Ferguson, MO

[Gulo Blue]

Just to be clear - are you saying I made up the notion of the violent white hierarchy?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CGVN5F_BQK0

No. But these days, there's always someone out there to say the thing you want to treat like the default opposition position because it's easy to critique. Doesn't matter if you made it up or found someone that said it anymore. Somebody said everything.


And Al Sharpton is a jackass.


edit: (by 'No.' I should acknowledge that I thought that, yes.) I mean. Come on. Of course I didn't know the reference.

 

[tomdalton22]

facts are facts. a city like mine will have no unlawful stops and lethal shootings. Place B will have several. Whats different? More crime isnt the reason theres more unlawful stops...they havent done anything wrong so they shouldnt be stopped! More cops and racial targeting tends to be the reason there is more unlawful stops.

And thats just the start of the conversation. Answering the question "Why is their more crime" in those areas presents a lot of other examples of social injustice.

what do you consider an unlawful stop? I really doubt there are that many truly unlawful stops. Now, are there stops for mickey mouse violations...yes.

The answer why there is more crime is pretty simple. It's not race, it's economic. White people in a poor area are much more likely to break the law than white people in more affluent areas. Just like black people in poor areas are more likely to break the law in poor areas than black people in more affluent areas. That's why their are more police in poor areas than in affluent areas. The people in those areas are more likely to break the law.

 

[Spartanmack]

What do you mean?


Police are state sanctioned and have labor unions that shield them from accountability.


You don't think the labor unions shield them from accountability?

I do, but I don't think it rises to anything near the level of the claims by the BLM movement. I don't think police are targeting black people for murder and getting away with it. I don't think most of the cases the movement is based on are legitimate - Eric Garner wasn't put in a choke hold and didn't die from excessive force, Mike Brown wasn't a murder victim, Trayvon Martin wasn't murdered - he wasn't even killed by a cop, Brooks was not a murder victim. Several of the other cases are also tragic, some of them seem to be unfortunate mistakes like the woman killed in KY recently, others like Floyd and the guy in South Carolina are clearly victims of excessive force if not outright murder, but they're the exceptions.

In 2019, 9 unarmed black people were killed by police nationwide. Adjusting for crime rates, because crime is why people have interactions with cops, you're more likely to be killed by a cop if you're white than if you're black and if you're black, you're more likely to be killed by a black or Hispanic cop than by a white cop. Police departments aren't systemically racist, period. Like everything, they should be constantly evolving and improving and there are needed reforms (weakening unions so they can't protect bad apples like Chauvin example, body cams on all cops would be another) but the idea that police pose a problem, let alone the biggest problem for these communities is complete and utter bullshit.

 

[Spartanmack]

I believe more cops in areas that have high crime = more arrests, more people getting pulled over for minor traffic violations that turn into more serious charges.

I do believe that some cops are guilty of racial profiling...which is wrong.


As far as quotas, the large city near me gets around this pretty easily. They set up a cop with a radar gun and video camera on an overpass above the expressway. They hand out $120 speeding tickets to anyone going 10 MPH over the limit...regardless of ethnicity. I think they generated over $6M last year. It's total horseshit.

why is it total horseshit to give out tickets for speeding, especially if they're being indifferent to race?

 

[mhughes0021]

what do you consider an unlawful stop? I really doubt there are that many truly unlawful stops. Now, are there stops for mickey mouse violations...yes.

The answer why there is more crime is pretty simple. It's not race, it's economic. White people in a poor area are much more likely to break the law than white people in more affluent areas. Just like black people in poor areas are more likely to break the law in poor areas than black people in more affluent areas. That's why their are more police in poor areas than in affluent areas. The people in those areas are more likely to break the law.

Thats simply not real life Tom. Thats real life from your perspective (the white perspective). But in reality you have lawyers comming out that have had young black men as defendants. Body cam shows the cop roll right past the white kid walking home...the black kid walking home 20 feet away the car suddenly stops and the black kid immediately gets thrown onto the hood of the car and cuffed. Kid was polite...all charges dropped (they found a small bag of weed in his pocket). Waste of fucking time and money for all. Good job cops!...way to get that small bag of weed off the streets. dumbasses...

 

[tinselwolverine]

No. But these days, there's always someone out there to say the thing you want to treat like the default opposition position because it's easy to critique. Doesn't matter if you made it up or found someone that said it anymore. Somebody said everything.


And Al Sharpton is a jackass.

It seems to me that Sharpton pretty well represents the position of BLM:

From the ?Black Lives Matter Mission Statement?

?Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state sanctioned violence and anti-black racism...the impetus for that was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted upon us by the state.?

Black Lives Matter Mission Statement

Reverend Al states the position in his typical rhetorical style, but it?s basically the same message.

 

[Spartanmack]

If the tide is turning on accountability, then great, but these people being charged now is just a step towards accountability. And a relatively recent one.



If we were all expected to point our anger at the dominant causes of our misery, we'd probably mostly have to protest ourselves. But this idea that because you can find some worse statistic, that somehow invalidates a protest of anything with a lesser statistic is a feeling-driven argument. I understand why it feels valid. It isn't though.



If you add enough qualifiers to paint the position of people you disagree with ('violent white hierarchy') then sure, you sound reasonable criticizing the position you just made up. There's enough racial discrimination in practice that whether or not every protester describes it with academic rigor really shouldn't be the thing that pushes a person to one side or the other. There are certainly things you could quibble about with regard to what anger should be pointed at and how protests should be conducted. Focusing on that is missing the forest for the trees.

it's not the worse statistic that invalidates the lesser the statistic, but it does provide some context. The lesser statistic itself should be enough to invalidate it in this case, but clearly it's not so maybe providing context of what the real problems are will hopefully drive the point home.

 

[tomdalton22]

why is it total horseshit to give out tickets for speeding, especially if they're being indifferent to race?

The horseshit part of it is that it's just a money grab. It isn't there to make it safer to drive or to slow traffic down...it's just to make money. If they wanted to make it safer they could just post a cop car there and people would slow down. Hell, don't even put a cop in the car, and people will slow down.

 

[Spartanmack]

facts are facts. a city like mine will have no unlawful stops and lethal shootings. Place B will have several. Whats different? More crime isnt the reason theres more unlawful stops...they havent done anything wrong so they shouldnt be stopped! More cops and racial targeting tends to be the reason there is more unlawful stops.

And thats just the start of the conversation. Answering the question "Why is their more crime" in those areas presents a lot of other examples of social injustice.

when did we shift to unlawful stops? which case are the rioters destroying their neighborhoods over involve unlawful stops? What are the statistics on unlawful stops?

Crime is not a function of social injustice, it's a moral failing that's generally the accumulation of a series of bad decisions by criminals but also their parents, their elected representatives, etc, etc.

 

[tomdalton22]

Thats simply not real life Tom. Thats real life from your perspective (the white perspective). But in reality you have lawyers comming out that have had young black men as defendants. Body cam shows the cop roll right past the white kid walking home...the black kid walking home 20 feet away the car suddenly stops and the black kid immediately gets thrown onto the hood of the car and cuffed. Kid was polite...all charges dropped (they found a small bag of weed in his pocket). Waste of fucking time and money for all. Good job cops!...way to get that small bag of weed off the streets. dumbasses...

I googled that scenario and I didn't find that video. The second video down was this one.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...punching-new-jersey-teen-head-during-n1007641

I guess some police officers are assholes to white people too.

 

[Gulo Blue]

I do, but I don't think it rises to anything near the level of the claims by the BLM movement. I don't think police are targeting black people for murder and getting away with it. I don't think most of the cases the movement is based on are legitimate - Eric Garner wasn't put in a choke hold and didn't die from excessive force, Mike Brown wasn't a murder victim, Trayvon Martin wasn't murdered - he wasn't even killed by a cop, Brooks was not a murder victim. Several of the other cases are tragic, some of them seem to be unfortunate mistakes like the woman killed in KY recently, others like Floyd and the guy in South Carolina are clearly victims of excessive force if not outright murder, but they're the exceptions.

In 2019, 9 unarmed black people were killed by police nationwide. Adjusting for crime rates, because crime is why people have interactions with cops, you're more likely to be killed by a cop if you're white than if you're black and if you're black, you're more likely to be killed by a black or Hispanic cop than if you're white. Police departments aren't systemically racist, period. Like everything, they should be constantly evolving and improving and there are needed reforms (weakening unions so they can't protect bad apples like Chauvin example, body cams on all cops would be another) but the idea that police pose a problem, let alone the biggest problem for these communities is complete and utter bullshit.

I somewhat agree with several details, but I think this approach is missing the forest for the trees. There's a mess of inequality that's driven by nebulous discrimination forces that can only be seen in averaged data and never pointed to in specific instances AND there are occasional instances that serve as illustrations of bad behavior that protesters rally around as symbols. There may not be good correlation or identifiable causality between the things that a protester is really angry about, the things they say they are angry about, and the stories covered in the media that trigger protests. The connections between these things are as nebulous as the links between racial bias and discrimination, so analyzing the details of a specific incident is never going to logic away a protest.

 

[Spartanmack]

The horseshit part of it is that it's just a money grab. It isn't there to make it safer to drive or to slow traffic down...it's just to make money. If they wanted to make it safer they could just post a cop car there and people would slow down. Hell, don't even put a cop in the car, and people will slow down.

I prefer the ticket in the mail enforcement to the cop sitting on the side of the road causing traffic jams because every idiot slams on their brakes, even the people that aren't speeding. Maybe it's not as bad in the Midwest but out here with the population density and resulting traffic we have, empty or occupied cop cars during rush make traffic soooo much worse. I have no sympathy for speeders getting speeding tickets and although it's never happened to me, if it did I'd probably shrug my shoulders, think to myself "those fuqers got me" and pay the fine.

 

[Spartanmack]

I somewhat agree with several details, but I think this approach is missing the forest for the trees. There's a mess of inequality that's driven by nebulous discrimination forces that can only be seen in averaged data and never pointed to in specific instances AND there are occasional instances that serve as illustrations of bad behavior that protesters rally around as symbols. There may not be good correlation or identifiable causality between the things that a protester is really angry about, the things they say they are angry about, and the stories covered in the media that trigger protests. The connections between these things are as nebulous as the links between racial bias and discrimination, so analyzing the details of a specific incident is never going to logic away a protest.

I think that basing your argument on nebulous discrimination that can only be seen through correlations with averaged data is missing the forest for the trees. In fact, to draw those conclusions, you have to only look at top line data and not dig deeper for an explanation because when you do, the case falls apart rather quickly. Those conclusions don't stand up to any level of scrutiny. None of these studies that show bias, make the case for institutional (i.e. policy driven) discrimination. and the problem with that is when you come to the wrong conclusion, you have almost zero chance of finding a solution that will fix what's really wrong.

 

[tomdalton22]

I prefer the ticket in the mail enforcement to the cop sitting on the side of the road causing traffic jams because every idiot slams on their brakes, even the people that aren't speeding. Maybe it's not as bad in the Midwest but out here with the population density and resulting traffic we have, empty or occupied cop cars during rush make traffic soooo much worse. I have no sympathy for speeders getting speeding tickets and although it's never happened to me, if it did I'd probably shrug my shoulders, think to myself "those fuqers got me" and pay the fine.

you are right...where I live there are no traffic jams. The expressway I am speaking of almost never backs up which is the reason traffic pretty much flows at a constant 70-75 MPH.

I have received 3 tickets. 2 from the exact same location. You'd think I would learn my lesson.

 

[Gulo Blue]

I think that basing your argument on nebulous discrimination that can only be seen through correlations with averaged data is missing the forest for the trees.

Back to "Nuh-uh You."
As always.

 

[Spartanmack]

you are right...where I live there are no traffic jams. The expressway I am speaking of almost never backs up which is the reason traffic pretty much flows at a constant 70-75 MPH.

I have received 3 tickets. 2 from the exact same location. You'd think I would learn my lesson.

I got clipped on the Ohio Turnpike a few years back for doing 14 over. I drive the whole thing end-to-end twice every summer and as long as I'm doing 9 over, no issues even going by cops in the median. Anything more than that and you get nailed - and no way you're talking your way out of a ticket, into a warning with New Jersey plates.

 

[Gulo Blue]

Those conclusions don't stand up to any level of scrutiny. They don't stand up to any real level of scrutiny. None of these studies that show bias, make the case for institutional (i.e. policy driven) discrimination. and the problem with that is when you come to the wrong conclusion, you have almost zero chance of finding a solution that will fix what's really wrong.

No scrutiny? Google 'Reviewer number three'. Those jokes reflect a reality where saying just about anything is met often by comically unreasonable scrutiny.


What constitutes 'policy driven' could be it's own discussion. Do just the intended consequences count or the unintended consequences, once they are know and policy is not changed? At some point, tolerating something long enough is part of your policy.

 

[Spartanmack]

Back to "Nuh-uh You."
As always.

sure, if you ignore the rest of the post where I explain why.

 

[Gulo Blue]

sure, if you ignore the rest of the post where I explain why.

Wrong assumption again.

As always.

 

[Spartanmack]

No scrutiny? Google 'Reviewer number three'. Those jokes reflect a reality where saying just about anything is met often by comically unreasonable scrutiny.


What constitutes 'policy driven' could be it's own discussion. Do just the intended consequences count or the unintended consequences, once they are know and policy is not changed? At some point, tolerating something long enough is part of your policy.

the point is bias isn't institutionalized racism. It's a totally separate issue with a totally different cause and a totally different solution. Everyone has biases and bias pervades everything regardless of color, gender, religion, etc. It's not any more an issue for cops of any color than it is for anyone one else of any color and bias is not why minorities have more interactions with cops, it's not an unintended consequence of bias - it's a direct consequence of disproportionate crime rates.

If that was the case, then even adjusting for crime rates, black suspects should be more likely to be killed than white suspects and black suspects would be more likely to be killed by white cops and they're not.