Someone is telepathic. This is exactly what the GOP leaders are thinking.

Very well said, and agreed.

I suspect a white Mike Brown would still have been shot. Does anyone have any stats on Class vs. Race for these things?

I like how the problem of white people in positions of power and authority treating black people with disrespect and brutality seems to always be presented as some sort of mystifying puzzle, some sort of intractable riddle for the ages.

It is as simple as….white people need to behave better and stop treating black folks like second class citizens.

IMHO changing the skin color of the police wouldn't change much (witness Baltimore).

Do you think law enforcement is going to be more effective in a community where people are afraid to call the cops because they think, if they do, they’re likely to be shot, or beaten, or just hauled off to jail for no good reason?

How about if the people in that community know for a fact (correctly) that the criminal class *will* *kill* *them* if they trust the police? That the police simply can not protect them?

Would there be less criminality on Wall Street if the FBI were to gun down a few bankers in their offices?

Whatever method Wall Street uses to train wreck the economy is normally *legal* at the time.

The solution isn't more complex laws or an all powerful regulator, the solution is to make them eat their losses.

Bailing out banks is less damaging to the economy than not bailing them out, so fine, bail them out, but fire the top two or three layers of management with no golden parachutes and claw back their last X years of bonuses.

Don Zeko: Again, this isn’t just about saving the lives of x people per year. if that was all we cared about, we’d lower speed limits...

A very good example. We are willing to tolerate a certain number of dead people per year because the cure is worse than the disease.

Any policy we choose is going to have certain costs and benefits. It is very possible to make things worse in the name of making things better, especially when dealing with complex social issues and the gov.

That's not a reason to do *nothing*, but it is something to keep in mind as we go forward.

trizzlor:
So we’re all on the same page, here’s a sample BLM agenda:

which of these points do you think will make community-police relationships worse?

That list is a lot saner and more defined than I was expecting, Thank you.

IMHO some of those are clearly good on the face of them, body cams, training, end profit.

Demilitarization is going to be good in most situations (the problem with having a really cool swat team is they need things to do).

"Fair Contract" is itself a laundry list of subitems, some of which I think are fine, a few of which aren't (releasing faces/names seems like a call for the lynch mob).

I get nervous that some of these are going to have unintended consequences. Something to keep in mind is that, if we assume ALL police created deaths was un-needed, then it was about 10% of the total (roughly 14.5k murders, the police killed roughly 1.1k). If we assume that 90% of police created deaths were needed, then the police are roughly 1% of the total.

When we reform the police, we should be deeply concerned that we're reducing the 1% at the expense of increasing the 99%. The police have to obey rules, criminals don't, how some of this plays out in practice may not follow the desired script.

Dark Matter: Two high-on-drugs criminals…

That but right there tells me most everyone that I need to know about @dark-matter’s credibility on these issues.

I'll interpret that as a request for sources. Links at the bottom. I'm reading from wiki and the DOJ report as I'm writing this. If you want to dispute what I'm saying I suggest you do the same.

RE: Criminals
Dorian Johnson (Brown's friend)
wiki used to do a better job at detailing his criminal record but whatever.

"...arrested for lying to cops three years ago and currently has an outstanding arrest warrant..."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2732122/Revealed-Key-Michael-Brown-shooting-witness-Dorian-Johnson-arrest-warrant-theft-busted-lying-cops.html
"An ABC News affiliate in St. Louis reported that Johnson is wanted in Jefferson City, Mo., on a 2011 theft charge and also for filing a false police report that same year."
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/dorian-johnson-the-boy-who-cried-wolf/
And he was in the papers the following year for being arrested on drug charges.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/dorian-johnson-figure-in-michael-brown-case-arrested-in-st/article_578b535b-bfb3-5216-8fa7-ee7e53f0a3f9.html

Mike Brown
"...at approximately 11:53 a.m., Brown stole several packages of cigarillos. As captured on the store’s surveillance video, when the store clerk tried to stop Brown, Brown used his physical size to stand over him and forcefully shove him away. As a result, an FPD dispatch call went out over the police radio for a “stealing in progress.” " (DOJ page 6)
BTW this was at 11:53 a.m. His encounter with the cop was at 12:01 and his death was at 12:03.

RE: High
According to Dorian Johnson, the entire point of going to the store was to get cigarillos so they could smoke marijuana.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/14/justice/ferguson-dorian-johnson-statements/

A toxicology test performed by a St. Louis University laboratory revealed the presence of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in Brown's blood and urine. The presence of THC indicates that Brown had used marijuana within a few hours of his death, but it could not be determined whether or not Brown was impaired at the time of his death.[81] (wiki)

Notice this is VASTLY different that other cases where they claim the level of THC was too low to affect him. Notice also the number of times Brown's actions simply make zero sense.

1) He has a bright future but he uses force to steal something cheap from a store.
2) He then walks down the middle of the street obstructing traffic until the police arrive.
3) He attacks the cop, apparently without provocation, and tries to get his gun.
-) He gets shot, runs away (this is fine).
4) He turns around and charges him.
5,6,7) The cop fires three volleys of shots at him, after every volley Brown pauses and then charges again.
The bullet which kills him is the last one, so by that time he's been shot multiple times and *still* decides that charging the gun is a good idea.
(multiple witnesses in wiki plus the audio recording of the shots).

On a personal note, I knew a guy in college who, when high on weed, not only got stupid but stupidly violent. Brown's actions simply make no sense unless "because he was high" is the answer.

https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown

DavidTC: Erm, this is the cattle future market. Last I checked, the fees there were pretty damn low for heavy investors.

A thousand dollars isn't a "heavy investor". The minimum amount you were supposed to have was $12k.

DavidTC: His *return* doesn’t have anything to do with what *percentage* of his trades are profitable. 100% of his trades might be 17% profitable, or 99.999% of them might be slightly unprofitable and that last single trade is 100000% profitable.

Absolutely right. If you want apples to apples he has a return of 17% and she had 6000%.

DavidTC: Oh, so it’s not even two-thirds.

Absolutely perfect, with no loses ever, would be 100%, she's scary close to the theoretical perfect.

DavidTC: And, not to be too blunt about it, but people didn’t understand probability. I don’t trust anyone who quotes odds without actually seeing the math. People *talking about* a model I can’t even see the results of, on data I have no access to?

People don't understand probability? The fluff newspapers were her backers, the stats you're ragging on were by economists from the University of North Florida and Auburn University published in the Journal of Economics and Finance. That's over and above the editor of the Journal of Futures Markets who said something similar without the stats (he compared what she did to buying a pair of ice skates and then winning the olympics the next day).

The people who are in the trade understand numbers like these are simply impossible. You're trying to justify a 6000% profit and claim somehow that it's "normal" or not unusual.

If that paper is off by 5 orders of magnitude, then we're looking at a politician's wife literally winning the lottery (how often has that happened), when the lottery was being run by someone actively being helped by her husband. If they're not wrong about the odds then it's more like she's winning the lottery consistently.

DavidTC: For example, it’s not the least bit unlikely for someone to win the lottery, despite what you seem to think. People win the lottery literally every day.

If the lottery were consistently won by the wife of the guy running it, it'd be a problem. This was a business who was actively being helped by her husband, and the broker's office is now known for this sort of thing.

Further, these are *scary* risks she was taking. The expected result was not only the loss of her money, but that she'd actually owe multiple years worth of income. If she'd lost $100k, how would she have paid it back and what would that have done to her and her husband's careers?

Imagine the governor declaring bankruptcy because his wife was betting on the cattle futures market. Is that really a good risk for a pair of really smart people?

DavidTC: No, meaning if you held anything long enough, and managed to sell it at the right place, it will eventually make you money.

That is the trick. If it were easy I'd still be doing it. 3/4 of the people who do what she did lose money. The odds are *that* bad.

DavidTC: I find this a weird discussion. I mean, you’re the one asserting that she *did* that, and it was mysterious. Why am I having to explain it actually happens? It clearly does happen, or, uh, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

So you're good with a politician's wife pulling in a 6000% profit under conditions multiple experts claim are somewhere between shockingly unlikely and impossible, while dealing with someone being helped by her husband?

DavidTC: ignoring the fact the market dropped pretty seriously from the start of May 1979
Let's just post what came up in court when that brokerage was investigated in a other matter (wiki).

Two brokers at Springdale, Bill McCurdy and Steven Johns, testifying about another trader's case, said they participated in a cover-up of block trading on a day in June 1979 that happens to coincide with the opening of what would become Rodham's single most profitable trade.[8]

I might buy that if we were just talking about homicides, but that’s part of a larger pattern and perception that black folks have of being unfairly hassled, roughed up, etc by the cops.

The police functioning to raise money for city hall is a serious problem. This is an example of the police 'creating' problems.

But a lot of that perception is simply the result of other problems. I'm not sure what, short of ending the war on drugs, we should do. The carnage that is Black on Black crime suggests a much higher level of police involvement just as a matter of course.

We could certainly reduce police involvement in Black areas... say, impose quotes for who they can arrest, but that would quickly become something like investigating a black's murder only if we've recently investigated a white's murder (and yes, imho this is just as insane as it sounds).

Besides, how many unjustified and unpunished shootings of innocent civilians by cops is too many? As with wrongful criminal convictions, even a quite small number still ought to be a cause for serious concern.

If you want to get it down to zero, then we probably need to get rid of the police and live with it being "Lord of the Flies".

There are other models we could try, perhaps even on a 'one city' level. Say moving to the medical 'review what happened without punishment' idea.

Let’s come back to this. The DOJ report had no eyewitness accounts of how the conflict escalated from (a) two kids walking in the street to (b) struggle in the car and gun goes off – the most important component of the case; they have conflicting accounts of whether Brown was surrendering, bowing, or advancing and no forensic evidence to support either;

1)kids? Two high-on-drugs criminals who had just pulled a robbery and then engaged in behavior which drew the attention of the police. Brown was 290lbs.
2) The forensic evidence says Brown was advancing, as do the witnesses who agree with each other. The ones who dispute that all disagree with both the physical evidence and each other.

When you break down the witness testimony into details it gets very one sided. Disputing witnesses admit they weren't there, disputing witnesses change their story several times, give conflicting stories, etc. The ones who support what the cop said also agree with each other. The wiki shows some of them, I've seen others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown#Shooting_scene_evidence
http://i.imgur.com/eNdviOl.png

If our system started with a presumption of guilt and required proof of innocence, the cop would have easily proved himself innocent.

Having said that, yes, absolutely, the police were functioning as a revenue generating service by giving out tickets; this was a much bigger problem for the poor than the rich for multiple reasons. And there's a strong argument that that led to the community simply not believing that it'd been a good shooting.

Some things do more harm to the underlying social order than their pure body count would indicate, and wrongful use of force by armed agents of the law that is essentially never punished certainly qualifies.

I think the numbers suggest the "perception" of wrongful use of force by gov's armed agents is greater than the reality.

Yes, there are problems, and we should deal with them... but the mismatch between perception and reality is a problem in itself.

10000 years?! Seriously?

Actually, yeah. We should be using more than *one* day for the police (who at a handwave are getting 10 million encounters a day).

I can't tell how many people were in your unit nor how long you were there (if you've posted that somewhere else I'm sorry I haven't caught that yet).

But assume you have 10 encounters per person per day and there are 10 people in your unit. That's 36,500 encounters a year so every 30 years of your time is 1 day of the police.

I'd like a years worth of data for the police, so you'd need 10,000 years to balance that.

Yes, I know, much hand waving and massive assumptions (for starters I don't think the police, or the military for that matter, do a good job of reporting 'never' events).

As others have pointed out, this is a BS comment.

I was an infantryman. I deployed to an actual war zone. We questioned people. We pointed guns at people. We searched people’s home without asking for permission. We drove around like assholes who thought we owned the road. I’m not proud of any of this, but I bring it up to make the point that we someone how managed to never shoot anyone who wasn’t trying to shoot at us (at least not my unit).

You don't judge how easy it is to win the lottery by looking at the winner. We're looking at extreme, and extremely rare, events in large groups, i.e. "never events".

My expectation is if you'd done your thing for enough time to get a decent statistical average (say, 10,000 years) we'd see numbers which said that your unit was a lot more dangerous than the the police.

For that matter we could get larger data if we looked at every unit over the course of the entire war (I'm reasonably sure there were friendly fire incidents and civilians accidentally killed).

Ah, so it's adjusted for percentage of arrestees, thank you.

Which, put together, suggests that the biggest racial disparity is not in police tendency to violence once they have crossed the threshold of arresting someone – it’s in their choice of whom to stop or arrest in the first place

Interesting... I'm not sure what to make of this. Given the wide racial disparity in all the other crime stats, this might be expected.

Intuitively I still think ending the war on drugs would be the most effective in terms of dealing with racial disparities in violence/crime, but I don't think this study has the granularity to support that.

It is difficult to hide a corpse. The total number of people killed by the police in 2015 was 1186. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/12/28/3735190/killed-by-police-2015/

The number of police who died on the job in 2015 was 42 (google, npr).
The number of blacks in the US is 39 million.
The number of hispanics is 38 million.
The number of cops is roughly 1 million.

We have the mentally ill and the drug war inflating the dead-by-police numbers.
Roughly half the kill-by-police are mentally ill
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/half-people-killed-police-suffer-mental-disability-report-n538371

These numbers don't scream that "death by racism" is a serious problem.

We're probably going to reform the police this election cycle. They'll have body cams, perhaps we'll get real reform and they won't be used as revenue collectors. These are good things, but I seriously doubt police reform will change the number of corpses on the streets.

Jaybird: Maybe not “fire everyone involved” but “fire at least one of the people, jeez louise” or, I suppose, avoid the “give the doctor who did the amputation a freaking medal”.

Punishment is the current police model, and what (predictably) happens is everyone points to the dead guy and says it was his fault.

DavidTC:
These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable.
Wow, that is weird! Wait, no it’s not.
Half of all trades ‘show a profit’ on the end of the day they’re made, by definition. (Minus the ones that end up exactly even, I guess.)
Saying ‘two-third made a profit’ is saying she did 16% better than random chance!

You're ignoring transaction costs (beginners' mistake).
Every trade is a loss the moment you make it.

Further subtract losers from winners to get a feel for this. 50%-50% would be zero, a 55%/45% split would be 10% (and very, very good). Warren Buffet's return is 17% (yes, I know I'm assuming all trades are equal which clearly isn't true).

Hillary's is 60% (80%-20%). That's Jesus-walking-on-water. I've done things like this professionally and her numbers are way beyond crazy great, and there's multiple other eye-watering details.

When this story first broke there was a big deal about her 6.5x first-days profit because nothing moved like that that day. The answer was easy, she had a swarm of trades which all managed to capture the jump or fall of that stocks' bounce.

DavidTC:
These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable.
Likewise, you can’t talk about 80% are ‘ultimately profitable’ when your entire premise is that she was being assigned the best trades of the day? How does them *ultimately* being profitable have to do with anything?

Trading at the top/bottom of the day's market is also an absurdly powerful walking-on-water thing. Get out of something during the best minute of the day and a loss magically becomes profit.

DavidTC:
Incidentally, on average, pretty much *all* investment is ‘ultimately profitable’, because markets generally go up, barring some sort of crash. I just own index funds, but literally *100%* of them have been ‘ultimately profitable’ if I were to choose to exit the market right now.

Meaning that if you reversed your buys and sells (i.e. did shorts) NONE of them would have been profitable.

DavidTC:
Incidentally, fun fact: You keep saying Clinton made money shorting the market…but there is not any evidence of that in anything you have linked to that I have seen.

Financial writer Edward Chancellor noted in 1999 that Clinton made her money by betting "on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled."[15] Bloomberg News columnist Caroline Baum and hedge fund manager Victor Niederhoffer published a detailed 1995 analysis in National Review that found typical patterns and behaviors in commodities trading not met and concluded that her explanations for her results were highly implausible.[16] Possibilities were raised that broker actions such as front running of trades, or a long straddle with the winning positions thereof assigned to a favored client, had taken place.[13][16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy#Likelihood_of_results

trizzlor: “based on the video, eyewitness accounts, and statements from the police this violates the fundamental principles of policing we strive to bla bla bla … none of which should be interpreted as a guilty verdict”.

So we're not going to rush to judgement but here is our rush to judgement? At this point in Ferguson we'd be saying that Mike Brown should never have been shot in the back while surrendering and there's no excuse for that.

trizzlor:
the response protocol is (1) apologize for event; (2) report the event; (3) perform a root cause analysis; (4) waive costs / assess damages. Do you see how apologize for event is the VERY FIRST THING on that list? If the root cause analysis finds the victim to be complicit in the event, then … you’ll have the apparently incomprehensible task of taking back an apology … because you said right in the statement that it was based on first impressions. Seriously, why is this even under debate?

First, IMHO there's a LOT to be said for treating this by the medical paradigm. Assess what went wrong, have special investigations which try less to assess blame and more to prevent future problems.

However we don't do that. We mostly want to treat this as a criminal matter, so putting the police in prison is on the table. Ergo we have the adversarial setup right from the start, and everyone behaves that way.

I don't think the police can apologize and admit guilt without admitting guilt (although I'm not a lawyer).

trizzlor:
Moreover, atypical events can provide clarity on how the overall system functions. Are there a lot of prominent police spokespeople getting out in front and criticizing the actions of the officers here? Can you find even one? If not, does this highly atypical event tell us something about police accountability?

Why should they "criticize his actions" right now? For that matter, why should we?

Let's replay Ferguson:

There's a police shooting. 20 witnesses say it was unjustified. The dead guy's friend says he was there and it was in the back after he surrendered. The dead guy's family says he was going to college and wouldn't hurt a fly.

Except after lots of investigations, including by Eric Holder's FBI, the almost 300 lb, high on drugs criminal who had *just* pulled a robbery attacked the cop and made him kill him. None of the 20 witnesses don't agree with each other or with the physical evidence. The 8 witnesses who support the cop's story do agree with each other and with the physical evidence. The dead guy's friend was his partner in crime and has a criminal history of lying.

Or how about the Orlando shootings? The FBI thinks the shooter wasn't gay, or confused about his sexuality, or even homophobic. It's still an ongoing investigation, so there's time to change, but as far as they can tell he never used gay dating apps, and they've got his computer so it either has gay porn on it or it doesn't.

We don't know anything yet. The press is going to talk to whoever will talk and what we think we know is probably wrong.

dragonfrog:
Not to mention, that there appears to be some statistical skew in cutaneous melanin density between the victims of those tragic mistakes, and the nation as a whole.

We just had a statistical analysis done by some left leaning black Harvard economist find the opposite.

One assumes he adjusted his stats for either encounters with the police or crime in general. I tried reading the raw report but it was going to take too long to get my head into. The racial breakdown of the shootings is a reflection of society, not a creation of the police.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/13/black-harvard-economist-finds-no-bias-against-blacks-in-police-shootings/

Oscar Gordon: What I suspect will be typical is the department (under the influence of the police union) doing everything it can to keep that cop on the job and out of trouble. It’ll be called an accident, no charges filed, he’ll get counseling & training, and we’ll all ignore the fact that if a civilian had done this, he’d be facing charges.

We don't insist that civilians point guns at people as part of their job.

I don't know the details of this incident, but the moment you're pointing a gun at someone, the stakes are raised seriously high, and accidents are going to happen and people are going to die.

The issue then becomes what happens next. Do we ask the question, 'is this officer salvable?' Should we?

There are lines which society needs to draw for police behavior, but we're not going to insist they can't point guns at people and we shouldn't insist on perfection.

I think it's fair to insist on basic competence, and maybe this steps over that line, but the press has screwed up so many of these that I think we need to wait.

Jaybird: Do cops have “never events”? Should they? If the answer to one or the other of those is “yes”, how in the flying heck this not one of them?

That's a wonderful comparison, and yes, I fully agree this sort of thing should never happen.

So then let's follow the logic. How often do "never events" actually happen in a hospital where the surgeons have total control, lots of time to plan, and a team of helpers?

50 million surgeries a year (Google).

5000 (link below) of which leave stuff (normally sponges) inside the patient (leaving a sponge in is mind-numbingly bad btw).

At those rates, the police should be seeing "never events" a thousand times a day.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/08/surgery-sponges-lost-supplies-patients-fatal-risk/1969603/

Further, as far as I can tell, the result of a never event isn't "fire everyone involved". Now maybe surgeons are harder to replace than police so that's not what we want to do, but it should be thought provoking.

A million cops. Probably 10 million encounters with the police per day.

So this was the worst one in the nation for this day.

That doesn't make it right, or not grim, but I expect this isn't "typical".