Two policemen executed for Brown/Garner

[dude1394]

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon1222hm.html

"Since last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers.
....

The New York Times ratcheted up its already stratospheric level of anti-cop polemics. In an editorial justifying the Ferguson riots, the Times claimed that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” Some facts: Police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and are a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. The police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk, which comes overwhelmingly from other blacks. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.—almost all killed by black civilians—resulting in a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports, kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about 40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The percentage of black suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the percentage of blacks mortally threatening them."

Joe bob says check it out.

[tap2390]

Originally Posted by dude1394

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon1222hm.html

"Since last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers.
....

The New York Times ratcheted up its already stratospheric level of anti-cop polemics. In an editorial justifying the Ferguson riots, the Times claimed that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” Some facts: Police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and are a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. The police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk, which comes overwhelmingly from other blacks. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.—almost all killed by black civilians—resulting in a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports, kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about 40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The percentage of black suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the percentage of blacks mortally threatening them."

Joe bob says check it out.

Irony: the same people condemning those exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech are generally the strongest advocates for the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

To blame the dialogue about police brutality for the deaths of these two is to be NO different than those who accuse all police officers of being racist.

[DirkFTW]

Originally Posted by tap2390

Irony: the same people condemning those exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech are generally the strongest advocates for the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

They have the freedom to say what they want, which they are clearly exercising. The rest of us also have the freedom to point out the rank hypocrisy and idiocy of what's said. And when what's said is "We want dead cops," the rest of us have the freedom to condemn this as hateful rhetoric that incited violence and to demand accountability.

Irony: the same people supporting the 1st Amendment rights of the protesters are generally the ones wanting to silence any criticism of the protesters.

Calling for dead cops is evil and insane. And I think it's odd that when a white cop kills a black man, black people attack Asians and Hispanics. (See also 1992 LA Riots.) It almost seems racist...

[mcsluggo]

Originally Posted by DirkFTW

They have the freedom to say what they want, which they are clearly exercising. The rest of us also have the freedom to point out the rank hypocrisy and idiocy of what's said. And when what's said is "We want dead cops," the rest of us have the freedom to condemn this as hateful rhetoric that incited violence and to demand accountability.

Irony: the same people supporting the 1st Amendment rights of the protesters are generally the ones wanting to silence any criticism of the protesters.

Calling for dead cops is evil and insane. And I think it's odd that when a white cop kills a black man, black people attack Asians and Hispanics. (See also 1992 LA Riots.) It almost seems racist...

Straw man much??

basically 99.994% of the population will agree that "We want dead cops" rhetoric is disgusting, and they hate it. This would include about 99.9% of teh people that support or even join in the Fergusun or Staten Island protests



For what its worth, i don't particularly support either group of protestors, and think they are poor example to use as the "poster children" for people that want to point out incidences of police misconduct ----- but i think it is downright moronic to tar those groups by pointing to the action of one psychopath that has clearly been inching towards this inglorious moment in the sun for years.

[DirkFTW]

Originally Posted by mcsluggo

i think it is downright moronic to tar those groups by pointing to the action of one psychopath that has clearly been inching towards this inglorious moment in the sun for years.

See also, gun control movement; Giffords shooting. Sorry, I must have missed a rule change.

I also bet 99.994% of the population will agree that police brutality is disgusting, and they hate it. This would include about 99.9% of the people that oppose the Ferguson or Staten Island protests, including the cops that are trying to maintain order in cities across this country.

But this "us v. the system" mess is getting way out of control. I'm not even sure what they're fighting for. Disarming cops? No cops? Racial quotas in arrests? Mob justice instead of grand juries?

Why don't we start with: 1) scaling way back on overreaching laws that create the opportunity for the state to intrude in people's lives, 2) taking away all the grenades and APCs from local law enforcement, 3) adding cameras to preserve a record of police activity, 4) eliminating no-knock warrants, and 5) restricting the application of state and prosecutorial immunity. We could probably use an update in use of force procedures for executing warrants as well (e.g., don't throw flashbangs into baby cribs).

Oh wait, Al Sharpton would not be necessary, so this can't be right.

[I.Can't.Breathe]

Originally Posted by dude1394

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon1222hm.html

In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.—almost all killed by black civilians—resulting in a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports, kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about 40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The percentage of black suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the percentage of blacks mortally threatening them."

Dubious data, dubious assertions, dubious conclusions.

How many police shootings a year? No one knows
By Wesley Lowery September 8

A summer of high-profile police shootings, most notably the Aug. 9 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., has rekindled a decades-long debate over law enforcement’s use of lethal force.

Police unions and some law-and-order conservatives insist that shootings by officers are rare and even more rarely unjustified. Civil rights groups and some on the left have just as quickly prescribed racial motives to the shootings, declaring that black and brown men are being “executed” by officers.

And, like all previous incarnations of the clash over police force, the debate remains absent access to a crucial, fundamental fact.

Criminal justice experts note that, while the federal government and national research groups keep scads of data and statistics— on topics ranging from how many people were victims of unprovoked shark attacks (53 in 2013) to the number of hogs and pigs living on farms in the U.S. (upwards of 64,000,000 according to 2010 numbers) — there is no reliable national data on how many people are shot by police officers each year.

The government does, however, keep a database of how many officers are killed in the line of duty. In 2012, the most recent year for which FBI data is available, it was 48 – 44 of them killed with firearms.

But how many people in the United States were shot, or killed, by law enforcement officers during that year? No one knows.

Officials with the Justice Department keep no comprehensive database or record of police shootings, instead allowing the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer-involved shootings as part of the FBI’s annual data on “justifiable homicides” by law enforcement.

That number – which only includes self-reported information from about 750 law enforcement agencies – hovers around 400 “justifiable homicides” by police officers each year. The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics also tracks “arrest-related deaths.” But the department stopped releasing those numbers after 2009, because, like the FBI data, they were widely regarded as unreliable.

“What’s there is crappy data,” said David A. Klinger, a former police officer and criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri who studies police use of force.

Several independent trackers, primarily journalists and academics who study criminal justice, insist the accurate number of people shot and killed by police officers each year is consistently upwards of 1,000 each year.

“The FBI’s justifiable homicides and the estimates from (arrest-related deaths) both have significant limitations in terms of coverage and reliability that are primarily due to agency participation and measurement issues,” said Michael Planty, one of the Justice Department’s chief statisticians, in an email.

Even less data exists for officer-involved shootings that do not result in fatalities.

“We do not have information at the national level for police shootings that result in non-fatal injury or no injury to a civilian,” Planty said.

Comprehensive statistics on officer-involved shootings are also not kept by any of the nation’s leading gun violence and police research groups and think tanks.

In fact, prior to the Brown’s shooting, the only person attempting to keep track of the number of police shootings was D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the 29,000-circulation Reno News & Review, who launched his “Fatal Encounters” project in 2012.

“Don’t you find it spookey? This is information, this is the government’s job,” Burghart said. “One of the government’s major jobs is to protect us. How can it protect us if it doesn’t know what the best practices are? If it doesn’t know if one local department is killing people at a higher rate than others? When it can’t make decisions based on real numbers to come up with best practices? That to me is an abdication of responsibilities.”

Burghart has enlisted a team of volunteers to search news clips as well as file records requests for data, with the goal of collecting a database that will chronicle several years-worth of police shootings.

As of September 1, according to Burghart’s estimates, 83 other people had been killed by police officers in the United States since Michael Brown’s death.

Law enforcement watchdog groups and think tanks say that the lack of comprehensive data on police shootings hampers the ability of departments to develop best practices and cut down on unnecessary shootings.

The way we improve practices is to take information about what’s happening in the field to make those improvements,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonpartisan think tank in D.C. that produces reports on police tactics. “The more we know about (the number of officer-involved shootings) the better off we’ll be.”

Other than basic statistical analysis, Wexler said, a comprehensive database of police shootings would allow departments to better analyze when officers are drawing and using their guns – potentially leading to policy changes that could save lives.

He noted a shift in policy by the New York Police Department in 1972, in which the department instructed its officers to no longer shoot at moving vehicles.

“When they made that change the number of NYPD shootings plummeted,” he said.

James O. Pasco, the national executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, believes that an accurate database would require Congress to pass a law requiring police departments to report their shooting data to a federal agency, presumably the FBI.

“Otherwise it’s an unfunded mandate,” Pasco said. “About 80 percent of police departments have fewer than 10 officers. They don’t have huge data collecting operations. They don’t even have a single person in some of these departments who are dedicated to all the statistical work they have to do now.”

Pasco said he doesn’t know what the union’s position would be on a legal requirement to report shootings and the result of shooting investigations.

“It would depend on what the law looked like,” he said. “Clearly, if it’s just a function of collecting the data, I can’t see that we would have a problem with that. Our issues are with due process for officers.”

The most detailed analysis of police shootings to date was conducted by Jim Fisher, a former FBI agent and criminal justice professor who now authors true crime books.

“I was rather surprised to find there are no statistics,” Fisher said. “The answer to me is pretty obvious: the government just doesn’t want us to know how many people are shot by the police every year.”

In 2011, he scoured the Internet several times a day every day, compiling a database of every officer-involved shooting he could find. Ultimately, he tracked 1,146 shootings by police officers, 607 of them fatal shootings.

“I was surprised at how many shootings, a reasonable person would conclude, were unnecessary,” Fisher said.

Earlier this year, the Gawker Media-owned sports Web site Deadspin launched a project to crowd-source a definitive list of police shootings by analyzing local media reports – a system modelled off of Fisher’s 2011 effort.

“Having that data would be extremely helpful, in more ways than one,” said Adolphus M. Pruitt, president of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, who has been one of those most vocal about allegations of police brutality in light of Brown’s shooting. “We track everything. There is no reason in the world for us to not be able to know just how many people the police are shooting in any given year.”

In the absence of reliable data, the FBI’s “justifiable homicides” statistics continues to be widely cited in academic studies, media reports, and other examinations of the use of lethal force by law enforcement despite being decried as unreliable by officials inside the Justice Department and other officials outside of the government.

As they do, criminal justice experts note that even compiling accurate numbers of people shot and killed by the police would be just a start.

“Every study that I’m aware of shows that most of the people who are shot by the cops survive and most of the time when cops shoot the bullets don’t hit,” said Klinger, who will soon publish a new study analyzing police shootings in St. Louis.

That study, prepared with several other academics, found that there were 230 instances in the City of St. Louis between 2003 and 2012 when officers fired their weapons. Only 37 of those fired upon were killed.

“If your statistics look just at dead bodies you’d be under-counting it by 85 percent,” Klinger said. “If the cops are shooting, we need to now when they are shooting, not just when they kill somebody with the bullets.”