Except we aren’t terribly interested in actually preventing such events but in getting a greater measure of accountability.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I think "Accountability" is a problem, but it's a bit player in the grand scheme of things and I doubt fixing it will change much.
The narrative is "stop shooting us" with Mike Brown as the poster child. But I don't see how an increase in "accountability" makes Brown's family happy; They're never going to believe their innocent child caused his own death.
IMHO it's "such events" which are the problem, and fixing them has much to do with what happened before the encounter with the police and little to do with what happens afterwards.
They’re gonna get sweetheart deals from... the new Secretary of Treasury, Trump can’t retaliate,
The new SoT is Steven Mnuchin, aka Trump's long time friend and the head of finance for his campaign. Steven's boss will be Trump (the guy who hired him and who can fire him).
The whole "can't retaliate" part seems really optimistic.
Being people who interact with potentially violent people on a regular basis only gets you part of the way there.
Given we're looking at less than 0.01% (a lot less since many of those deaths are presumably forced), "part of the way there" may be enough.
My assumption is police work is a lot harder and more subject to chance than me driving a car around. So what are my daily chances of getting into a car accident? Something less than 0.01%?
I'm can manage the radio, winter roads, the occasional idiot, life-before-coffee, unexpected construction, and so forth. I can even handle all of those things at the same time... but now we're getting into risk, and even though I "control myself" and even though I don't want to wreck my car, we call it "risk" because there's an element of chance.
There are things we can do to reduce risk, there are things we should do, the odds are already so low that it's not going to make a big difference.
Maybe. I'm seriously doubtful of basically giving cops a 007 style license to kill. On the other hand I thought the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commision seemed better than the alternatives.
There's no chance in human interactions? Really? A pick up line either works 100% of the time or it never works?
One cop chooses to pull the trigger. One doesn’t. Who’s right? The answer *can’t* be both. Not if we are applying the same standards to both situations.
I used to train in the local dojo. It's master has a large number of belts in multiple forms. He can hurt you with one finger, and know when he does it how long it should last. Put him up against even a high Mike Brown and I'm sure Brown gets hurt but survives.
So... because I know a guy who could trivially control Mike, does that mean the Ferguson cop was wrong to pull the trigger?
The cops are all different from each other and the situations are different too. Amount of light, backup, experience, fatigue, history, and yes, whether or not the other guy has done the wrong things in the wrong order. High isn't the same as "violently high", hands out of sight for a moment is very different from out of sight for three and you think he's pulling a gun.
Cops don't control who they run into, so they have to make judgements on their own risk. When you put your hands out of their line of sight you're imposing risk on them, if you're in an area where twice in the last week that type of action ended up with a gun in hand, then their view of the amount of risk you're putting on them will increase (that's a 'history' example).
No one is able to put all of these factors together and try to come up with one permanent formula which is going to describe when they get to pull the trigger and when they don't. Trying to pretend otherwise seems nonsensical, as does trying to pretend that video showed all the information they had at hand.
So *yes*, the answer is *both*, even with the same standards in the same situation. The real world isn't a chess game, it's not even poker.
What we want is whatever comes after... "I screwed up. This could have been avoided if I'd..."
Thing is that probably turns a good shoot into a bad one.
In practice we're already pretty close to no fault, maybe we should just make it explicit and try to learn from these things? (I seriously don't know about this one).
So, we have very, very, very similar situations with very, very, very different responses. I’m wondering how *both* responses can be justified.
You buy a lottery ticket, normally what happens is nothing, but sometimes you get a very, very, very different outcome. *Both* outcomes are "justified", that only the common one is expected doesn't change that the uncommon one is possible.
Life is full of situations like that. Drunk driving normally doesn't kill anyone. Every act of sex doesn't result in pregnancy (nor AIDS even with the right conditions).
Even at the extremes, Mike Brown attacked a cop. He could have ended up beaten, pistol whipped, or tasered instead of dead, any of those outcomes would be "justified". It's also possible that if he hadn't been put down he would have just beaten up the cop and not killed him.
However Mike "purchased" lots and lots of lottery tickets, to the point where the expected outcome was extreme.
And while we're on this analogy, the real question we should be asking is whether being black affects the outcome of the lottery, or whether it's purely the number of tickets you buy.
American banks are unlikely to change their minds, because he’s still a bad risk and the sorts of leverage they can exert over him lessened with his assumption of office.
He's got a gun to their heads. The banking sector is heavily regulated and what those regulations are is subject to opinion, and the opinion that matters is a guy appointed by Trump.
These companies need the goodwill of politicians in order to exist. They're the same people who have enriched the Clintons by dozens of millions of dollars, doing the same for Trump is a no-brainer.
“Hey, have you stopped beating your wife yet? Hmmm? I’m not seeing any innocent explanations here, pal …”
If she's covered with blood and stab wounds and you're holding a knife, there actually *are* innocent explanations.
This is....
1) Unethical people give HRC+crew money.
2) Unethical people get serious favors/access to HRC's power as SoS.
3) There doesn't seem to be a reason for the 2nd event other than the first.
It's OK though, I'm sure that when she was accepting that money and doing those unusual favors, she wasn't doing anything that was provably criminal.
So apparently in your book, that makes her a total innocent... and as luck would have it, we're probably going to see Trump do the same thing.
Where is your qualifier that it only applies where police power is ineffective or impractical coming from?
Thus far observation. Part of this might be "cost effectiveness", but using Drones to kill people in Canada would be an act of war.
It'd be announcing to the world that Canada doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force in their own country. That's basically the definition of a failed government and/or civil war.
Moreover, what makes a given place a battlefield?
Unfortunately AQ gets a vote on that one. In practice it's anywhere where AQ has set up shop and they're too strong to be handled by the police.
Police don’t have any power over Snowden or Assange.
Yeah, actually they do, just not *our* police.
Snowden and Assange are subject to the laws of the land where they are and the government who controls that land. Russia doesn't need an army to deal with Snowden, their normal claim of monopoly on the use of force would work just fine.
Unfortunately, liberals have determined that Ivanka’s 6-week paid leave plan is just plain old insulting.
Was it Ted Kennedy who used to talk about having a chance to vote for something like Universal Health Care back in the 70's(?) but voted against it because they could do better?
The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of upper management.
So he would need to get new loans…and no one will loan him or his company money.
What's it worth to you?
Forbes thinks he's worth 4 Billion (he claims 10), would clean government be worth the taxpayers buying him out for that? Presumably then we spend years breaking it apart and selling it piece-meal (like the TARP).
Asserting that the AUMF allows the president to unilaterally decide that any person, anywhere in the world is a member of Al-Qaeda or affiliated groups without any sort of judicial process, then dropping a bomb on their house is “the usual rules?”
Hardly "anywhere in the world", more like "any battlefield in the world where the police have no power".
What was the "judicial process" when we bombed Saddam's house during the gulf war? When we sent a snuff squad in to kill Bin Laden? Or if you want to be really nasty, when we firebombed Tokyo during WW2?
Do we just know that she’s sane and stable relative to her father?
That seems a pretty low bar.
What we have is a total lack of meltdowns, a lot of public poise, some jobs not under the thumb of her father, relationships with functional people, and the words of Chelsea Clinton.
The First Lady's job is to advise her husband. She herself can't be fired. Often she's one of her husband's closest advisors. Except with Trump, that's his daughter. His daughter has his brains, his wife does not. His daughter is a big time advisor, his wife is not.
And I don't care. I wouldn't care if Trump wanted to have one of his sons take over that office.
We, the American people, are best off with more voices of sanity/stability talking to Trump, not fewer. Given his daughter is one of the big ones in Trump's life, I think that benefit far outweighs any downsides from potential conflicts of interest.
This is playing Trump's game and you'd lose by stepping into that ring. Focus on some outrageous thing Trump has said regarding sex and you're just letting him distract you from what he's actually doing.
You're not going to embarrass him, all you're going to do is spend your own resources (money, time, outrage) uselessly.
Kazzy:
Floyd performed the following actions, all of which have been used to justify police shootings:
Think of what Floyd did as drunk driving. What chance does the typical drunk drive have of killing someone? 1%? Probably a lot less? You can get so drunk that it's impossible for you to drive without killing yourself so the odds increase (even all the way to 100%), but that's mostly a different problem.
What Floyd did with those cops was risky, but odds were still heavily stacked in his favor that it'd be fine.
However I think you're trying to represent his behavior as potentially-risk-free-if-we-educate-the-cops (if he can do it then everyone should be able to always do it), and that seems as nonsensical as claiming that if one drunk drive doesn't cause a problem then society should be fine with it.
The point is within a rounding error, 100% of arrests don't result in anyone dying. More than 99.99% are fine, what happened here is not only what should happen but what typically does.
When a situation escalates into a shooting, have the officers involved write a description of why it went that way and things they could have done to prevent it. Circulate these in the department, so other cops can learn from them.
Not a bad idea... but the implication is we move to "no fault" as a way to deal with shootings.
If you want absolute truth and people to learn, then you can't punish them for telling it.
Number of Drunk Driving arrests per year, 1.5 million (google). That's 4109 per day.
Number of people killed by the police so far this year: 940 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ )
Number of arrests for drugs in 2015: 1,488,707
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Crime#sthash.723ECB3F.dpbs
Number of arrests (for anything) in 2012: 12,197,000
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2014/aug/29/edward-flynn/fatal-police-shootings-occur-tiny-percentage-arres/
Number of murders in the US in 2015: 15,399 (google quoting the NYT quoting the FBI).
To those paying attention, false accusations say more about the accuser than the accused. Unfortunately, so few people do.
False? Marc Rich's wife really did give more than a Million dollars to the Clintons (mostly HRC's senate campaign fund), and then Bill really did ignore all sorts of standards to give Marc a pardon. And since there's no bill of sale or other signed contract between the four of them, apparently this doesn't quite rise to the level of "provably criminal".
There's no reason to pardon him other than the money, but the legal system can't prove an actual transaction... and that's apparently the ethical standard the Clintons use.
That the Clinton' actions aren't "provably criminal" doesn't mean the accusations are "false", and we could do this dance on multiple other ethical adventures they've been on. But I don't see the point as long as you're going to insist there is no difference between "not provably criminal" and "innocent".
AFAICT, most politicians don't insist on living this close to the edge, the only other one I can think of who does is Trump.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Give This Man a Promotion”
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I think "Accountability" is a problem, but it's a bit player in the grand scheme of things and I doubt fixing it will change much.
The narrative is "stop shooting us" with Mike Brown as the poster child. But I don't see how an increase in "accountability" makes Brown's family happy; They're never going to believe their innocent child caused his own death.
IMHO it's "such events" which are the problem, and fixing them has much to do with what happened before the encounter with the police and little to do with what happens afterwards.
On “First Spouse Problems”
The new SoT is Steven Mnuchin, aka Trump's long time friend and the head of finance for his campaign. Steven's boss will be Trump (the guy who hired him and who can fire him).
The whole "can't retaliate" part seems really optimistic.
On “Give This Man a Promotion”
Given we're looking at less than 0.01% (a lot less since many of those deaths are presumably forced), "part of the way there" may be enough.
My assumption is police work is a lot harder and more subject to chance than me driving a car around. So what are my daily chances of getting into a car accident? Something less than 0.01%?
I'm can manage the radio, winter roads, the occasional idiot, life-before-coffee, unexpected construction, and so forth. I can even handle all of those things at the same time... but now we're getting into risk, and even though I "control myself" and even though I don't want to wreck my car, we call it "risk" because there's an element of chance.
There are things we can do to reduce risk, there are things we should do, the odds are already so low that it's not going to make a big difference.
On “First Spouse Problems”
I think they're much more skilled at bribery. Ideally the pols write laws so that it's even legal.
On “Give This Man a Promotion”
Maybe. I'm seriously doubtful of basically giving cops a 007 style license to kill. On the other hand I thought the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commision seemed better than the alternatives.
"
There's no chance in human interactions? Really? A pick up line either works 100% of the time or it never works?
I used to train in the local dojo. It's master has a large number of belts in multiple forms. He can hurt you with one finger, and know when he does it how long it should last. Put him up against even a high Mike Brown and I'm sure Brown gets hurt but survives.
So... because I know a guy who could trivially control Mike, does that mean the Ferguson cop was wrong to pull the trigger?
The cops are all different from each other and the situations are different too. Amount of light, backup, experience, fatigue, history, and yes, whether or not the other guy has done the wrong things in the wrong order. High isn't the same as "violently high", hands out of sight for a moment is very different from out of sight for three and you think he's pulling a gun.
Cops don't control who they run into, so they have to make judgements on their own risk. When you put your hands out of their line of sight you're imposing risk on them, if you're in an area where twice in the last week that type of action ended up with a gun in hand, then their view of the amount of risk you're putting on them will increase (that's a 'history' example).
No one is able to put all of these factors together and try to come up with one permanent formula which is going to describe when they get to pull the trigger and when they don't. Trying to pretend otherwise seems nonsensical, as does trying to pretend that video showed all the information they had at hand.
So *yes*, the answer is *both*, even with the same standards in the same situation. The real world isn't a chess game, it's not even poker.
"
What we want is whatever comes after... "I screwed up. This could have been avoided if I'd..."
Thing is that probably turns a good shoot into a bad one.
In practice we're already pretty close to no fault, maybe we should just make it explicit and try to learn from these things? (I seriously don't know about this one).
"
You buy a lottery ticket, normally what happens is nothing, but sometimes you get a very, very, very different outcome. *Both* outcomes are "justified", that only the common one is expected doesn't change that the uncommon one is possible.
Life is full of situations like that. Drunk driving normally doesn't kill anyone. Every act of sex doesn't result in pregnancy (nor AIDS even with the right conditions).
Even at the extremes, Mike Brown attacked a cop. He could have ended up beaten, pistol whipped, or tasered instead of dead, any of those outcomes would be "justified". It's also possible that if he hadn't been put down he would have just beaten up the cop and not killed him.
However Mike "purchased" lots and lots of lottery tickets, to the point where the expected outcome was extreme.
And while we're on this analogy, the real question we should be asking is whether being black affects the outcome of the lottery, or whether it's purely the number of tickets you buy.
On “First Spouse Problems”
He's got a gun to their heads. The banking sector is heavily regulated and what those regulations are is subject to opinion, and the opinion that matters is a guy appointed by Trump.
These companies need the goodwill of politicians in order to exist. They're the same people who have enriched the Clintons by dozens of millions of dollars, doing the same for Trump is a no-brainer.
On “Impeach Barack Obama”
If she's covered with blood and stab wounds and you're holding a knife, there actually *are* innocent explanations.
This is....
1) Unethical people give HRC+crew money.
2) Unethical people get serious favors/access to HRC's power as SoS.
3) There doesn't seem to be a reason for the 2nd event other than the first.
It's OK though, I'm sure that when she was accepting that money and doing those unusual favors, she wasn't doing anything that was provably criminal.
So apparently in your book, that makes her a total innocent... and as luck would have it, we're probably going to see Trump do the same thing.
"
Thus far observation. Part of this might be "cost effectiveness", but using Drones to kill people in Canada would be an act of war.
It'd be announcing to the world that Canada doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force in their own country. That's basically the definition of a failed government and/or civil war.
Unfortunately AQ gets a vote on that one. In practice it's anywhere where AQ has set up shop and they're too strong to be handled by the police.
"
Yeah, actually they do, just not *our* police.
Snowden and Assange are subject to the laws of the land where they are and the government who controls that land. Russia doesn't need an army to deal with Snowden, their normal claim of monopoly on the use of force would work just fine.
On “First Spouse Problems”
Was it Ted Kennedy who used to talk about having a chance to vote for something like Universal Health Care back in the 70's(?) but voted against it because they could do better?
The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of upper management.
"
Maybe. But time itself speeds up as you get older so it's probably that.
"
What's it worth to you?
Forbes thinks he's worth 4 Billion (he claims 10), would clean government be worth the taxpayers buying him out for that? Presumably then we spend years breaking it apart and selling it piece-meal (like the TARP).
On “Impeach Barack Obama”
Hardly "anywhere in the world", more like "any battlefield in the world where the police have no power".
What was the "judicial process" when we bombed Saddam's house during the gulf war? When we sent a snuff squad in to kill Bin Laden? Or if you want to be really nasty, when we firebombed Tokyo during WW2?
On “First Spouse Problems”
That seems a pretty low bar.
What we have is a total lack of meltdowns, a lot of public poise, some jobs not under the thumb of her father, relationships with functional people, and the words of Chelsea Clinton.
So... not perfect but way better than nothing.
"
The First Lady's job is to advise her husband. She herself can't be fired. Often she's one of her husband's closest advisors. Except with Trump, that's his daughter. His daughter has his brains, his wife does not. His daughter is a big time advisor, his wife is not.
And I don't care. I wouldn't care if Trump wanted to have one of his sons take over that office.
We, the American people, are best off with more voices of sanity/stability talking to Trump, not fewer. Given his daughter is one of the big ones in Trump's life, I think that benefit far outweighs any downsides from potential conflicts of interest.
"
This is playing Trump's game and you'd lose by stepping into that ring. Focus on some outrageous thing Trump has said regarding sex and you're just letting him distract you from what he's actually doing.
You're not going to embarrass him, all you're going to do is spend your own resources (money, time, outrage) uselessly.
On “Give This Man a Promotion”
Think of what Floyd did as drunk driving. What chance does the typical drunk drive have of killing someone? 1%? Probably a lot less? You can get so drunk that it's impossible for you to drive without killing yourself so the odds increase (even all the way to 100%), but that's mostly a different problem.
What Floyd did with those cops was risky, but odds were still heavily stacked in his favor that it'd be fine.
However I think you're trying to represent his behavior as potentially-risk-free-if-we-educate-the-cops (if he can do it then everyone should be able to always do it), and that seems as nonsensical as claiming that if one drunk drive doesn't cause a problem then society should be fine with it.
"
How does the 1% know who they are?
"
The point is within a rounding error, 100% of arrests don't result in anyone dying. More than 99.99% are fine, what happened here is not only what should happen but what typically does.
"
Not a bad idea... but the implication is we move to "no fault" as a way to deal with shootings.
If you want absolute truth and people to learn, then you can't punish them for telling it.
"
Number of Drunk Driving arrests per year, 1.5 million (google). That's 4109 per day.
Number of people killed by the police so far this year: 940 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ )
Number of arrests for drugs in 2015: 1,488,707
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Crime#sthash.723ECB3F.dpbs
Number of arrests (for anything) in 2012: 12,197,000
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2014/aug/29/edward-flynn/fatal-police-shootings-occur-tiny-percentage-arres/
Number of murders in the US in 2015: 15,399 (google quoting the NYT quoting the FBI).
On “The Electoral College Option”
False? Marc Rich's wife really did give more than a Million dollars to the Clintons (mostly HRC's senate campaign fund), and then Bill really did ignore all sorts of standards to give Marc a pardon. And since there's no bill of sale or other signed contract between the four of them, apparently this doesn't quite rise to the level of "provably criminal".
There's no reason to pardon him other than the money, but the legal system can't prove an actual transaction... and that's apparently the ethical standard the Clintons use.
That the Clinton' actions aren't "provably criminal" doesn't mean the accusations are "false", and we could do this dance on multiple other ethical adventures they've been on. But I don't see the point as long as you're going to insist there is no difference between "not provably criminal" and "innocent".
AFAICT, most politicians don't insist on living this close to the edge, the only other one I can think of who does is Trump.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.