. Reviewing shootings is commonplace. Also many cops are ex military where after action reviews are standard. It’s possible smaller departments slack off and that many departments have only perfunctory reviews. But they are trained to review shootings. That is how they are supposed to learn to do things better.Report
I think it’s terrible that this is happening *BEFORE* we make guns illegal.
The least cops could do is wait for the gun legislation to pass.Report
Most non-political people seemed inclined to believe the police and give them the benefit of the doubt because it’s been drilled into them by society since they were young. Nearly all shows about the police depict them in a very honorable manner. They aren’t racist, they do t get things wrong and accuse the innocent out of convenience. It’s all good guys and bad guys without nuance. Few White Americans imagine themselves on the wrong side of a police encounter and act accordingly.Report
A reality-based cop drama would depict 40% of the police characters engaging in spousal abuse.Report
Yeah, Gotham, the “how Batman became Batman” show is probably the most realistic in that regard.Report
Hunh, I came onto the site expecting to see something about today’s killing of an unarmed black man and for a second I was confused; Sacramento? I thought it was in Texas…
The fact that this is commonplace enough that it’s so easy to lose track feels like it should say a lot in, and of itself.Report
Unfortunately, “accidents” like this happen in Sacramento on a regular basis now.
Even more unfortunate for the residents here, the police are frequently fully exonerated of any wrong doing.Report
I don’t understand this contradiction in police culture. Police culture and police supporting culture declares that Police are heroic and take extreme risks to uphold public safety but every time the Police gun down people these same cultures declare that the public should absorb extreme risk of death to safeguard police lives. To be heroic you need to be taking risk and if you aren’t accepting the risk then you ain’t heroic.Report
It’s not a contradiction! It’s merely that the courts have not yet discovered where the boundary to “qualified immunity” ends.Report
@north
The lefty answer here would this would be how white supremacy and white privilege show themselves. Or in the case of white people being abused by cops, class privilege and suppression.
I think this is broadly right. Most of the stories involve white police officers killing people of color. An overwhelming majority of the defenders of the police are also white. Now the thing about this supremacy is that it doesn’t have to be conscious in the persons mind.
But I think Lee is basically right, a lot of people see the cops as defending order and protecting people from harm. They don’t want to consider anything else because it is complicated. Also concepts like freedom and civil liberty are vague and intellectual. I think a lot of people don’t see how these events can lead to their oppression. They can still walk around safe, can’t they?Report
Since all police killings don’t become “stories”, there’s a very strong selection bias here. I can’t remember the last time a black cop killing anyone became a story, but it’s possible that happens just as often.
If the stories’ narrative aligns with reality, then we could make the problem go away by seriously integrating the police force. However if it’s a “cop privilege” and general lack of accountability then it won’t.Report
A black cop gunned down a white woman here in MN and it both was an equally major story to the ones about white cops gunning down black men AND that black cop is being prosecuted for murder. Look up Justine Damond.Report
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/04/19/nypd-officer-who-shot-unarmed-man-faces-sentencing/83221906/
And there was this. Which sort of hits everg button: officer of color; victim of color; unarmed; successful charges brought; conviction reduced by judge on appeal.Report
Local news which is big locally. However it didn’t make the national circuit so beyond MN it didn’t happen.
Here locally we had 30+ cops from five departments gun down a white guy after carefully planning his “arrest”. I assume some of them were black. It was a good example of “careful planning when they know their lives are at risk”, the guy was an (mentally ill?) end-of-the-world survivalist and always heavily armed. There was a car chase and he got shot at an suburban apartment building with civilians around. All very dramatic and dangerous.
That didn’t make national news either.
Does anyone know if there’s data saying we hold black cops differently accountable than white?Report
It was national news, Google ‘Justine Damond’.Report
Yeah, I heard about this on the national news level as well.Report
Fair enough. The exception which proves the rule.
She’s a new age guru (which probably makes her a pacifist), attractive/photogenic, and shot in a bathrobe by the police she summoned. That’s setting the bar pretty high.Report
“It became necessary to kill the citizen in order to protect him.”Report
Put ‘hero’ in quotes. Does that help? 🙁Report
but at no point do (they police) identify themselves
Were they uniformed?
My assumption is that they were.
Was it too dark to see if they were uniformed? (If so, this is a lot more likely to work in the favor of the police at trial because they’ll be able to argue that it was too dark to see that the phone was not a gun.)Report
I guess the fact that they were wearing body cameras tells me that they were uniformed.Report
@jaybird When the mayor is already saying he cannot second-guess the police, the likelihood of a trial is beyond small. And as for the darkness, we again have the same issue: what is allowed to the police versus what is allowed to those that they are interacting with.Report
Yeah, then this case is nowhere near big enough to take the focus off of cops being heroes.
“Black Lives Matter” is pretty much over.
I guess it had a good run.Report
I find it interesting that a middle class white kid kills a bunch of other middle class white kids (an event that is still very rare), and suddenly we have the media all breathless about how brave the survivors are, and we can drum up over a million people to march on the capital and in major cities in relatively short order to demand political action.
But Police kill another unarmed (and most likely brown/black) citizen (a weekly event, if not more frequent – hard to tell since police resist keeping THOSE stats), and despite protests, no one really wants to talk about political action.
A lovely confluence of structural racism.Report
@oscar-gordon This is very true. I would just add that 1) not every child victim in Parkland was white, and 2) the Parkland kids themselves are aware of and doing their best to call attention to this same problem / use their middle-class privilege to give other groups opportunities. Over and over they say pretty much what you are saying. Also this: http://time.com/5201562/parkland-students-minority-groups/Report
1) True enough, but most of the survivors I see in interviews are white. I’m sure not all of them are, but the white kids are the ones I see getting interviewed.
2) Good for them!Report
That’s not racism. Press coverage of 17 dead is always going to be a lot more than 17x.Report
See also, Chicago on a bad weekend.Report
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
-Stalin
Also (and especially) does it fit the larger ‘narrative’ the press wants to tell?Report
Racism is part of it. So is the narrow and culturally biased lense through which our media class views ‘gun violence.’ Like it’s only something private citizens do, and only in leafy suburbs where the victims are photogenic children from the right class… who can also conveniently be mobilized in support of the narrative the media supports.Report
“I find it interesting that a middle class white kid kills a bunch of other middle class white kids (an event that is still very rare)…”
Actually, the right is now blaming the victims.Report
Another thought. In the news this morning, Sea-Tac is getting 10 more K-9 teams to help clear busy passenger lines more quickly. In a lot of these shooting cases, I wonder if having more police K-9 teams could help avoid a lot of these kinds of shootings, since a K-9 officer can close distance a lot faster, is a lot harder to hit with a bullet, and can bring a suspect down, or at least keep them busy for the few seconds needed for humans to close and effect and arrest.
Or is the idea of police ‘releasing the hounds’ on dark skinned people just a bit too much?Report
Yeah, it’s already out there as kind of a problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc4iEjycDCwReport
Some police just really love being able to use violence, and we don’t demand that those officers be removed.Report
“Get that bad guy!”…?
Jesus Christ. Many of my students like to play “Police Man” and other ‘good guy’/’bad guy’ games. They have rather unnuanced understandings of “good” and “bad”.
While I’d never actually show them this video, I bet if they were to see it they’d insist one side was cheating.Report
Well they already sent out, what was that, 9 or 10 cops, some of them armed with assault rifles, and a dog. If he doesn’t resist arrest it makes the cops look like idiots, doesn’t it? Fortunately people getting mauled by a dog tend to struggle, so they can at least get him ‘resisting arrest’ enough to justify a couple punches in the face.
Good grief I bet the mayor said that you can’t judge the ‘full context of the situation’ from just one video, and the police chief pointed out that they were ‘following procedure’ (which they presumably helped write themselves, though their union).Report
There was a claim that the officers thought they heard shots fired. However, nothing seems to have come of that claim. Once this blew up on the internet, the county rolled over pretty quick and paid $17,500 to shut the issue down.
https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2017/08/15/reno-man-mauled-police-dog-get-17-500-settlement/567207001/Report
One assumes so they can spin things or talk about how ****ed they are. On the whole having cameras was still a vast improvement over needing to rely on the police for what happened and giving them the opportunity to leave a drop piece. Removing the ability to mute (which should happen btw) just means they’ll have this conversation back in the locker room after the shift is over.
Does anyone know if cameras have reduced how common this sort of occurrence is?
This question is creating an optical illusion via data selection (or we can call it luck of the draw).
When anyone interacts with the police they’re rolling dice, or buying a lottery ticket. There are billions of encounters worth of data from which to pick. If we select for the worst possible outcome for the most innocent person of color, we find death. If we select for an encounter with a horrible criminal who isn’t doing suicide by cop, normally we don’t find death because that’s rare.
This type of cherry picking showcases whatever the author wants and isn’t useful without supporting data. If it’s showcasing racial disparities, we should take care that it’s actually a thing AND that it’s not better explained by something else (for example the War on Drugs). Imagine the current administration “fixing” the problem by hiring vast numbers of black cops to enforce the WoD.
More broadly, the level of competence can vary from cop to cop, and perhaps even from day to day. Sometimes you’re encountering Andy Griffin, sometimes you’re encountering Barney Fife playing Rambo.
As far as what happens here, I agree it’s unlikely we’ll hold them criminally liable. Without that, the issue becomes whether these guys were obviously Barney before this point and whether or not they keep their jobs. It’d be an improvement if I could reasonably expect those answers to be “no” and “no”.Report
From the comment section of the linked Deadspin article:
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Maybe I’m just a dumdum but what, exactly, is a “toolbar”?Report
@kazzy My best guess is a prybar or a crowbar or one of those yellow metal multitools that Stanley makes. Same basic idea on that last one but a few more uses allegedly.Report
According to google, it’s thisReport
Oh man, those are wicked dangerous, I can see why the cops were keyed up, he might have come at them with a meme or something.Report
That would explain the cell phone.Report
I don’t understand why people complain about the number of shots.Report
It indicates a total lack of any control at all, coupled with a desire to kill.Report
That’s why they report it, but the reality is, that is how they are trained.
The relevant question is not how many shots were fired, but rather how many hit the target. If 20 were fired and 2 hit, then 18 shots were flying through the neighborhood.Report
That. I live in a much nicer neighborhood that Clark, but I can see my neighbor’s back porch from my family room window. It’s about 20 feet away. If someone fired 20 shots a man on that porch, I’m sure a number of those would come through the window and walls of the room where my family is usually sitting after dinner.
Even if these cops get a pass on killing a man armed only with a cell phone, after quick firing 20 rounds in residential area they should be up on charges for reckless endangerment.Report
This line of thought has become a “how many shots is appropriate” policy/training decision.
The situation is:
1) You’re firing at someone you think is armed and trying to kill you
2) You’re not sure if he’s wearing a vest (thank you drug war)
3) It’s dark and it’s happening fast so you’re not sure if you’re hitting him or where.
4) It’s a high stress situation so accuracy is way down
5) People have been known to remain functional after multiple hits (Ferguson’s Mike Brown for example).
IMHO the problem isn’t “how many bullets”, I’ve far more of an issue with the first bullet than the last.
(Assuming what we’re hearing is correct and we don’t have to retroactively change this into a good shooting in a week with new information).Report
It’s still a case of not being sure of your target AND what is beyond it (what is your backstop should you miss or over-penetrate).
To beat my horse some more, if I fired at someone who I thought had a gun (and who later turned out not to have a gun, nor was doing anything to suggest he had a gun), not only would I be facing criminal charges for wounding/killing the person, I’d be responsible for the damage of every stray round*. The police won’t even have to pay for the Spackle.
*Although, if the person was a legitimate threat and the violence justified, I would not be criminally liable, and depending on state law, possibly not even civilly liable for stray rounds. But the standard for me would be that the person was armed and I had a demonstrable reason to fear for my life.Report
That. That exactly.
We’re going to see this spun so that this was the situation, or this was the reasonably believed situation.Report
Sorry, that came off as way less sarcastic than I intended.Report
Even if the prosecutor prosecuted and the jury convicted it would be tossed out on appeal. And that’s not a legislative law but constitutional. And the union will protect them from administrative punishment.
We have lost the ability to discipline the police.Report
We have lost the ability to discipline the police.
Not entirely. Some people are still armed.
It’d be pretty crazy if there were some sort of movement to change that, though.Report
The ghost of Philando Castile would like a word.Report
“Oh, if only the laws were in place to make my murder a good shoot on the part of police”?Report
Well, if I understood you correctly, you were suggesting that people being armed was somehow contributing to an ability to discipline police?Report
It certainly seemed to scare the ever-living shit out of the cop far, far more than the thought of what his supervisors, prosecutors, juries, or union reps would do to him if he screwed up on the job.Report
Cops shooting an unarmed civilian on the premise that they thought he had a gun is a bizarre example of how citizens being *armed* constitutes an ability to discipline the police.Report
This is one of those things where I’m going to point out that there are differences between “the potential to do something” and “actually having done it” and it’s not going to lead anywhere productive.
But, hey. Maybe if we make guns illegal, cops will finally be nicer in minority neighborhoods.
“Why did you think he had a gun?”, we could ask. “We made guns illegal!”, we could point out.
“We had an internal review and found that the officer did nothing wrong”, we could hear in response.Report
So what is the logic of trying to connect racist and belligerent policing, with guns and gun control?
I’m not seeing how these things are related.Report
They are related, but in the opposite of the way Jaybird thinks. A polity that becomes more supportive of regulating guns also becomes more supportive of regulating cops, and vice versa, because of the interconnected racial narratives.
It might be justifiable in some circumstances to kill police in self-defense, but we’re not going to see a world where minorities (or anyone) can sustain armed resistance to police in the long term. Public reform of police is a much closer possibility than that.Report
A polity that becomes more supportive of regulating guns also becomes more supportive of regulating cops, and vice versa, because of the interconnected racial narratives.
I’m going to need more information on this because I don’t see how in the heck the racial narratives make it so that a polity that is finally willing to regulate guns is also, finally, willing to punish cops for bad behavior.
Are there trend lines we could point to for gun regulations and/or holding police accountable?
Do they correlate?Report
I’m not seeing how these things are related.
It has to do with the assumption that the racist and belligerent police ought to be the only ones that are armed.
I, personally, don’t think that they should be.Report
Well, OK, so we are right back where we started.
What evidence are you seeing that arming the victims of racism produces a better outcome?
Are there cases of racist cops encountering a black man armed with a gun and saying, “whoa, Bill, lets beat it- He has a gun!!”
And why should we accept “racist and belligerent cops” as an acceptable premise?
Isn’t that, like, the exact problem we are trying to solve?Report
What evidence are you seeing that arming the victims of racism produces a better outcome?
Better outcome than what?
Than the victims of racism being forced to disarm?
To answer your question, I only have historical anecdotes.
And why should we accept “racist and belligerent cops” as an acceptable premise?
“should”
Oh, is agreeing on that point all you’re looking for?
Then let me say that we should not accept “racist and belligerent cops” as an acceptable premise. At all.
Isn’t that, like, the exact problem we are trying to solve?
Looking out in the wild, I’m not seeing how we’re trying to solve that problem at all.
Like, not even in the slightest.Report
I’m just not seeing the connection.
On one hand, unarmed minorities get shot.
On the other, armed minorities get shot.
So why are guns even a variable in this equation?Report
Well, at the root of this discussion, there was the question of whether it’s possible to force the police to act in accordance with something approaching uncontroversial reasons that a polity would want police policing it.
The point was “We have lost the ability to discipline the police.”
This is a good point. It’s a good point that I agree with.
I would go on to say that the fact that the citizenry is armed is one of the things preventing cops from being *EVEN WORSE*.
And then someone else argued against this point by pointing out a wrongful shooting of a private citizen… a shooting that pretty much everybody here agrees was wrongful.Report
It seems to me, after several years (decades) of stories now, that the police are jumpy & on a hair trigger because every officer believes (and is indoctrinated with the belief) that every person they meet is potentially armed. This belief is not entirely irrational, as statistically, there is about one gun per capita in the US.
Thus, a citizenry that is in fact most *less* armed, where guns are as rare as say, high explosives, would reduce the perceived threat level and cause cops to calm the heck down.
Or maybe not. It’s still possible, and even plausible, that an actual threat reduction will not change the perceived threat, as people are kinda bad at that in general.Report
Thus, a citizenry that is in fact most *less* armed, where guns are as rare as say, high explosives, would reduce the perceived threat level and cause cops to calm the heck down.
Getting from here to there would probably require confiscation.
I am not confident that law enforcement has the required inclination to do what would need to be done, here. (I admit that I’m seeing the deputy at the school as more representative of law enforcement than the police who showed up later in the day.)Report
well, yeah, the only *practical* way is a decades long generational attitude shift, like we saw with smoking cigarettes.Report
It’s the Magic Words.
They learn it in their first Criminal Justice course.
“Officer Safety.”
All they have to do is say, “I feared for my (or another officer’s) safety,” and there is no inquiry whatever into whether the fear was legitimate or not.
It could well be that they feared a pterodactyl would land and start eating people. Doesn’t matter.
It’s about the Magic Words.Report
IMHO there is a difference between “the citizenry” (who as a class don’t shoot people even if they have guns), and “drug dealers” (who do). These would be the same dealers who as a class are already unable to legally have weapons.
Disarm 80% of the law abiding citizens (which is a monster undertaking) while leaving the criminal class totally armed can’t possibly lower the “threat level” the police perceive because we will STILL have dealers murdering each other because of business disputes.Report
Is it impolitic to observe that other western nations don’t seem to have the same glaring difficulty with their peace officers mowing down minorities in hails of bullets and that their peace officers have the opposite presumption: that by and large their citizenry is unlikely to be armed?Report
Or their officers get better training at de-escalation and keeping control of a situation without violence.
ETA: Police in the US understand that they can not out-draw and out-shoot someone who is intent on killing them. Police in other first world nations also understand this. The difference, IMHO, is that the police in the US operate under an extreme version of the precautionary principle.Report
Well, I looked up the numbers and found this:
Police firearm use by country.
All the countries in the comparison are European (with the exceptions of Australia and South Africa).
Get rid of South Africa, it would take the rest of Europe 42 years to catch up with the amount of shootings that the US has in 1. (Keep South Africa in there, it’d take around 3.)
Lotta variables in there.Report
The issue with this is that the police in the U.S. are organized differently than those of any other nation.
Their mission is different.
Any similarities are only superficial.Report
I think the comparison is of very limited utility almost to the point of being a red herring. These places have never had anything resembling the crime problems America had in the late 20th century. Most of them wouldn’t tolerate the levels of inequality and poverty we do and none of them (unless we count South Africa) had a de jure racial caste system in living memory similar in scope to ours. To the extent we’re talking about Europe, you’re also dealing with small countries administered and policed in a far more centralized manner as opposed to our sprawling country with a federal system and wide variation among centers of power.
We have a cultural affinity with Europe because its where the country’s founders came from and where most Americans trace our ancestors. However, there are a lot of important ways in which we are more like the countries of South and Central America. I’m pessimistic that European results around crime and police conduct are as simple as importing their laws. There’s this idea out there that other countries have solved the problem of places like Baltimore or Detroit but I don’t think they’ve ever had anything quite like it.Report
To the extent we’re talking about Europe, you’re also dealing with small countries administered and policed in a far more centralized manner as opposed to our sprawling country with a federal system and wide variation among centers of power.
I’m not sure I understand how this gets to the heart of the difference between European countries and the US. Cop violence here is primarily, almost exclusively, perpetrated at the local level. Town cops, city cops, state stroopers. And if that’s correct (and I think it is :), the sprawling size of our nation doesn’t seem like a relevant consideration either.
It’s something else…Report
The drug war (turns head and spits…)Report
Let’s use a physics example. Do hot water and cold water mix? The answer is… it depends on the scale. Yes in a coffee cup, no in a lake.
It’s easy to forget we’re a seriously multicultural country with a population density of a 3rd world nation. That sprawl makes central control a problem.
There are big cultural and practical differences between the poor/rich city/urban/suburban immigrant/native/whatever groups. There are large issues with inequality between various groups that, because they’re complex and rooted in local situations and/or culture, make central “one size fits all” solutions seriously problematic.
Easy, obvious, “common sense” solutions can look insane in different parts of the country.
Some of what’s going on is we’re turning local news into national news, and reforming local police isn’t a national priority for the bulk of the country.Report
It alone isn’t the cause but it’s among the exacerbating factors that make America different. When we talk about fixing the police we’re talking about fixing thousands of entities in widely varying cultural circumstances controlled by different sovereigns. @dark-matter gets at this more in depth above. One agency getting it right can’t compel others to and the things they do or don’t do to get it right may not translate or even be relevant in places getting it wrong.
But again, I didn’t say that’s the difference. It’s just one of many that makes comparisons to Europe mostly inadequate. I do think that the de-escalation tactics they seem to use more readily might be helpful, but there are a lot of other moving parts.Report
I’m currently reading American Empire: A Global History. Andrew Jackson is specifically compared to the caudillos that emerged in Latin America as they achieved independence from Spain.Report
Having intently studied that period of American history from 1810 – 1870, and being familiar with the Latin American nations, both at present and through their history, I would say the comparison is a superficial one, at best.
Jackson was an entirely different kind of animal.
Land reform was never as big of issue in the U.S. as it was in Latin America, in part because land ownership was never as concentrated in the U.S.; part of why we never had a Bolivar in the U.S.
I don’t know of any caudillos who were hailed as the champion of the common man. Jackson was Irish, and a military man. Very, very different.
The trade patterns were significantly different w/r/t to former colonies and their European motherlands. The triangle of trade in the U.S. led to West Africa and the Caribbean, and the colonies had previously effected an embargo on British goods, which was simply not feasible in Latin America. Latin American trade was more expansive, both in Europe and the New World.
Brazil housing the monarchy is unprecedented in the history of Latin America, as is Napoleon’s Emperor in Mexico (land reform was a big thing, even for the emperor).
It is an interesting proposition, but I am very skeptical, to say the least.
I think it’s probably something along the lines of comparing the Lincoln & Kennedy assassinations, drawing conclusions on which part of the evidence one chooses to see.
There are rough similarities, but those are very, very rough.Report
Except this is what is demonstrably untrue.
No cops, anywhere, are backing down in the face of armed black men.
White men, oh hell yeah. They treat us with effing kid gloves even when we are lying on a freeway overpass pointing a rifle at them.
But a black guy holding a toy gun? Shot on sight.Report
If I had to take a stab at what @jaybird is getting at, I’d say this…
When the police KNOW they are going up against someone who is armed and possibly willing to shoot officers and die in a hail of bullets, law enforcement is amazingly creative in how they arrest such people. They conduct careful recon, they use clever deceptions to put the target at ease or to get him to willingly disarm, etc. In short, when the police are facing the hard reality of being shot at, they are the model of restraint (see: Bundy standoff).Report
The obvious retort would be that the cops are diligent with very heavily armed groups which is true. They are reckless and violent in everyday interactions often claiming fear of people who are far less armed then the bundy’s. Then there is the whole race thing. When facing certain people who may be armed they send in bullets first. With other people they send words first.
Also daily cop/citizen interactions are with local cops. The bundy’s were dealing with state and fed cops who in my experience are often more professional, more well prepared and are planning how to do X well. Local cops are shooting people in their everyday work life without prep, planning or forethought. That seems like a big difference.Report
Lets imagine if the Bundys were black…
oh, wait, we don’t have to imagine…
Let The Fire BurnReport
Even local police can be restrained when the target is a known wild card.
What I am getting at, however, is the attitude of the police that they must deal with every interaction with shock and awe, and relatedly, assume every interaction can and will go pear shaped. When officers are calm, and restrained, everyone tends to live and the officers can make their arrests. It comes back to training, and the fact that departments focus too much on violence and not enough on de-escalation.Report
I agree. Cops need better training and rewards for deescalation. That is also why changing cops behavior is hard, it take lots of individual/ local decisions and pressure.
I’m trying, and mostly failing, to remember the story where a cop didn’t shoot a guy who seemed to have lost it but tried to deescalate him. A couple other cops rolled up and shot the guy. The first cop was fired for not shooting.Report
West Virginia, Stephen Mader. He recently won a suit against the department, or something.Report
@oscar-gordon
So… when their lives are in ACTUAL danger, they act with care, thought, and caution.
When their lives aren’t in actual danger, it’s John McClain time!Report
“Are there cases of racist cops encountering a black man armed with a gun and saying, “whoa, Bill, lets beat it- He has a gun!!””
No. Cases of racist cops encountering a black man lawfully armed with a gun and murdering him are common.Report
Carrying a gun pretty much gives the police the right to shoot you at will.Report
See also: Carrying a phone.
See also: Carrying a wallet.
The problem isn’t the gun. The problem is the cops.
Getting rid of the guns ain’t gonna fix the problem with the cops. Not even close.Report
Word.Report
If that were the case, it would have been like that all along.
It isn’t, it wasn’t, and it hasn’t.
There has been a sea change that occurred as something of an undertow (to continue the analogy).Report
“If that were the case, it would have been like that all along.
It isn’t, it wasn’t, and it hasn’t.”
Why? You’ve never heard of the phrase ‘shiny metallic object’? Or ‘throwdown gun’?
And that’s assuming that they even needed to offer a public justification. A decade or two ago, an old Detroit Free Press reporter described writing up a homicide article using a police report. He was in the police station, and they’d drop off a copy in his box.
The police officers were laughing, and he realized why when he got to ‘race of victim’ (‘Negro’). He said that he realized that he’d wasted his time, since the paper generally didn’t run any articles on black victims.Report
Maybe OT but Linda Brown of Brown vs. Board of Education has died at the age of 75. The struggle carries on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/obituaries/linda-brown-symbol-of-landmark-desegregation-case-dies.htmlReport
I will say this again, because it bears repeating:
From having actually parsed the data in compiling a research report, in any jurisdiction you look at, whites are slightly more likely to be killed by police than any other race, when adjusted for racial make-up of the jurisdiction. However, that increase (1.3% IIRC) is statistically insignificant.
The group most likely to be killed by police are those described as “mentally disturbed” or “mentally ill.” These account for anywhere from 30% to 50% of deaths by police in any jurisdiction.
If you were ever on Prozac (or any other similar medication) or Ritalin (or any other similar medication), your chances of being shot dead by the police skyrocket.
Being shot dead by the police is a legitimate form of treatment for all sorts of mental and emotional disorders these days.
The instances of contact with the police where blacks shoot off the charts is incidental harassment, i.e., police brutality that does not end in death. This is incredibly frequent, and often without any report or memo on the incident.
The focus on black deaths by police ignores two really big problems to focus on a minor one.
However, the underlying cause is unaccountability of public employees, and as long as the dialogue generated turns to this, some small progress might be made through the course of a massive misdirection.Report
@will-h
Does that data control for the specifics of the situation? Maybe that is too hard or too subjective, but I’d want to know how often the folks being shot are unarmed versus armed, demonstrate actual violence at the scene versus don’t.Report
The data doesn’t but the reports do, and that’s where the information on race is found.
Not many of the police shooting fatalities are armed, not many at all; something like 12%. Most of those armed had something not normally considered a weapon, such as a screwdriver or a hammer.
Again, this is only fatalities.
Brutality is directed against blacks way out of proportion to their ratio of the general population, but the black get getting the living tar whaled out of him is so common it isn’t even noteworthy enough to make the news.Report
I’m not sure that really gets at my question, in part because I think it was poorly framed.
While we’d all probably agree that the vast majority of police shootings/killings are a ‘disproportionate’ response to the situation at hand, I’m curious if they are more disproportionate for people of color versus whites.
If black guys get shot for reaching into their car to get the license they were asked to produce and white guys get shot only after rampaging through crowded sidewalks, than it isn’t enough to just say that white guys are slightly more likely to get shot.
But that may not be possible to determine analytically.Report
The reports do give some indication of that.
For example, the area I studied showed someone with a rifle at a state park who had already shot two people. Killed by the police.
Also, a grandmother calls the police to go check on her grandson she hadn’t heard from in a week. The grandson is described as “mentally disturbed.” The grandson had a screwdriver in his hand when the police arrived. Did not respond immediately to police request to drop the screwdriver (probably wondering what was going on). Killed by the police.
Those things are in the shooting reports, but, as you say, there is some subjective determinations to be made.
However, the obvious should not be overlooked simply on account that it requires two and two to be added together.Report
Unless blacks are far less violent than whites, it is enough. If the two are equal in violence then white guys being slightly more likely to get shot can’t be true if blacks are shot with less provocation. Counter intuitively, whites are shot with less provocation (or with more incompetence).
Big picture is the data suggests police view a police shooting as a life changing event, i.e. one with lots of negative consequences for themselves. So even a racist bully thinks it’s a bad idea and something to be avoided if there’s any other choice.
This means any policy which attempts to convince the police that police shootings is a bad idea will fail because they already believe that. This also means police racism is a different, separate, issue from police shootings.
This doesn’t make these various stories less outrageous, nor mean the system is working correctly, it just means the problem is broader than the press shows (meaning it extends to whites as well as blacks).
We have issues with the police interacting with the mentally ill. We have issues with police incompetence and incorrect and/or overly aggressive training. We have issues with the war on drugs.
And yes, we also have issues with the police being abusive short of murder, which is why BLM thinks death-by-cop is their issue rather than one for society in general.Report
This might be true, but the belief that it is a bad idea seems to pale when compared to the idea that a person, in the officers belief, might become violent or have the capability to be violent. So the department might understand that a shooting is bad, but enough officers appear to believe that even the slightest risk of getting hurt is way worse.
It’s the whole, ‘better to be judged by 12, than carried by 6’ mindset. Except they very rarely are every judged by 12, and when they are, the legal standard of ‘I feared for my life’, despite any reasonable supporting evidence, tends to win the day.
Hence policy can make a difference by actually enabling DAs to make sure every questionable case is judged by 12, by removing the ‘I feared for my life’ standard and enforcing the ‘reasonable person’ standard the rest of must face.Report
Even when they know the right thing to do, they can’t help but do the wrong thing.Report
Heartbreaking.Report
Curious how disobeying orders is typically handled and how it will be handled here.Report
The guy in charge, who was calmly issuing detailed orders on how to not kill her, was the one to pull the trigger. CNN reports “one of the officers on scene led the department’s hostage negotiation team until recently”, presumably the same guy.
Jensen’s body camera shows him calling over another officer in the aftermath: “OK, I shot. After this is done, we’re going to have to talk here.” As a female officer approaches, Jensen explains: “Yeah, I shot her. … She had a couple knives in her hands, approached us with the knives, yelling and screaming.
“Oh, I’m good. I mean, I don’t know what else we were going to do there,” Jensen tells another cop who asks him how he is doing. “I’m not happy. It absolutely sucks, but … I was stuck, you know?”Report
Hold up… this is interesting.
There are protests happening at the Sacramento Kings game. This is the second protest this week but the twitters seems to be announcing that the game is cancelled?
Moreover, that not only is the game cancelled but refunds are forthcoming?
Hrm. If the NBA might have more fertile soil than the NFL had…
This could turn interesting. BLM might have legs after all.Report
They’re trying to wins hearts and minds by shutting down (or taking hostage) sporting events?
That could easily backfire, “Fan” is short for “Fanatic”. I don’t see an obvious connection between pro-Basketball and police violence (or even general violence).Report
It *COULD* easily backfire… The NFL is a great example of it backfiring.
But the criticism of state violence is something that will usually be spun to have backfired by the bees that power.
As someone who thought that BLM was mostly dead, I’m interested that it is still moving. I guess we’ll see what happens when the NBA players themselves are asked to display solidarity.Report
Vivek Ranadivé , the Kings’ owner, has been very sympathetic to the protestors. Obviously, he doesn’t want his team’s games shut down, but he might be open to some compromise that avoids that.
Also, the Kings are 24-53. I’m sure many of the fans were glad not to have to watch them.Report
“This could turn interesting. BLM might have legs after all.”
Remember that this is something happening for centuries. The struggle has been long, and for every step forward, 90% of the time there’s a step back.Report
BLM is, among other things of course, a criticism of how Power conducts itself.
It’s inconvenient to Power. It’s in Power’s interest to turn it into a black thing. Let’s make it a fight about racism! Let’s make it a fight about privilege! Let’s make it an argument about anarchy!
When BLM shows up as being a very, very different kind of thing than the Parkland Protests?
I imagine that we’ll see journalism stories about it morph into negative coverage. Or just be starved of oxygen this time around.Report
Been chewing on all this for the past couple days now, and I just finished reading all the comments, and I have some thoughts coalescing on all this. I’m a few beers deep so bear with me if I’m not at my most articulate.
It seems to me that if you look at the history of policing in this country, especially over the last 150 years, and including stuff like the slave patrols of the antebellum South, the function of the police has never really been dealing with crime, per se, that’s more of a side effect than their actual function, which is keeping “those people” in “their” part of town. In the modern era we have the former idea of policing largely because of TV and film, but thanks to the Little Brother effect of omnipresent smartphones we’re finally being forced to confront that it’s actually the latter (I guess by we I mean white people since POCs have already known about this forever). I really hope that this actually causes change on all this but the cynical part of me thinks that the ironic effect of these videos becoming so commonplace is that we’ll become inured to it, like mass shootings and drone strikes. It’ll just get factored in by the country’s psyche, one more “cost of doing business.”Report
@zac-black
The modern idea of policing was really only developed in the late 19th Century – the basic principles were laid out by Sir Robert Peel.
This was significantly after the US became an independent state.Report
Peel is wholly irrelevant to the U.S.
Four models of policing in the United States:
1) The political model (which the feds are still in)
2) The professional model (see August Vollmer , Berkeley, Wickersham Commission)
3) The community policing model
4) The intelligence-led policing model
To cite Bobby Peel is, effectively, to declare oneself irrelevant.
Peel had not one thing, nor will ever have one thing, to do with the United States. Period.
The police in the U.S. are organized differently, i.e., they act on a differing grounds of authority, rendering Peel wholly irrelevant.
Referencing Peel = identifying oneself as a crackpot.Report
We can look to Peel for how it should be, but yes, Peel had minimal influence on US policing (the best that could be said is that community oriented policing is more in line with Peel).Report
@will-h James (who is coming at this from a non-American, not living in the US perspective) was referencing Peel as someone who has not had an influence on the US, specifically to cast doubt (in support of Zac’s thesis) that any American policing model is in any way modern.
Calling someone on this board a crackpot, particularly with insufficient understanding of what they were saying = a good way to get in trouble with the moderator.
Please don’t do it again.Report
@maribou I think you mis-read that.
I already know James K is a kiwi.
And I wasn’t calling him a crackpot. I wouldn’t do that anyway, even if I thought he was (which I don’t). If I actually thought he was a crackpot, then saying so wouldn’t do either of us any good, and I prefer to conserve my efforts for directions other than the inanely futile.
I was saying that bringing up Peel is a very effective way at getting marked as an unserious person when discussing police in the U.S.
The idea that might have been read as directed at a single person never occurred to me.
As far as I neglected to be specific enough to avoid being mis-read, I apologize.
EDIT: and that should have been directed toward @JamesK as well.Report
I’ve brought up Peel in reference to US policing. Specifically in the “it’s a pity American policing diverged from the British model before Peel.
That is, in fact, the most common context I see Peel referenced in US policing. That one problem is US policing was never influenced by Peel, and that Peelian principles were never adopted by the US. Because, you know, Peel was post-Revolutionary War.
Perhaps you should adjust your test for “unseriousness” on this subject, as you are marking people who agree with you that Peel had no influence on American policing as “unserious” due to not actually reading why they mention Peel.Report
I don’t think it was the timing of the Revolution so much as the timing of the establishment of police forces.Report
@will-h
Yes, that was my point – while its natural to think of the US as being any other anglosphere country, The US split off from Britain very early. This not only means the US had a lot more opportunity to diverge, it also means that its starting point for that divergence was a much less functional version of the UK than the point New Zealand, Australia or Canada diverged from.
I feel this explains some of what is wrong with the US government.Report
Also, as I understand, the rupture between the US and UK was much more abrupt and “complete”* than for the other three you mention.
I’m embarrassed to admit that while what you say makes perfect sense, I hadn’t thought about it in quite that way until hearing you say it.
*Not sure “complete” is the right word.Report
In many ways, this is true.
For example, it was rioting against an influx of immigrants from Ireland that brought about the establishment of what is typically considered the first modern police department in the U.S. Philadelphia was the first to hire day watchmen to supplement their night watch, but anti-Irish sentiment in Boston led to our first police department, and that was the model in the earliest of days.
Anti-immigrant sentiment also fueled one of the major factions of abolitionists, the Free Soilers, who were fine with bringing slaves in from the Caribbean, but insisted on manumission for the American-born.
I remember an early case where there was a contract that specified Bank of Illinois money, but when payment was made, it was clear that bank would soon fail (i.e., they were already paying state workers in scrip), and the seller insisted on Bank of St. Louis money.
England would have enabled the colonies to better deal with both issues, immigration and slavery, as well as the early banking crises that gripped the young nation.
The northern states had given up slavery due to either the Declaration of Independence or their new state Constitutions, and the last was New Jersey in 1804. That would have likely been delayed, but the issue of slavery in the south would have transitioned much more smoothly.
There were a lot of early cases in courts regarding land with unclear title, and many of these would likely have been avoided.
Negotiations with the Indian tribes would have been much different, and it is doubtful that removal would have occurred, or on such a broad scale.
OTOH, there were advances in law that the newly-founded U.S. saw that were considerably delayed in England and the Empire.
The U.S. did not hang people for bankruptcy, and this practice continued in England until the 1860’s.
A wave of court reform swept the nation in the early 19th century, and divorce was no longer the exclusive province of the legislature, but could be granted by a court. Indiana soon became the divorce capital of the U.S., due to the laxity of its laws.
I believe the issue of voting rights for the unlanded came up much earlier in the U.S.
But I do believe the positives would outweigh the negatives.
The issue of whether Peel should have influenced policing in the U.S. is a separate one, and I believe the answer is obvious.
However, it will never happen here, because of the extraordinary influence of public employee unions.
If you pick up any criminology textbook and turn to the part about organized crime, and read through to its causes, you will see something that strongly resembles current U.S. policy toward Hispanic immigrants and communities. It was calculated like that, because an increase in organized crime generates more jobs for law enforcement personnel, and that is what they lobby for.
Unionism might have ended up in a different place were there a longer stay with the Empire.Report
Oh I don’t know… there were tremendous economic and social forces at a local/state level driving this. There’s an argument it would have trumped any legal theory, treaty, or King sitting on a thrown on the other side of the sea.
The Supreme Court, even without English influence, ruled the Indians were a seperate nation and should be dealt with that way even before the Trail of Tears. If the President of the US wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the mighty state of Georgia, then I’m not sure what would have worked or what “worked” would have looked liked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._GeorgiaReport
It goes way deeper than policing. In fact, I would dare to say that most of what we would categorize as domestic policy is really about keeping certain people in certain places. Housing policy. The design and construction of transportation infrastructure. Zoning ordinances. The regulation of businesses and commercial practices. Immigration laws. Financial regulations. All of these areas are to a significant extent about keeping certain people in certain places.Report
” All of these areas are to a significant extent about keeping certain people in certain places.”
And a whole bunch of this stuff was set up and supports folks who can never be considered “politically right”, utterly destroying the claim that the “democrats” and the left side with the disenfranchised–they’re as racist and classest as they accuse the :”republicans” of being.Report
j r: “That’s a very good point, and it extends beyond the function of the police in important ways.”
Damon: “Hey Democrats! You SUCK!”Report
I call it like I see it.
I’ve lost count of the number of times “position” was claimed only to be disregarded when rubber meets the road, for both parties. Both parties suck and neither have their alleged constituents best interests in mind, nor do they represent them.Report
@stillwater That’s not actually what he said.
Should you wish to argue against what he actually said, there are far more incisive arguments to be made.
Did you feel personally insulted? I thought it was fairly clear he was talking about groups, not individuals. but perhaps I was mistaken.Report
I didn’t feel insulted at all. I thought it was hilarious.
Damon appears to agree with my paraphrase of his comment, fwtw.Report
@stillwater I’m glad you weren’t insulted. But I continue to see a pretty big gap between your paraphrase and both his original comment and his followup.Report
” I really hope that this actually causes change on all this but the cynical part of me thinks that the ironic effect of these videos becoming so commonplace is that we’ll become inured to it, like mass shootings and drone strikes. It’ll just get factored in by the country’s psyche, one more “cost of doing business.””
I think that it will make a difference, but it’s clear by now that half of the white population *likes* this, *wants* this, and will support this.
Look at the Sandy Hook massacre, for example. A bunch of white children get murdered, and the people who lie about it even happening are treated as perfectly respectable. Half of the white US population are willing to lay the lives of white middle-class children on the altar, let alone the lives of non-whites.Report
Interesting tweet here.
The site isn’t letting me imbed it but here’s the text if you don’t want to click on it:
A group of Black students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High called a press conference today to say they have concerns that may not mirror those of their white peers. And that the media should listen. #MSDStrong
As Popehat says, a greater police presence isn’t equally reassuring to everybody.Report
@jaybird Here’s a vice article covering the same press conference as well:
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/59j9va/black-students-marjory-stoneman-douglas-parkland-speak-out
And it links to a Facebook-posted 16 minute video of the young people in question speaking:
https://www.facebook.com/BlackLivesMatterAllianceBroward/videos/1605606709555313/
(I mention Facebook only b/c it’s still weird to my creaky old bones to be like “oh, I want a primary source… ” and then it’s something on Facebook.)Report
“The police presence at my school is not comforting,” Koerber, 17, said. “It’s intimidating. … My once safe, beautiful school now resembles a prison. We have police towers in front, military-grade entry and exit points, and now we have invited those who are infected with the disease of prejudice to protect us.”
I’d have included something like “we *HAD* a police presence! The coward refused to help the children being shot!” or something similar.
Not that I’m Monday Morning Quarterbacking or anything…Report
What gets me is that there is no precedent to ground a reasonable belief that further school shootings will occur at the same location.
I know of not one instance of repeated mass shootings occurring at any school.
The next one is going to happen somewhere else.
Meanwhile, it’s good OT for a handful of cops.
A lot safer than traffic stops, statistically.Report
Coming to a security theater near you.Report
“The next one is going to happen somewhere else.”
(warning – strong language used)
I remember after 9/11, when TSA was searching
white peopleHeartland AmericansReal Americans, rather than just Swarthy Forunners. TSA replied that they were assuming that the next attempt would take pains to *not* look stereotypical.ReportThis is the equiv of pretending that everyone could be a school shooter (in the name of fairness or equality or something) as an excuse to not focus on the multiple reports saying this specific guy was going to shoot up a school.
The AMAZING thing this time wasn’t that stopping him would have been hard, it’s that it would have been trivially easy. Minimal competence by any of a number of law enforcement would have done the job.
For that matter, if we need to get to damage mitigation after the shooting has started, maybe the police standing outside and waiting for him to get bored with killing people wasn’t the right move.Report
He was identifiable because of behavior, not demographics. That matters.Report
Fair point.Report
I’d like to see a good analysis on that, which tries to figure out just how many students would fit his profile *before* the murders.
For example, I’ve heard that torturing animals is a common factor in the history of most mass murderers (that P(TA|MM) is high). But I have not heard anything on the predictive power (i.e., how high is P(MM|TA)?).Report
@barry
Profile? Sure, let’s just look at that.
The first warning sent to the FBI was a copy of his posting on social media, under his real name, that he planned on being a school shooter. The second warning sent to the FBI was even more specific; Someone detailed his name, love of guns, various other disturbing behavior, stated plans, and expressly warned she thought he was serious and going to be a school shooter.
So during the months (years?) he was planning this he occasionally bragged about what he was going to do in public and at least two people turned him in. This is in addition to the four(ish) dozen 911 calls about him over the last decade (which is probably worse than it sounds). This is also ignoring the police cowering outside the school waiting for the shooting to stop before doing anything.
This wasn’t an unforeseeable event or even a surprise. Everyone expected him to do this!
This was the third mass murder in Florida in recent history, and ALL THREE of the shooters were well known to law enforcement as problems. The failure here seems to be “law enforcement not doing their job” and the solution probably lies there. Instead what the media is focusing on is crafting a policies which assume everyone is equally likely to become a shooter and/or trying to pass laws which will fail if the shooter ignores them.
To answer your question, I suspect the number of self identified future school shooters is very small, especially in combo with multiple warnings about that as a problem and also in combo with dozens of 911 calls for violence and other alarming behavior.Report
This man, despite literally SHOOTING at the police, was taken alive.
Stephon Clark, obviously, wasn’t.
Maybe the first guy just got lucky. That is the story we are always asked to believe. But it seems impossible to believe, given what we repeatedly see, given that the man above was given multiple opportunities to live, and Clark got no opportunities at all.Report
I really wish I could dig up the study, but I recall reading awhile back about pain medication and race. Specifically, that you found doctors tended to prescribe pain medications more readily to white patients than black, for people reporting the same level of pain.
Which fits into a number of other studies that show, for some reason, there’s this embedded belief (at least in America) that black people are, at least physically, slightly superhuman. All other things being equal, the average white person will simply assume a black person is strong, tougher, faster, more durable, and more dangerous than an identical white man. (Although not, I would note, smarter. Physically superhuman…)
It’s a pernicious little belief — a tiny thumb on the scale. And it’s not like you can call it “racism” — the unconscious, unquestioned little bit of cultural belief lodged in the back of your mind isn’t the same thing as shouting “Blacks are subhuman!” is it?
And yet…summed up over America, it’s got quite a toll in pain, suffering, and death.Report
I don’t think we should get upset about it when the cops do something right.
There are systemic problems-writ-large, and there are many (most of them fairly small) jurisdictions trying to deal with them.
While it’s easy to pick out the bad ones (and there are a lot of them) based on egregious error, the fact is that most departments are getting it right.Report
It’s not about being upset that the cops didn’t kill that guy, it’s about disarming the notion that the police had to resort to lethal force because they thought Clark had a gun. This is similar to a link I posted upthread about police who were trying to bring a woman with a knife into custody, and the person in charge of the scene had talked to all of his officers about how to bring her in by gradually escalating force, and then when she appeared with a knife, the guy in charge shot her.
Clearly there are tactics and strategies for dealing with armed men and women in a non-lethal fashion that police are not using.Report
Links are always appreciated.
Of note:
Officer was working alone.
Person immediately took an aggressive and belligerent attitude.
Person repeatedly ignored officers commands.
Person clearly had a firearm (daylight hours, easy to see that is a firearm).
Person clearly intended to shoot (shooting stance).
Person did actually shoot at the officer (after he’d been hit at least once).
I mean, this is as text book a case as it gets. Plenty of warning things were gonna go sideways, and it was easy to identify the threat accurately.Report
Yeah, the problem isn’t that officers occasionally have to shoot people. It’s how often they’re shooting people, how incredibly thin the justifications are for quite a few of the shootings, and oh yeah it turns out that they seem to habitually lie about it a lot.
Which wouldn’t surprise a whole lot of people, but now that they’re getting caught on camera more and more — it’s surprising the oblivious suburbanites who deal with friendly cops that won’t light you up for holding a cell phone.Report
No, Clark was the one who beat the odds, not the first guy. Comparing Clark to anyone else is like complaining other people win the lottery no matter how many tickets you buy.
There are 1.1 million active cops in the US. 10 encounters per cop with a civilian per day suggests something like 3.7 Billion encounters per year. That’s a lot of lottery tickets.
The police killed less than a 1000 people last year total, in all situations. Assuming all police shootings are bad seems laughable, so what do we want to say, 10%? That’s a 90 bad shootings… but it still might make Clark the worst this week, or month, and maybe one of the top 10 this year.Report
That BANG you just heard was a SCOTUS gavel putting another nail in the coffin of the 4th amendment (and any related police reform via the courts).Report
According to the Volokh folks, it may be even worse than it seems: http://reason.com/volokh/2018/04/02/the-supreme-courts-continuing-immunity-cReport
If you think it’s worse than it seems, you haven’t been paying attention.
Courts devoted to adjudicating the unaccountability of government was the sea change I was referring to up-thread.
The problem is not one of the police anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time.
The problem is more one of being without functional courts.
FWIW, I just gave a presentation on Coke’s jurisprudence 1610 – 1616, with an overview of the Petition of Right that came up with reference to one of our Amendments in the Bill of Rights in the Q&A session that followed.
The need for that very same Petition of Right is ever-present with us today. Now.
And I can tell you where that leads to: The period from 1641 – 1649.Report
@oscar-gordon Ugh. I have my differences with Sotomayor from time to time, but I’m glad she wrote the dissent for this one.
“The majority today exacerbates that troubling asymmetry. Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished. Because there is nothing right or just under the law about this, I respectfully dissent. “Report
Personally, if it had gone to trial, I think the officer probably would have won (she was holding a knife and ignored his very reasonable command to drop it), but I really do not like that the Court is so willing to prevent the case from being heard by a jury in the first place.Report
@oscar-gordon I dunno. Reading the majority and the dissent was surreal because they sounded like they were describing two completely different scenarios, to the point where I don’t know which one is accurate …. which to me is exactly why we have full-blown jury trials in the first place (as you say, not letting it be heard is the worst part).Report
Exactly, two competing narratives means it goes to trial.Report
Or one of them is simply wrong and trying to score political points.Report
One of the things that stands out here is the ruling was 7-2, and last I checked we had 4 liberals on the Court.
What is the split here if it’s not liberal v conservative?Report
Actually, no. The court didn’t vote. Perhaps Br. Likko could refresh our memories, but I think only 4 judges are needed to kick a case back. In this case, 2 judges choose to publish a written dissent, but we have no idea how the remaining 3 felt about it.Report
Sotomayor was an ADA; Roberts was a political operative. No surprise one understands the facts here and one does not.Report
Qualified immunity attaches when an official’s conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.
This is one hell of an umbrella. What is that? Three weasel words?Report