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Facts Over Slogans, Solutions Over Anarchy
If we do not truthfully diagnose the problem in America, systemic and otherwise, we will never make things right. Unfortunately for everyone, if we continue to ignore the body count that rises daily in the African-American community, and continue to focus on the exception to the exclusion of the rule, we’re toast.
What follows is not necessarily pleasant to read, and if I were in the NFL, academia, or a major media outlet, I suppose the wrath of God-knows-who would descend on me. But you know what? I didn’t spend 20 years on active duty and do three tours of duty in the Mideast and a year in Korea so that others can dictate my thoughts and words, and negate the rights I fought to preserve.
Let me start by placing a few facts on the table because ignoring them only makes the situation worse.
Wednesday, June 10: One man was shot to death and two others, including a child, were injured in a triple shooting here in Memphis. In a separate incident, two people were shot outside of a local bar in Memphis. In yet another incident, a 12-year-old boy saw his father robbed at gunpoint in the driveway of their home.
Tuesday, June 9: Three people were shot in two separate incidents here in Memphis.
Monday, June 8: Three adults and one child were injured in a drive-by shooting, caught on camera, in which a car stopped, occupants got out, and fired a barrage of shots at a house. After the police left, the car drove up and stopped again as occupants shot up the house a second time. In a separate incident, another man was in critical condition after a shooting Monday night. In yet another incident, a man was arrested for shooting at a Memphis Police helicopter that was monitoring local protests for George Floyd. In still another incident, a woman was arrested for murder after shooting another woman in the face. The victim was holding her one-year-old son when she was killed. In two other incidents, two other people were shot.
Sunday, June 7: One person was fatally shot.
Saturday, June 6: One person was dead and another injured following a double shooting. In a separate incident, another woman was shot dead.
Friday, June 5: One person was killed and another wounded in a shooting. Another person was shot while walking through the neighborhood, in a separate incident.
That’s 13 shootings, 15 people wounded and six fatalities, in the span of six days. And those six days are not any different from any other six-day stretch in Memphis. None of these people were shot by the police. There was no racism involved. African Americans are victimized every day here, yet none of the local protests that took place during those six days were for these victims. No traffic was blocked for them, no one took a knee or carried large banners or placards or even so much as an index card in their honor, and their names never escaped the lips of those who were yelling through bullhorns. Tell me again whose lives matter.
A Few More Facts
There are approximately 7,500 black homicide victims annually, approximately 90 percent of whom die at the hands of black assailants.
Of those 7,500 black lives lost annually, approximately 0.1 percent are unarmed and die at the hands of the police.
In 2019, there were 19 unarmed whites killed by police, and nine unarmed blacks (a 76 percent reduction from 2015).
In about 75 percent of police shootings, the deceased is not black.
African Americans make up 13 percent of the US population, yet account for 53 percent of homicides.
African American males make up 7 percent of the population, yet account for 45 percent of homicides.
According to the CDC, African Americans between ages 10 and 43 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of whites.
A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than a black male is likely to be killed by a police officer.
According to Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute:
Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimizations, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks.
And from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting 2018, we see this:
Looking more closely at the above graph, we see that the bulk of African American suspects’ interactions with the police are more often in instances involving the most violent crimes, which logically result in more volatile and/or violent situations in which suspects resist arrest. The police didn’t cause these crimes. They responded to 911 calls for help.
The above list should not be construed as to suggest that there is no racism. Racism is a blight on the human condition, and the human condition has been disordered since the time of Adam and Eve. Racism, like every other category of evil, will endure as long as human nature endures. I’ve seen plenty of bigots and even encounter a few to this day. But to look at the carnage of 7,500 African American lives lost each year, 90 percent of whom died at the hands of other African Americans, and to conclude that the 0.1 percent of that number, represented by nine unarmed African American deaths at the hands of the police (when there are nearly twice as many unarmed whites killed by the police), is proof of systemic racism against blacks is to become unmoored from the facts and from rationality itself.
Worse, to pretend like the police are declaring open season on African Americans is to ignore the fact that 13 percent of the population accounts for over half the homicides, over half the robberies, 34 percent of aggravated assaults, and 43 percent of weapons offenses. By logical extension, when police receive calls about robberies, homicides, etc., they are more likely to be called to the communities where these offenses occur. That isn’t racism. It’s real life.
Misdirected Solutions
To compound the error of misdiagnosing the problem by imposing equally erroneous solutions is to make a bad situation catastrophic. In her book, The War On Cops, Heather MacDonald tells how, in 2016, under the pressure from Black Lives Matter and others, police in Chicago (to take one example) reduced pedestrian stops and drug arrests by 80 percent. Whereupon homicides in the Windy City increased 60 percent. Carjackings, highway shootings, and robberies all increased and spread further across the city. Additionally, when cops backed off from proactive policing in 2015, those cities with the largest African American populations saw the largest increases in homicide, with Washington DC at 54 percent, Cleveland seeing a 90 percent increase in homicides, and Milwaukee experiencing a 72 percent increase. That’s what happens when police stand down.
In the last week alone, homicides in Los Angeles have increased over 250 percent over this time last year. The number of people shot has increased 56 percent. In New York City, murder is up 94 percent and shootings are up 63 percent. Still want to defund the police?
Alternative Solutions
Reduce Recidivism
On Monday, June 8, Stephen Cannon was arrested for the murder of David Dorn, the retired St. Louis police captain who was murdered while trying to protect a pawn shop from looters. In 2014, Cannon had been sentenced to seven years for robbery and assault after he confessed to beating a man and robbing him in order to steal his cash and his phone. He pled down to second-degree robbery and was granted a suspended sentence. He violated his parole in 2018 and the judge declined to enforce the sentence. He was arrested for theft just last February and was out free, pending a hearing on June 22. He never served so much as one day.
Surveillance film shows Cannon pointing a gun at 77-year-old David Dorn, who then fell to the ground where he lay dying as people looted the store. Cannon has been charged with first-degree murder, robbery, burglary, felon in possession of a firearm, and three counts of armed criminal action. His bond is set at a meager $30,000.
Here, then, is the systemic injustice. The problem of predators who are released back into communities across the country to victimize innocent people must be addressed. According to Matthew Clark, writing in Prison Legal News:
A U.S. Sentencing Commission report on recidivism among federal prisoners, released on January 24, 2019, showed that nearly 64% of prisoners who had been convicted of violent offenses were arrested within eight years compared with about 40% of those convicted of nonviolent offenses.
Why such high arrest rates? A February 2019 report from the California state auditor questioned the effectiveness of the rehabilitation programs used by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“Our analysis of inmates released from prison in fiscal year 2015-16 did not find an overall relationship between inmates completing CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) rehabilitation programs and their recidivism rates,” said State Auditor Elaine Howle. “In fact, inmates who completed their recommended CBT rehabilitation programs recidivated at about the same rate as inmates who were not assigned to those rehabilitation programs.”
It is well and good that defendants in the US are not placed in double jeopardy, per the Fifth Amendment. It would also help tremendously to ask exactly how many times the lives and wellbeing of innocent citizens should be jeopardized by repeatedly releasing known predators in their neighborhoods. The idea that violent offenders are in prison to protect the community at large must be reinforced, and judges have got to stop playing Russian Roulette with the lives of law-abiding citizens.
Expand Educational Opportunities
It’s also worth considering whether or not the African-American community is being properly served by an education establishment that precludes parents from moving their children from underperforming schools to ones that will most benefit their children. Economist Walter Williams writes that in 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, there were zero students making a proficient score on Maryland’s state math test. Six other Baltimore high schools saw 1 percent of their students achieve a proficient score, while only 15 percent of the city’s students could pass the state’s English exam. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, only 19 percent of eighth-graders could score proficiently in math, with 16 percent in reading. Detroit saw 4 percent of its eighth-graders score proficiently in math and 7 percent in reading. Wealthy politicians routinely send their children to private schools while voting to deny the same options to their constituents. Is it any wonder that kids are struggling? Why isn’t this regarded as a systemic failure?
Reduce Union Control
What teachers unions have done for inner-city schools, police unions have done for their communities. Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin had a string of at least 17 complaints against him, including being named in a brutality lawsuit. None of it derailed his career, however, though he did receive two letters of reprimand. Such are the protections against even bad officers, that when she served as County Attorney, Amy Klobuchar declined to prosecute cops in over two dozen officer-involved fatalities.
Office Tou Thao, who stood by passively as Mr. Floyd, had numerous complaints against him as well. In 2017, the city of Minneapolis settled a $25,000 lawsuit alleging Thao’s excessive force and that of another officer. As Mayor Jacob Frey admitted:
The elephant in the room with regard to making the changes necessary to combat the institutionalized racism and have a full-on culture shift is the police union, the contract associated with that union, and then the arbitration that ultimately is necessary. It sets up a system where we have difficulty both disciplining and terminating officers who have done wrong.
In 2017, the Washington Post reported that a total of 1,881 police officers from 37 major municipal police departments had been fired since 2006. Of those, 451 successfully appealed and the police departments had to reinstate them. Writing for the Heritage Foundation, Rachel Greszler found that:
A 2019 study of “moral character” violations reported by local police agencies in Florida between 1996 and 2015 found that “collective bargaining rights led to about a 40% increase in violent incidents of misconduct among sheriffs’ offices.”
Of course, it’s not unusual to see a conservative writer criticize the tendency of unions to protect substandard performers, any more than it should be surprising to see those protected substandard performers go on to inflict serious harm. What would be refreshingly unusual, however, would be to see the problem actually addressed. But that would require the Democratic Party to liberate itself from its symbiotic relationship with unions.
Accountability Begins In The Home
Next, I turn to Dr. Shelby Steele, an African-American author and fellow at the Hoover Institution who has written numerous books on race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He weighed on the plight of African Americans in a recent interview with Mark Levin:
I would be happy to look at all the usual bad guys, the police and so forth, if we had the nerve, the courage, to look at black people, to look at black Americans, minority Americans, and say, ‘You’re not carrying your own weight. You’re going to have a fit and a tantrum and demonstrate and so forth and yet you’re not doing — are you teaching your child to read? Are you making sure that the school down the street actually educates your child? Are you becoming educated and following a dream in life and making things happen for yourself? Or are you saying I’m a victim and I’m owed and the entitlement is inadequate.’
In his 1983 book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? another African American economist Dr. Thomas Sowell, who grew up in Harlem, describes it this way:
Few people today are aware that the ghettos in many cities were far safer places two generations ago than they are today. Incredulity often greets stories by older black as to their habit of sleeping out on fire escapes or on rooftops or in public parks on hot summer nights. …In the 1930s whites went regularly to Harlem at night, stayed until the wee hours of the morning, and then stood on the streets to hail cabs to take them home. Today, not only would very few whites dare to do this, very few cabs would dare to be cruising ghetto streets in the wee hours of the morning.
So what happened? Dr. Sowell continued:
…If crime is a product of poverty and discrimination as they say endlessly, why was there so much less of it when poverty and discrimination were much worse than today? If massive programs are the only hope to reduce violence in the ghetto, why was there so much less violence long before anyone ever thought of these programs? Perhaps more to the point, have the philosophies and policies so much supported by black leaders contributed to the decline of the community and personal standards, and in family responsibility, so painfully visible today? For many, it may be easier to ignore past achievements than to face their implications for current issues.
Fast forward to 1963, when future UN Ambassador and Senator from New York, Patrick Moynihan authored a book titled, Beyond the Melting Pot, in which he lamented an illegitimacy rate in the African American community that was 14 to 15 times higher than of the white population. Today, over 70 percent of African-American children are born to fatherless homes. As one commentator wrote just yesterday:
When 28% of black kids grow up in 2-parent homes compared to 83% of Asian kids, and Asian adults go on to statistically blow the doors off everyone across every meaningful metric while black adults statistically lag everyone else in every meaningful metric, you simply can’t tell me the absence of 2-parent homes is not a dominant factor in that disparity.
You will also, for obvious reasons based on those same statistics, have a harder time convincing me that “white supremacy” is the culprit.
I know that to suggest that at least some of the programs brought about by President Johnson’s Great Society initiative might have been counterproductive is heresy. To recommend personal responsibility when young African American men make up 7 percent of the population and 45 percent of homicides is to be guilty of apostasy.
The point remains that in Memphis and elsewhere, carrying placards, chanting slogans, and blocking traffic in the name of one man who was wrongfully killed by bad cops in another city, while ignoring the endless bloodshed and death in your own neighborhood, has not worked to this point. And averting our eyes from the facts isn’t working either. Maybe Shelby Steele is right. Maybe it’s time to try other solutions.
Published in General
Very well said sir!
Dave, the first half of this post is quite good, and the second half is generally not.
You say you want to “reduce recidivism,” then give a quote about how programs to reduce recidivism don’t work and very large percentages of released convicts go on to offend again. You have no suggestion for reducing recidivism. The obvious way, alas, is to lock them up for even longer.
You say you want to improve educational opportunities. I do support school choice, but I am not optimistic that it will help much. Black students do very poorly on achievement tests. It is not clear that the schools are to blame, as opposed to broken families and, more tragically, the possibility that there is a genetic or biological basis for the significant and persistent IQ gap.
You want to reduce union control, and cite complaints against Ofc. Chauvin, with no evaluation of whether those complaints were justified or completely baseless. People make false allegations all of the time. They file meritless lawsuits quite regularly. Without consideration of whether the accusations were justified, this is nothing but a smear. By the way, the evidence is quite weak on the issue of whether his actions actually killed Mr. Floyd, or whether it was a fentanyl overdose or his severe cardiac disease, or some combination.
I do like your final point, accountability begins in the home. What this means, though, is that the problem is bad behavior by black people. I do suspect that this is the root of most of the problems among black Americans. It is not a problem unique among blacks, though the percentages are higher. But you don’t say what you would do about it, other than mentioning the Great Society welfare programs, which seems to be a hint that the policy response should be to end welfare.
I think that we should pursue strong pro-family policies. Dave, we seem to agree on this, so I’d like to hear any specific proposals that you might have.
Excellent article Dave.
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution. Black Lives Matter brings in money for the DNC. From my comment on another post:
Black Lives Matter obviously has other donation channels, and the money from this one isn’t ActBlue’s only funding source. But BLM is a big source of energy and motivation for the Democrats, and provides a big part of the street arm for the mass conditioning (brainwashing) campaign run by the PRC.
I appreciate so much the incredible research that you patiently took the time to collate and now to publish for all of us.
You are a ninja of knowledge.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result.
Every one – EVERY ONE – of the things BLM and all the supporters of these wonderful riots are asking for, the things we need to finally get a clue and DO, is exactly what we have been doing!
This isn’t the first riot, for crying out loud! They’ve been ocurring regularly since I was a sprout back in the ’60s. The Left calls for “more humane solutions” instead of mean old right-wing “law-enforcement mentality”.
They invariably win, and we do it their way. More money. More teachers. More talk talk talk. And a year or two later, the next riot, and it all starts over again.
I don’t know the solution, possibly some of the things you’ve listed. But I know that pretending that more money, etc., is going to solve anything if it hasn’t the last 15 times we’ve tried it.
Blacks have been a protected class since Richard Nixon, contrary to the advice of his liberal Staffer Daniel Patrick Moynahan, signed the Executive Order beginning Affirmative Action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Philadelphia_Plan
Wikipedia, of course, presents to the leftist view of that program.
Lyndon Johnson, with his Great Society, began the destruction of the black family. The basis of aid to families was the original aid to widows and orphans that was formalized in the Social Security Act.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/ces/cesbookc13.html
The purpose of legislation for aid to dependent children has been to prevent the disruption of families on the ground of poverty alone and to enable the mother to stay at home and devote herself to housekeeping and the care of her children, releasing her from the inadequacies of the old type of poor relief and the uncertainties of private charity. The assurance of a definite amount of aid, not subject to change from week to week or month to month unless conditions in the family change, is one of the chief advantages of this form of assistance. The enactment of laws for aid to dependent children was evidence of public recognition of the fact that long-time care must be provided for those children whose fathers are dead, are incapacitated, or have deserted their families; that security at home is an essential part of a program for such care; and that this security
Such a program was based on the absence of the father. What followed was the dissolution of the black family. Prior to 1950, black families resembled white families and were largely intact with low illegitimacy.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html
To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.
To go back to the political and social moment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is to return to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty had hardened into fixed orthodoxies—before phrases like “blaming the victim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of-wedlock childbearing” (the term at the time was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current.
We have had almost 50 years of lies.
I watched this young lady take on a BLM group in DC, and it is interesting in that she was a black and it looked like the BLM people were mainly white. She basically said what Dave did, BLM is a joke because you don’t care about all the blacks that kill blacks everyday.
I’ve been thinking of some of these statistics over the last couple of weeks. To see it laid out clearly with the citations and the links already there because @davecarter did all the work for me…
It’s a pleasure, a relief, and a great resource.
I shouldn’t post when I’m tired… Maybe I will end up regretting it, maybe not. I don’t know. I just want to participate.
I enjoyed the main post. I’m skeptical that discussions about “black on black” crime are rhetorically the appropriate/proximate response to blacks’ general concerns about police predation.
1) It isn’t parallel: cops invoke a specific civic/political authority that a random [black] person does not have with/to another random [black] person. The issue is that blacks are wary of the police, and if they don’t comply fully they are characterized as being aberrant. And the response is “well yes, but I can show you other statistics that suggest you really are aberrant.” I’m just not sure how this wins hearts and minds.
2) Generally these arguments get kind of “samey” and it bothers many people in the black community that there is this feeling that every dead black person is scrutinized or needs to be “contextualized.” I bring this up as an argument about political communication. (Why don’t blacks vote for Republicans more I wonder? No… No. They don’t know these FBI stats. They haven’t seen the same states every time the issue of blacks x cops comes up or someone posts/tweets about shootings in Chicago– people really do care about what happens in Chicago…).
–I’m not saying that posting this is wrong or a sign of being uncaring or uncharitable. I’m just saying there is an extent to which there is a “talking past each other” factor and it bleeds into how people assess each other.
3) It’s just not that likely that blacks don’t understand the difference between black on black crime and perceived police predation. Blacks really are talking about a specific policy point. Blacks’ trust in the cops is generally roughly in line with whites’ and blacks call the cops more than whites, and this increases on income. Blacks simply want to be able to trust the cops and feel accepted by them as normal members of the community. Or at least, that is the high level argument. As a revealed preferences argument, I’m skeptical that blacks’ concerns about the police have much to do with not assessing other threats to their well being (e.g., black on black crime). So this is a specific policy goal and not substituted by other policy goals like generally reducing black deaths.
Education is always tricky. Blacks, like most people, respond well to good educational treatments, it is just that they are hard to find and good treatments often decay quickly and are generally small (.5 sd change is huge in education studies). Early interventions can and do help, but it’s *early*, like “so you are pregnant let’s talk about how to be decent parents.”
“Act White”(culturally). Better yet, “Act Asian” (culturally). If you’re too intimidated to do that, and you want to stay moored to your failed culture, there’s not much hope for you.
Sounds bad, sound tough but there it is. You want ‘honest conversations’, well there’s some.
Certainly black males inclined to crime or violence are “wary of police.” How about middle aged black women? Anybody doing a survey of them?
The stats are “on average” but middle aged black women who are afraid their sons will be victims of what they see as an overactive police force? Yes.
The issue is not that blacks actually dislike the police. Survey evidence shows a lot more support than one might guess. The issue is that there is a persistent resentment of always having to justify why they have a concern about police predation (I get the stats argument). My comments (1, 2) were about responding to a particular dialogue/argumentative strategy and concerns that well meaning people are talking past each other.
Concur, wholeheartedly.
The problem is the left. When we think things are going passably okay, they are termites, working assiduously in the dark to ensure they can split the foundation, and make us a house divided that will not stand. Then of course, the termites can rush into the rubble and devour the frame, the infrastructure at their leisure.
The root cause of every malady and social malaise you articulated is the left.
There is a pretty good analysis of this I’ve seen this week . It about the “Humiliation” of having to have whites protect them from their own feral males. Can’t find the link right now.
Yeah, uh…we were there at about the same time, and saw the death of Kim Il Sung, and stared into the abyss of nuclear brinksmanship, and military and civil society had the feel that we were traipsing on the edge of Armageddon, but ROK at that time was a blast, no? Maybe because we were so close to the edge, life seemed a little sweeter.
I think noting black-in-black crime (and black criminal conduct in general) is relevant because it helps to explain why police might react differently to a black man than to a white (or Asian) man.
When a police officer encounters a random black man the police officer knows there is a much higher probability that the man has been involved in criminal activity than if the man were white or Asian. Until black men stop committing crime at rates 4 – 5 times the rate other men do, police officers are going to continue to react differently to black men than to white men.
Jerry, thanks for weighing in on this post, as you did on my previous one on the general subject. This thing was long enough to be a movie script, so thanks for hanging in there to read it all. A few points, if I may:
“You have no suggestion for reducing recidivism.” My post reads: “The idea that violent offenders are in prison to protect the community at large must be reinforced, and judges have got to stop playing Russian Roulette with the lives of law-abiding citizens.” That means, keep them locked up longer, so I think we’re in agreement there. As to how the policy should be worded, I don’t know. I don’t write legislation,..but I would either find a way via mandatory minimums and/or make them actually mandatory through parole ineligibility,….or find new judges (depending on whether they are elected or appointed).
“It is not clear that the schools are to blame, as opposed to broken families and, more tragically, the possibility that there is a genetic or biological basis for the significant and persistent IQ gap.” I don’t think failing schools and broken families are mutually exclusive alternatives. Both can be, and in my opinion actually are, major culprits. With respect to IQ scores, I don’t think that a world in which Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Allen West, Ben Carson, etc., run circles around their peers and the rest of us is indicative of genetic or biological problem. Rather, I think the problem is cultural, which is a point that leads to my final topic in the piece about accountability in the home, which I will address below.
“You want to reduce union control, and cite complaints against Ofc. Chauvin, with no evaluation of whether those complaints were justified or completely baseless. … By the way, the evidence is quite weak on the issue of whether his actions actually killed Mr. Floyd, or whether it was a fentanyl overdose or his severe cardiac disease, or some combination.” You make a valid point here. I cited a Heritage.org piece by writer Rachel Greszler, but I didn’t use a great deal of what she found due to space limitations. For example, she does allow that its is quite possible that disgruntled members of the community will lodge unfounded complaints against an officer they don’t, just to smear his record, or perhaps even to sideline a good officer so that the complainant can continue their criminal activity. However, she also cites Minneapolis Police Chief Robert Olson as saying, “During recessions [the city] would give the union management rights in lieu of money [and] that’s when the trouble starts. San Antonio Police Chief William McManus talked in the article about one problematic officer that he had to fire twice, and because of union protections, he still had to reinstate the officer. Ms. Greszler also cites a 2017 Duke Law Journal study that looked at 178 police contracts, “..and provided empirical evidence on how collective bargaining agreements ‘can frustrate police accountability efforts by limiting officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, banning civilian oversight, indemnifying officers in civil suits, mandating the destruction of disciplinary records, and limiting the length of internal investigations.”
And with respect to what did or did not kill Mr. Floyd, I spoke with a Ricochet member Duke Powell, on my most recent podcast, who has 49 years of experience with EMS, 36 years with the same EMS agency that tended to Mr. Floyd. While agreeing that Floyd had fentanyl and some other things in his system at the time of the arrest, he concluded that Floyd died from cardiac arrest resulting from “positional asphyxia and excited delirium” brought on principally by the officers kneeling on his back while he was pinned down the prone position. In short, he really couldn’t breathe. I also read a statement from Dave Bissonnette, who has been a police officer for 19 years, 16 of those years spent teaching Use of Force and Police Arrest & Control techniques at the Municipal Police Academy and other departments in southern New England. “Kneeling on someone’s neck is not a technique that is taught or accepted anywhere that I’m aware of. As a matter of fact, we specifically tell recruits and cops NOT to kneel anywhere near the spine and neck because you can paralyze or kill someone.” If the above doesn’t give you pause about the probability that Chauvin and the other officers killed Mr. Floyd, I don’t know what else to say.
On the topic of accountability residing in the home, you write in part: “But you don’t say what you would do about it, other than mentioning the Great Society welfare programs, which seems to be a hint that the policy response should be to end welfare.” That’s because there is no program, or policy response (outside of curtailing policies which have historically substituted Uncle Sam for fathers in the home) to people taking charge of their own communities and changing their cultural ethos from self destruction to cultural enrichment. As Shelby Steele noted in the quote I used, it’s time that for people to effect the changes that need to happen, no policy or dictate from the government is going to do that.
Thank you! I literally spent the last couple of weeks saving relevant articles and sources onto my little “Pocket” app so I could reference them for an article. This was the result. I’m gratified you find it helpful!
You’ve opened up some more research avenues for me. Thank you!
I saw that as well. Very powerful indeed.
I hear you, and I do get what you’re saying. Which is the main reason I also included actual numbers that show how many unarmed blacks have been killed by the police (without bringing the specifics of whether those police actions were justified, e.g., someone using their car as a weapon against an officer is still categorized as “unarmed,” etc.) The fact that there were 9 such instances in 2019, the fact that it was a 76 percent reduction over 2015, and the fact that whites are killed by the police at nearly double the number of blacks ought to figure into the mental/emotional equation, shouldn’t it? If it’s “talking past each other,” to present empirical evidence that undercuts hysterics,…then I really don’t know what else to do. Validating erroneous preconceptions has not worked, and isn’t going to work. I can’t step off of the Empire State Building and complain that gravity is biased against Cajuns.
But I actually don’t quite follow your point that, “The issue is that blacks are wary of the police, and if they don’t comply fully they are characterized as being aberrant.” If I’m pulled over for going 95 in a 55mph zone, and I don’t comply with the officer’s instructions, then yep, I’m being aberrant. I shouldn’t expect the officer to hand me a cookie for it either. Perhaps I need more caffeine, but I think I’m missing your point somehow.
I remember waking up the news reports the day that Kim Il Sung died. Yeah, we stepped up our game. The good news is that I had enough Soju that year to save my family the cost of embalming me one day. We should pour a round or six and trade stories sometime.
@davecarter Thank you for the reply!
Re: Empirics on changes in police shootings. Good points. Again– I enjoyed the post a lot. We probably emphasized or weighted different parts. Empirical evidence matters and should be used as an antidote to chaos and misconceptions. But I’ll go further– not to pick a fight! But because what you say is interesting.
Including the police shooting data isn’t really an argument for anything in and of itself. Police shootings of unarmed blacks (is that really the most interesting stat?) could decline for a variety of reasons. Data collection is just one part of theorizing. Why privilege a point estimate or two? Why raw rates of shootings over more interesting and valid relative rates? I actually don’t believe cops kill more blacks than whites once models are properly specified. But that’s not the only relevant issue. It could actually be the edge case issue. Which was sort of what I was getting at with point 3 (I hope!).
Re: Missing/not following my point. I assume you had a enough caffeine :) After your comments, I wish I had made the point more clearly and carefully. It was real time thinking + word limit + lots of things. Your response emphasized the police/procedural aspect. (Writing the post I guessed this would be a response/weak point in my argument….) I was trying to emphasize the communication/social aspect– there seems to be a general resistance to claims that policing may be rougher and more arbitrary for blacks even accounting for crime. Rightly (wrongly?), a lot of blacks who generally support policing have become sensitive (over sensitive?) to this. Maybe the point works, maybe it doesn’t. Generally: I just figured I’d give a couple of thoughts in order to receive some thoughts!
There is a thing called “The Bell Curve” in which there is a distribution. The people you named are on the “right” tail of that curve. There is a standard deviation level shift to the left of the average IQ of blacks, just as there is a smaller shift to the right of Chinese and possibly Japanese. I don’t know how much has been done to study other Asian populations.
Got it. Thanks! I should also clarify that I’m writing from a law enforcement perspective, given that I’ve had a little bit of experience, mostly in military law enforcement for a few years while on active duty. So I am biased toward procedural perspectives, since that was literally the difference between life and death at times. I am sensitive to very real possibility of rougher treatment for blacks by the police. I think there are very realistic reasons for this,..but everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt and to be treated with dignity.
What say you about the sort of aggressive, proactive policing we saw during Mayor Giuliani’s term? I’m sure it struck many as over the top,..but the streets became much safer and homicides went from 2,000 annually to the low 300s, if I remember right.
You raise a very good point about the fact that many blacks generally support the police. Heather MacDonald has emphasized this point repeatedly in her books, speeches, and articles. This would follow logically, given that that blacks are the overwhelming victims of black crime. When you hear the various mayors and officials caving in to efforts to “defund” the police by reducing their operating budgets in order to pour more into social programs, Ms. MacDonald points out that they are studiously ignoring their constituents in crime-ridden communities, most of whom want vigorous enforcement for their own safety.
Thanks again for the conversation. This is immensely enjoyable!
@davecarter
(I had to chop some of the reply to get my word limit back.) Thank you for the reply. Yes, very enjoyable. I was nervous about posting about this issue but I have enjoyed this and learned.
Giuliani and NYC, and I guess Bloomberg, stop and frisk? I actually think overall… okay? Critics point out the difference in the “hit rate” between blacks and whites for stop and frisk but it seems to be a misunderstanding of how one would expect stop and frisk to work if you had limited time and energy to do stops and frisks. I think it helped neighborhoods and stopping and frisking early on probably cut crime down without even needing to do so by increasing measured arrests. I get a little tense when people want to measure hit rates and arrests and other outcomes when the point of the policy is to intervene before arrests (as a for serious offenses) are necessary.
Heather MacDonald has generally been very good on policing. She helps me understand the legal issues since I get the measurement aspect of this stuff fairly well on my own. The defund the cops stuff… I really don’t like it and I believe it will hurt vulnerable people, so I like it even less. I don’t like that the news is allowing people who have been in national/state/local office for many years to act like they haven’t been in office forever and that there hasn’t been a long standing concern about policing and accountability.
Thanks for compiling all of these data, Dave, and putting them into a well written and coherent essay.
Now, about that book…
Those middle aged black mothers are part of the problem. My sister lives in Chicago with her retired CPD husband. A few years ago her black next door neighbors’ son was arrested for murder in the middle of the night. I don’t know what opinion the mother of the murder victim might have had. That neighborhood was even more upscale than my own parents “South Shore.”
http://abriefhistory.org/?p=5250
I would love her to get out of there but her husband had a stroke 10 years ago and she stays close to relatives.
I know….. And thanks!