To Serve And Protect

Maybe it's just me, but it looks like police officers are slamming people to the ground with more regularity than ever before.

This is real life. Not WWE or MMA.

 

The whole power structure is falling apart. With these police aggressions and the anger in the public at large we are headed toward something really big.

While social media is showing what hasn't been shown in the past it is also pushing what didn't happen at times as well. This idiot in Cincinnati is clearly a murderer if there is nothing extraordinary that can be shown to have happen before that video was edited and it should be a source of outrage but at the same time how many people lost their businesses and livelihood in Ferguson because of the "flash reaction" there?

You can feel it coming....

 

Brian Bolton, A Memphis Police officer, was gunned down while making a routine traffic stop. Barely any "media" attention and the twitters are silent.

Not equating it to anything here but just noticing the difference in reaction. This officer, by early accounts, was following all the rules and just got shot in the face.

Same thing happened here in Virginia a few months back. A cop pulling over a suspected stolen vehicle and was ambushed. Black cop and Black perp so I assume that's why we didn't hear much about it nationally. Sad truth is that we hear very little about this stuff unless it meets a political narrative these days. Police hide statistics, media hype (or create in the case of Ferguson) race in ones they decide need coverage while ignoring true and verifiable tragedies going on in our inner cities. White kid with a gun shoots up a kindergarten we get a new law in someone's "name". 400 Black people under the age of 25 die in Chicago alone in the same time since then and nobody knows.

 

I'm not sold on the systemic racist police forces at all. I always look to the math of any issue as it's what I do for a living. The statistics show a correlation not out of the probability range for Black and non Black encounters with the Police that result in deadly force. This issue presently cherry picks numbers and ignores others. When you chase the $$ behind the movement you find money from overseas from organizations that have nothing to do with wanting this issue resolved. Rather they are interested in changing how our society works and looking for any way to divide.

Has there been racist cops or even racist police forces? Hell yeah. Are there still cops who act on race first? Yup. Are there police organizations that act in a racist manner? This is where I separate myself from this "issue". This movement still clings to the Michael Brown incident as an example of racist cops. They "sell" it to the people in the inner cities. My kids who play ball for me are inundated with it at their school and the "rights" leaders in their neighborhoods. Only one problem... It didn't happen. This right here is proof to me that this is a political movement and not one based in solutions. Speaking of solutions, what is the solution this movement is asking for? That seems to be a very important piece of their message if they are truly for helping people. The message is organize and unionize but no solutions other than grievance. Follow these guys and not those. Believe this and not that. This happened no matter what you year anywhere else. Nothing good will result with this amount of dishonesty. This is how you "control" a group not lift them up.

As for the math. American Indian males are 25% more likely to die in encounters with Police than Black men. They are incarcerated at a rate about 25% higher than Black men as well. Since the early 1960's Black male deaths at the hands of the police are down around 68% while White Male deaths at the hands of police are up 13%. Any other part of our society this would be seen as progress. One needless death is one to many but the movement is definitely in the right direction. If you listen to this stuff you'd think we are in the 1930's again.

My personal beliefs are that the creation of a dependency state creates a lot of the crime that results in these statistics. It's where the debate doesn't go because the ones forcing the debate are looking for more of this as a solution. Native American populations and largely black inner cities have a lot in common as far as dependency. They have a lot in common as far as education. They have a lot in common as far as addiction. They have a lot in common as far as incarceration rates, violent crime and mortality rates. Black people have groups organizing them. Where's the movement for the Native Americans? Sadly the answer is in voting blocks in my opinion.

Statistics will also show almost no difference in the numbers of whites incarcerated when you control for dependency, addiction and education levels. This doesn't scan so it's filtered out of the debate.

No one will even begin to look at the results of the dependency state in these larger social issues. This "movement" limits itself at "Black lives" while more White, Hispanic and Native American lives end just the same way in total. Unity by division has always been a strange approach to me.

Finally, this movement gives credibility to guys like Farrakhan and his rhetoric of separation and hate. That right there is enough for this black man to step back.

 

Also Police, like all government employees, are difficult to fire. You basically have to go through a trial before they can be terminated due to deals the unions struck with city officials. So a lot of cities send these "bad apples", as the bad police apologists love to call them, to the economically depressed parts of the city where the residents are less likely to sue. Coincidentally, many of these officers are called racist, when they're just folks who shouldn't be police officers. Period.

A partial solution to the problem is demanding that city officials not align themselves with police unions. If they feel that their chance of being reelected is in jeopardy if they align themselves with the unions, then changes to the union contracts will be more likely to happen. Making it easier for bad apples to be terminated.

 

If you want to see what 75 years of union cronyism nets you look up Homan Square. While the stories center on race the larger picture is much more frightening. Militarized police with strong arm union cronies. If you dig into this a little you'll find that this facility is in an area of Chicago where blacks have ruled local politics for decades. A certain very important black man was alderman not far from this facility while it was being used. The noise is about race but it obscures a lot larger issue.

 

My thing is this... Is the system perfect? Nope, but no system is... Are there racist cops? Duh! But it does not encompass what most police departments are all about. This movement that is going on, is cherry picking their stats, and videos... Is there a rise in police brutality? No... Sorry to disappoint, but it hasn't.... You cherry pick some videos that work in the favor of this pointless movement and bam you have your ammo...

What troubles me is that people aren't looking at the stats that are conducted nation wide.... You guys want facts? Want numbers? Okay, here.
Forget numbers that are presented by the Feds, since you know, they're in on it too.

Here is a little site that keeps updated about the people killed by police...

http://killedbypolice.net


You will find that the number of white people are greater than the black people killed... I'm assuming the cops don't like whites as well? And just for fun, here are the stats that were present by our own government..



Maybe these cops are sub consciously racists towards whites as well?

 

My point is this... If Mike Brown was white instead of black, I really feel this whole Anti-police movement wouldn't be happening...

There is still no indication that police brutality or police racial discrimination is on the rise... It's just social media has become so easily accessible that you can cherry pick videos... and make it seem like we have some sort of epidemic.

And I have a problem with non-trained, non-police personnel, meaning citizens, politicians, and the media, telling us (cops) how to do our job, how to react to situations, how to treat people; when they have no idea what we go through, the people we deal with, how we have to stay vigilante so we don't get shot like the recent string of officers, how to maintain our cool when unreasonable people continue to be unreasonable....

Not directing my anger towards any posters on here, I apologize if I seem I am.. I'm merely venting about the situation as whole. I just don't like how the general public views me as scum, when I feel I am a decent human being only trying to do good...

 

This is a statistically biased evaluation. This is not to say that you have any bias personally but that when you filter by difference first you get difference.

I write data base queries for a living. When you examine a data set you have a number of ways to do it. Your example is a very basic one and from the approach of finding a statistical probability the wrong one. This is why I said above that these articles and "movements" cherry pick and are less than honest at times. In other words, when you look at a wide range of demographic criteria you find that race is not a statistically significant predictive factor in determining if you will be shot by the police.

Deaths of unarmed suspects by police.... When you query a data set with ALL demography variables you will find over 85% correlation in the following 3 areas. Economic status (both individually and the zip code of the encounter), education level and employment status. In the 70% range of correlation you will find substance abuse/addiction. Mental/Physical impairment is also around that level. When you go inside those correlated groups and filter for race you find non statistically significant results meaning that from year to year there is no racial correlation to the data.

Now if you begin by using % of population by race and then just look for unarmed deaths at the hands of police you get what you noted. There is no correlation to demography other than % of population.

Now lets talk predictive analytics. Going back to the early 60's the rate at which whites and blacks have been killed by the police are divergent. Significantly divergent as well. The rate is going down for blacks and up for whites. On the surface that is interesting to say the least. Now if we do the same query based on a wide range of demographic criteria you will find that the rate at which white are at an increasing risk of being shot by police is 90% correlated to the increase in whites in poverty, lower education level and employment status.

Now at the end of this you can overlay the fact that more Blacks are in poverty, have lower education levels and are unemployed in percentage terms than whites and find out why what you noted is also true but for a completely different reason than racism.

I noted that if you want to just stay at the level of "race" and % of population then this thread should be about Native Americans and not Blacks. They are at a much higher risk of being shot by police than Black people. Now you can look at it from the very shallow point of view of just racial makeup or go deeper into the demography and find guess what? The exact same 3 factors again.

If you look at incarceration rates by race you see what you noted. A significant slant toward blacks in terms of % of population. If you query based on those 3 to 5 criteria it disappears.

If you want to just look at Blacks in this country you can find this again in the numbers. Black "natives" (born here) vs Black immigrants (legal immigrants). If you look at the rates of incarceration, death (by source), economic status, education, addiction etc. you will find that there is very little common correlation. Immigrant Blacks, on average, are higher than the entire demographic average in economic, education and addiction criteria. This again points to other factors than just race.

If you take a look at those 3 factors and add in the zip code information for the locations of the encounter (shootings and incarceration) and the zip codes where the highest % of public assistance occurs in our country you again find a 80%+ correlation. This doesn't prove public assistance causes this but it does add more depth to the subject matter.

To circle back to your assertion that Blacks have a 3.5 to 4 times higher probability of being shot by police. It's a yes and no answer. Yes from that very shallow view. No if you look at all of the other factors with very high statistical correlations. A middle class black man who writes data base queries for a large Quant Analysis company in DC is no more likely to be shot by the police than the white person doing the same thing in the cubicle next to him. Conversely a While male in poverty, without a job and a high school drop out is just as likely to be shot by the police as a black man in the same conditions.

This is a very emotion charged subject and as such ripe for political bias. There are some horrific things that have happened recently that have raised this to the level of a national issue. The 3 to 5 demographic criteria for this haven't really changed in 60 years. The trends for blacks and whites are divergent in one respect (rate at which they are shot by police) and not in another (increasing % of white people in poverty, under educated and unemployed).

Time brought up Twains' comment about statistics and damn lies. Data is not biased. How you use it can be very biased. To do a typical statistical analysis of something like this typically takes a month or so just to write the query and another 4 to 6 to filter if for potential intrinsic bias.

There! That's more than I've written on the internet in my whole life!

 

It

wouldn't change the fact that he should never have been an NBA coach.