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We’re back after our 4th of July break (well, most of us are back — we have Ricochet Editor Bethany Mandel sitting in for the vacationing Peter Robinson) and we’ve got another super-sized episode to make up for our time off. First up, the always great Heather Mac Donald, who speaks truth to protestors like nobody else. Then, meet Shermichael Singleton, former political strategist, a former Deputy Chief of Staff at HUD, and a former member of the GOP. Shermichael tells us why he’s left the latter two organizations and it should be required listening at the RNC. Luckily for us, Shermichael is a current Ricochet podcaster and if you have not listened to the Speak-Easy podcast he co-hosts with Antonia Okafor, we highly recommend it. Also, a bit on the Harper’s free speech letter, the triumphant return of the Lileks Post of The Week, and Bethany has a new Twitter friend.
Music from this week’s show: Everything Is Broken by Bob Dylan
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Hang on a wee minute.
How do you know that the George Floyd killing was a case of “prejudicial abuse of police authority”?
It might well have been, but how do you or anyone else know that? I frankly think it’s racist to assume it.
This one he’s probably right about, though accusations of murder as opposed to negligent manslaughter (with reckless and depraved indifference) are over the top and generally politically motivated.
Since we already know that George Floyd had lots of fentanyl and what-not in his system, it’s quite possible that he was just dying anyway and all the police did was keep him from thrashing about while it happened.
The entire ‘prejudicial abuse’ narrative is generally unfalsifiable; I just glanced through that Harvard study, and perhaps I missed it, but I didn’t see control variables such as ‘physical size of suspect’ or ‘local assault rates on police offers’, both of which offer non-racialized-and yes, justified-explanations as to why police offers (including black police officers) would use greater levels of ‘low-level force’ like using hands, handcuffs, or showing batons, as a precaution when interacting with suspects, even non-resisting and compliant ones.
And speaking of zero tolerance, we need zero tolerance for resisting arrest, Orwellian Marxist hate groups, and unfalsifiable claims of racially motivated police violence being used to justify or rationalize the first two.
I chose “killing” to avoid an assumption of intent. In support of your point, I commented earlier that it can be a serious mistake to overcharge (e.g. if you cannot prove intent). I’m very concerned about whether the increased charges overshot what they can establish in court. You are right that extraneous motivations can lead to overcharging, which risks failing to make the case.
Even if I’m wrong (and I might be), I’m not making a racist assumption about the cops because what I’m saying has nothing to do with the race of the cops involved. Black cops can also abuse authority.
Even if I’m wrong about this being “prejudicial abuse”, I suspect most people will agree that keeping a knee restricting the airway even well after Floyd is unresponsive is “abuse of police authority”.
I’m not even assuming we are certain it is a racial prejudice. It could be personal prejudice over some unknown grievance going back to when they both worked security at the same nightclub.
I’m guessing you agree that what happened is not justified police conduct. If his defense proposes some justification, I have yet to hear a believable one that is free of prejudice against Floyd.
Once again, assuming facts not in evidence. Indeed, the autopsy report that I read, indicated that Floyd’s breathing was NOT restricted. Keeping in mind too that he started saying “I can’t breathe” while still standing upright, that basically someone saying “I can’t breathe” – especially more than once – proves that they CAN breathe, and that once again he had levels of fentanyl etc in his system that would have been quickly-lethal to someone who was not a regular user.
It is good and right to scrutinize studies and their assumptions. There are plenty of bad studies and bad methodologies. I welcome critical examination.
My main point is that we need to eliminate the excuses and protections that allow the bad cops to stay on the job, abusing and giving a bad image to policing. I don’t much care whether there are many or few. There should be none.
An officer does need to take into account every relevant threat in each situation, including threatening words or actions toward themselves or efforts to resist the legitimate exercise of police authority. Their response must be proportionate to the actual events. I think there can also be a place for the officer making it clear that they are prepared to deal with any attempted assaults against the officer.
What they are not justified in doing is to preemptively mistreat a citizen just because that citizen’s skin color is the same as some other people who have assaulted police officers. We need to draw a line there because that is Prejudice and a violation of civil rights. (Should we punish all Muslims for 9/11 or all Japanese for the attack on Pearl Harbor?)
If one picked an NBA player at random, it is about four times more likely that the player will be black rather than white. But that would not mean one could pick a black man at random and legitimately assume this man before you is likely to be a player in the NBA. The former does not justify the latter.
We cannot presume guilt.
I think part of our disagreement might revolve around what constitutes a reasonable precaution (handcuffs, for instance) under difficult circumstances, and what constitutes mistreatment. FWIW, however, I was referring to locales where police officers face unusual risk of being assaulted, not the race of suspects; there is likely a racial disproportion due to cultural attitudes and relative rates of criminality, but the precautions would be based on race-neutral statistics or events and physical threat level, not race itself. I’m open to police reforms, but not debates centered around the presumption of prejudice (the immediate consequences of which have been made clear, and the long-term consequences of which will prove even worse) due to ‘disparate impact’.
That’s a statistical fallacy, or whatever the technical term might be.
If you pick a black man at random that man is not “likely” to be a player in the NBA, just because the number of NBA players is a tiny fraction of the total population. But any random black man is MUCH MORE likely to be an NBA player than any random white (or non-black, anyway) man, because an NBA player is X (maybe 4, maybe not) times more likely to be black, AND blacks are a much smaller share of the overall population (about 1 in 8).
BOTH ratios need to be applied.
Which suggests to me that a random black man is perhaps not 4 times more likely, but something like 32 times more likely, to be an NBA player, than any random white (or non-black) person.
The total share of NBA players to overall population is still low, though, much lower than crime rates.
So that still doesn’t mean anything like that if you have a random pool of 32 black men, one of them will be an NBA player. The black population of the US is about 51 million. If half are male, that’s about 25.5 million. If 1 out of 32 of all black males were NBA players, that would mean the NBA has about 800,000 black players, RIGHT NOW. But in fact, less than 4,000 people of all races have played in the NBA over the last 50 years.
I’m confused. @ericb, isn’t “prejudicial abuse of police authority” your term? Did you honestly not intend that term to mean racial prejudice, in a discussion prompted by the current events – race riots, ostensibly – that were triggered by the death of George Floyd, a black man, while under the (stipulated) abusive authority of Chauvin, a white policeman?
Okay, I see that you address this in your post:
Now I’m confused by what you consider “prejudice.” I admit it’s a word that’s confused me ever since I first heard it. If Officer Chauvin’s behavior toward George Floyd was in fact based on Chauvin’s personal experience with George Floyd, can Chauvin’s behavior reflect prejudice? Is “personal prejudice” even possible, given that in your supposition, personal prejudice derives from personal experience with only one other person, and is applied only to that one other person.
I have always thought that prejudice necessarily derives from a generic, rather than a specific source.
Another of the few times when Bill Maher has made sense, was when he says “Prejudice means to pre-judge. I promise you, I am not pre-judging. I am JUDGING.”
One can reasonably believe the officer is guilty of abuse and also that it was not a prejudicial act. It is possible he made a poor judgment based on the circumstances, rather than on any personal grudge.
It should be difficult to believe that any officer — even a corrupt and hateful officer — would slowly murder someone while so obviously aware he was being recorded on smartphones. One was pointed directly at his face only a short distance away. Most likely, the officers did not anticipate Floyd’s death.
That other officers present made no attempt to save him before calling the EMTs and that they were also aware of the phone recordings (without attempting to confiscate the phones afterward) reinforces the presumption that they expected Floyd to live. Odds are, they were only trying to subdue him… by methods which might or might not have been permitted by local standards. They knew the incident would be publicized.
The officers are rightly being investigated. But the popular narratives about the incident are obviously, recklessly presumptive and probably wrong.
Well put.
Correct.
If anyone, black or white, acts in a threatening manner and a policeman responds proportionately, that is appropriate. That is judging the situation, not prejudging it.
If a police officer presumptively acts with aggression according to some judgement he has made in advance of any such acts, that is pre-judgement or prejudice. It might be because of someone’s skin color or because of a bias based on personal grievance. The key is disproportionate preemptive action before sufficient actual justification from this person’s actions.
The confusion is understandable. My statement there was responding to the matter of whether it was “racist to assume” that the police were acting prejudicially, ie Am I assuming this about the cop because of the cop’s race? No, the race of the cop is irrelevant and I am not assuming anything about the cop based on the race of the cop. That’s all I was saying about that.
I am opposing prejudicial actions by police that are not justified by the actual behaviors of the person before them.
I agree. Black economist Thomas Sowell has written much to debunk “disparate impact” as a way to render judgement. He has many examples from around the world.
The only just approach is to assess the actual events of actual cases, eg. Did Floyd act in any way that justified keeping a knee on his throat even long after he was unconscious and unable to resist? If the justification is a presumption of what Floyd might do because some other black guys have done X/Y/Z, then that is a prejudicial use of power and a violation of rights.
It would be like attacking a redneck because of what some other rednecks have done. It’s wrong, even if what the other rednecks did was real.
There is nothing inappropriate about a justified proportionate response to actual events and observed threats from the person at hand. But if you’ve seen Minority Report, it is a very different matter to act against a person in advance of actual warranting events at hand. That’s when it becomes prejudice.
I didn’t claim an intent to murder, even for Chauvin. I do say the “eminently dangerous” act of kneeing a prone and handcuffed man’s neck for 8.75 minutes, almost 3 minutes while Floyd was unresponsive, shows at least a reckless disregard for the safety of his life that was without justification.
After 17 previous complaints, Chauvin plausibly assumed this was just #18 and he would later shake off #19 like all the others.
I can believe the others wanted Floyd to live, but that is not the same as having no concerns he could die.
Chauvin took command, using decisive authoritative statements. Though the others yielded to his lead and did not defy him, they expressed concerns as declarative statements and tentative questions.
Transcripts from Lane’s mic and then Kueng’s mic
(Kueng’s mic, p58):
(p59):
(p61):
(p65 EMT is involved)
Lane helps with CPR compressions. See Lane’s transcript starting at the bottom of p20.
That’s a nice sentiment, but the evidence suggests that it would lead to a lot more dead cops.
Dennis Miller used to say, more or less, “Noticing that the vast majority of terrorists are muslim, is not profiling; it’s being minimally observant.”
What evidence?
Notice that you’ve shifted to justifying prejudice, i.e. (as you correctly mentioned) pre-judging. The one thing that I excluded was the pre-judging that happens when a cop decides to user power to take an aggressive action against someone even before this person has acted in a way that justifies that action. Now, you are apparently trying to defend/justify that pre-judging, i.e. prejudice.
By that thinking, that would mean that cops are justified to mistreat black men generally, just because they have black skin (like a minority of blacks who are criminals). This confirms exactly what many non-criminal blacks have been claiming. In short, you’ve said they’re accusations are correct. It would seem that you think they should just learn to accept it and forget about the violation of their rights.
Why should we think this would help and improve the effectiveness of police interactions with black men? When a black man who has not acted wrongly cannot expect to be treated an unprejudiced manner, this is supposed to be good, right, and helpful?
Justice cannot treat the innocent as though they are guilty because of someone else’s misdeeds.
I expect that many excellent cops do well by treating people as individuals and by assessing each situation according to what is actually happening. I challenge the unsupported assumption that pre-judging people and acting according to that prejudice is helpful, let alone necessary, to effective policing.
On the contrary, that predisposes toward aggression. (And yet there was so much skepticism of the Harvard economist’s study indicating that very outcome.)
So it doesn’t really happen, and it’s necessary standard practice to avoid police deaths? Which is it? Both??
I would claim it actually makes matters much worse in many ways when blacks are told that, because of their skin color, they cannot expect just treatment under the law from law enforcement officers.
The evidence is that blacks commit not only more murders and other crimes, but 4 times what their share of the population accounts for. I don’t think it’s unexpected or even necessarily bad, if cops recognize that maybe just whatever city they work in, has more crime than some other city they used to work in. And there really is no logical difference in recognizing that certain groups account for more crime than other groups. As I quoted earlier, that’s not really profiling, it’s just being minimally observant. And failing to account for such realities could easily lead to more dead cops.
I think there’s a huge difference between keeping a knee to someone’s throat for 10 minutes and, say, handcuffing a large (but apparently compliant) suspect in a dangerous neighborhood as a sensible precaution. And even in the case of George Floyd, I’m unaware of any evidence that he was presumed dangerous because he was black.
Maybe rather than the word prejudice, which has become weaponized, let’s use that other pre- word: precaution.
Discernment.
That could work in a new setup, but for a pre- word to replace prejudice, precaution is likely the best.