This site published a debate between Rafael Mangual and Lara Bazelon a while back. Personally, I've found Rafael to be one of the clearest voices on the subject of crime. His recent book Criminal Injustice was one of the most eye-opening works I've read. It makes the argument both philosophically and statistically that the notion that Black Americans are being indiscriminately murdered by the police is a myth. Criminal Injustice also proceeds to dismantle many other progressive shibboleths regarding race and crime, including the idea that people should be afraid of their interactions with the cops.
These days the police typically kill about 1,000 individuals per year. Mangual estimates that these 1,000 deaths are the result of roughly 3,000 police shootings. Given that the police make roughly 10 million arrests each year, if we assume that each of the 3,000 shootings is the result of a separate arrest, we arrive at the fact that only about 3/10,000 or 0.03% of arrests end up with an individual being shot. If a person simply does what the police say, that probability declines to virtually zero.
Note that this is the probability of an adverse encounter conditional on an actual arrest attempt. Conditional on merely an interaction with the police, the probability of an individual being shot is even lower. In 2018, over 61 million individuals reported at least one interaction with the police. The total number of police-civilian interactions each year is undoubtedly higher. The notion that Black Americans or Americans of any race should live in fear of being shot by the police is wildly hyperbolic at best.
Matt Taibbi recently participated in a debate where he highlighted the failings of the mainstream media with respect to Trump and Russiagate. I would argue that the failure of our journalistic institutions to accurately report on the situation of crime in this country is a far worse sin. The media's obsession with Trump seems silly at best. Its dissemination of misinformation regarding policing has been outright dangerous.
Much has been written about Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, with its exhortation for white Americans to do the work of advancing racial justice. If nice white people read Rafael Mangual’s book Criminal Injustice instead and did the work of understanding the real situation of race and crime in America, I have no doubt this country would be vastly better off as a result.
"Black Lives Matters signs are everywhere, reflecting Kensington residents’ solidarity with working-class black people in cities like Richmond—even as Richmond has become less safe as a result of the changes that movement has ushered in."
Behold, the American Far Left summarized in a single sentence. Who cares if the policies actually work? What matters is the joy of virtue signalling about the noble cause.
Yet another example of the dangers of the left's utopian thinking. It's almost like the 20th Century never happened... Stalin? Pol Pot? "Great Leap Forward"? Any of that ringing a bell??? Apparently not. Let's try it here, I'm sure it will work out great this time.
What’s incredibly aggravating is that anyone with a proper, honest, analytical assessment saw this coming even before Floyd.
The constant politicization allowance and lack of ownership of criminal activity is why this has happened. Until pursuit of truth and the proper probability of outcomes are in demand, it will only get worse.
I’m glad the officer addresses the incredibly difficult task of split second decisions. Law enforcement isn’t infallible, they’re human. I belief 99+% of police interactions go without issue. It’s the very small incidences captured on video that distort the work that’s properly done. It’s also the coverage of a major case that’s covered DAILY where the primary motivation is looking to second guess or find errors in the policing work. It’s absurd.
We need to address the honest expectation of what human beings can achieve in highly volatile situations. A man can fail 70% of the time hitting a baseball and be called a hall of famer. A police officer can have 20,000 positive interactions and then placed in a difficult situation and then accused of abuse of power.
This country NEEDS to have an honest conversation of what expectations of policing looks like. And for any pundit pandering for some organization to take a permanent vacation.
Great article, but one small quibble: George Floyd was not killed by Derek Chauvin. Although Chauvin is clearly not the kind of fellow you want in uniform, channeling William Penn, right is right and wrong is wrong.
Floyd had enough fentanyl in his blood to easily kill him, even considering that his drug-addicted liver was revved up and eating drugs for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Secondly, unless I missed that day in medical school, the windpipe is on the front of the neck, not the side, where Chauvin had his knee. The technique used by Chauvin to restrain Floyd has been used countless times with no problems. Floyd was struggling to breathe because his central nervous system had little molecules blocking its nerve cells, not because he was being murdered.
This was so depressing I had to stop reading. Let me ask this - what progressive idea has NOT turned out badly? Their litany of failure is so drearily successful that it seems they have the reverse Midas touch - turning everything to which they minister to merde. "Defund the police" - what could possibly go wrong? Release violent sociopaths and psychopaths without bail - streets will be safer. Call drug addicted vagrants "homeless" and let them sleep on subway grates and use subway cars for toilets. And now give rein to every lunatic who wakes up thinking they're Napoleon and forcing us to address them as "General." How about calling proggies what they are - lunatics. At this point if a proggie says "good morning" (they seldom can summon the manners and grace to do so) - you know it's bedtime. Although every once in awhile, I get the feeling that the insanity is nothing but part of a plan to destroy the United States of America - the only nation that stands between liberty and the ghouls in Davos.
In Seattle, during the pandemic lockdowns, BLM protestors were allowed to conduct illegal protests of the police on the i-5 highway in open defiance of the law and of pandemic restrictions. Seattle's city officials, rather than clearing the protests, assigned police to shut down the highway entrances to allow people to illegally protest them.
This ended when a college student from Africa took the off-ramp onto the highway and hit two protestors on accident, killing one and permanently crippling the other.
Twitter posted a bird's eye view of the accident and declared it a murder by Trump supporters. The story spread internationally as proof of Trump's deadly hate speech, and Seattle subsequently unfurled giant banners to BLM from their skyscrapers.
In the same week, in my neighborhood of Bothell, a young police officer was shot dead during a routine traffic stop. Outside of Bothell, nobody cared.
That police officers are leaving the service is not surprise. To be law enforcement was never the nicest job, hours are long, pays is mediocre, stress in risk are high. Put people wanted to serve and protect their communities, and took pride in their job. Also communities respected and valued their police officers.
Today, honestly you need to be crazy to want to become police officer in many metropolitan areas in US (Portland, LA, Seattle, NYC, DC to name some). Hours are worse than ever before, crime is booming, streets are effectively not safe, but the worst of all, thanks to MSM and politicians large part of population are treating Police Officers as root of all problems and criminals victims of the system. This leads that this part of population elects politicians that implement laws that further make law enforcement impossible. Since many public prosecutors have became woke, entire policing has become Sisyphus work, where police arrests criminals, for those just to be released by some progressive prosecutor next day.
No wonder moral is low and nobody wants the job, when large part of politicians and MSM is constantly calling you racist, white supremacist for simply trying to enforce laws that those same politicians implemented.
Yes there are issues in police, lack of training, over militarization, unions that protect bad cops, but for every bad one there are 100 good, who do their job with pride.
Sadly this demonization of police will just make things worse in long run, because less and less people will be willing to serve, crime will go more and more up, making job even less attractive than it is now. This wont affect elites in Martha's Vineyard, Manhattan or parts of Silicone Valley, they will just pay private security and not worry. Its middle class and lower classes that will suffer the most, because they will be left on mercy of criminals (what is already happening)
George Floyd was not murdered. Let's start there. If Chauvin's appeal is ignored, what self-respecting human being would become a police officer? Frothing-at-the-mouth pitchforkers ran out into the streets burning shit down in response to a video with MISSING PIECES. Floyd laid himself on the ground after ingesting the rest of his drug wad. He'd done this before. That "knee on the neck" was a sanctioned restraint against excited delirium. Perps claim that they "can't breathe" all the time. Floyd is the first person -- and perhaps the only person -- who had COVID but didn't die of COVID. If anything -- one could call it manslaughter. But it sure as hell wasn't murder and that this was decided by the jury -- to protect themselves -- is nothing short of tragic for us all.
Now only the real thugs and racists and what have you would dare become police officers. All those morally panicked USEFUL IDIOTS made their racist dreams come true.
And even worse -- when I tried explaining to people why Chauvin had his knee on Floyd's SHOULDER, and that there were pieces missing in the video (if you watch it in its entirety you'd see how polite and almost deferentially they were treating Floyd -- so I am even more baffled beyond belief at the outcome of this trial) THEY WOULD GET UPSET AND START SCREAMING AT ME....like irrational little babies...
If this is the state of our so-called "educated class..." -- and our judicial system....and yes, the media is at fault, but even so: our "educators" are tyrannical ideologues who do not teach their charges to do the damned research.
The mission statement of "Black Lives Matter" openly stated that they were a communist revolutionary movement dedicated to overthrowing the culture of the USA. They took it off their website in 2020 when hundreds of millions of dollars of private and corporate money flowed in.
When Cubans protested their communist government in 2020, inspired by the protests in the USA, BLM released a statement in support of the whiter communist government rather than the Afrolatin protestors. The protests ended very badly for many of those black people. They did not receive millions of dollars of luxury properties.
BLM was never about the welfare of black people, and they've done nothing to restrain black on black violence in the years since their political victory. Instead, there are more black crime victims than before, and DEI officers positioned in every institution in the USA.
This is what a communist cultural revolution looks like from the inside. And so many people are afraid to push back, lest they be denounced by the revolutionaries as the terrible "r" word.
I left policing in Georgia (patrol officer in a county police department) back in 2019 after five and a half years of it. The job was sprinkled with good times and bad times, humor and horror. I’m glad it was something I got to do, but in the end, I didn’t want my family subjected to the whims of Twitter in the event I had to take action due to someone else’s poor choices. Maybe if it was just me, it would have been different.
I’ve shared this article before, but I think it compliments today’s post quite well and is worth a glance.
I wonder how many police officers retired or were terminated because they didn’t want the jab. Didn’t Ron DeSantis offer jobs to out of state police officers fired for not complying?
The lies told about the occupation of police officer are among the most glaring and obvious of the “new order” progressives. In this new order, we don’t trust local police, we don’t trust our religious leaders, they’ve infiltrated our respected doctors and universities: just trust the federal government and shut up. Those who believe that in order to create an equitable future and redistribute wealth the existing structures must be burnt down, are doing a smashing job. Nothing in this piece is news nor shocking this many years into this nonsense, where progressives collide with China toward their mutual goal of the destruction of the US, but these individual stories must be told until the silent majority wake up and demand their basic rights of safety. We should respect and reward our officers, like our military, who shoulder the burden of our freedom and safety, anything less is a crime.
I’d guess those twelve murders in a few days in Richmond and Oakland were all blacks. Congrats regressives, you’ve made black lives hell, almost as if they really don’t matter.
The left, doing what they’ve done since reconstruction, the KKK, Jim Crow and now BLM, hollowing out our major cities. Performing systemic racism along with planned unparenthood.
This site published a debate between Rafael Mangual and Lara Bazelon a while back. Personally, I've found Rafael to be one of the clearest voices on the subject of crime. His recent book Criminal Injustice was one of the most eye-opening works I've read. It makes the argument both philosophically and statistically that the notion that Black Americans are being indiscriminately murdered by the police is a myth. Criminal Injustice also proceeds to dismantle many other progressive shibboleths regarding race and crime, including the idea that people should be afraid of their interactions with the cops.
These days the police typically kill about 1,000 individuals per year. Mangual estimates that these 1,000 deaths are the result of roughly 3,000 police shootings. Given that the police make roughly 10 million arrests each year, if we assume that each of the 3,000 shootings is the result of a separate arrest, we arrive at the fact that only about 3/10,000 or 0.03% of arrests end up with an individual being shot. If a person simply does what the police say, that probability declines to virtually zero.
Note that this is the probability of an adverse encounter conditional on an actual arrest attempt. Conditional on merely an interaction with the police, the probability of an individual being shot is even lower. In 2018, over 61 million individuals reported at least one interaction with the police. The total number of police-civilian interactions each year is undoubtedly higher. The notion that Black Americans or Americans of any race should live in fear of being shot by the police is wildly hyperbolic at best.
Matt Taibbi recently participated in a debate where he highlighted the failings of the mainstream media with respect to Trump and Russiagate. I would argue that the failure of our journalistic institutions to accurately report on the situation of crime in this country is a far worse sin. The media's obsession with Trump seems silly at best. Its dissemination of misinformation regarding policing has been outright dangerous.
Much has been written about Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility, with its exhortation for white Americans to do the work of advancing racial justice. If nice white people read Rafael Mangual’s book Criminal Injustice instead and did the work of understanding the real situation of race and crime in America, I have no doubt this country would be vastly better off as a result.
"Black Lives Matters signs are everywhere, reflecting Kensington residents’ solidarity with working-class black people in cities like Richmond—even as Richmond has become less safe as a result of the changes that movement has ushered in."
Behold, the American Far Left summarized in a single sentence. Who cares if the policies actually work? What matters is the joy of virtue signalling about the noble cause.
I’m surprised this article could be written without a passing mention of Obama’s part in vilifying the police.
Yet another example of the dangers of the left's utopian thinking. It's almost like the 20th Century never happened... Stalin? Pol Pot? "Great Leap Forward"? Any of that ringing a bell??? Apparently not. Let's try it here, I'm sure it will work out great this time.
What’s incredibly aggravating is that anyone with a proper, honest, analytical assessment saw this coming even before Floyd.
The constant politicization allowance and lack of ownership of criminal activity is why this has happened. Until pursuit of truth and the proper probability of outcomes are in demand, it will only get worse.
I’m glad the officer addresses the incredibly difficult task of split second decisions. Law enforcement isn’t infallible, they’re human. I belief 99+% of police interactions go without issue. It’s the very small incidences captured on video that distort the work that’s properly done. It’s also the coverage of a major case that’s covered DAILY where the primary motivation is looking to second guess or find errors in the policing work. It’s absurd.
We need to address the honest expectation of what human beings can achieve in highly volatile situations. A man can fail 70% of the time hitting a baseball and be called a hall of famer. A police officer can have 20,000 positive interactions and then placed in a difficult situation and then accused of abuse of power.
This country NEEDS to have an honest conversation of what expectations of policing looks like. And for any pundit pandering for some organization to take a permanent vacation.
Great article, but one small quibble: George Floyd was not killed by Derek Chauvin. Although Chauvin is clearly not the kind of fellow you want in uniform, channeling William Penn, right is right and wrong is wrong.
Floyd had enough fentanyl in his blood to easily kill him, even considering that his drug-addicted liver was revved up and eating drugs for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Secondly, unless I missed that day in medical school, the windpipe is on the front of the neck, not the side, where Chauvin had his knee. The technique used by Chauvin to restrain Floyd has been used countless times with no problems. Floyd was struggling to breathe because his central nervous system had little molecules blocking its nerve cells, not because he was being murdered.
This was so depressing I had to stop reading. Let me ask this - what progressive idea has NOT turned out badly? Their litany of failure is so drearily successful that it seems they have the reverse Midas touch - turning everything to which they minister to merde. "Defund the police" - what could possibly go wrong? Release violent sociopaths and psychopaths without bail - streets will be safer. Call drug addicted vagrants "homeless" and let them sleep on subway grates and use subway cars for toilets. And now give rein to every lunatic who wakes up thinking they're Napoleon and forcing us to address them as "General." How about calling proggies what they are - lunatics. At this point if a proggie says "good morning" (they seldom can summon the manners and grace to do so) - you know it's bedtime. Although every once in awhile, I get the feeling that the insanity is nothing but part of a plan to destroy the United States of America - the only nation that stands between liberty and the ghouls in Davos.
In Seattle, during the pandemic lockdowns, BLM protestors were allowed to conduct illegal protests of the police on the i-5 highway in open defiance of the law and of pandemic restrictions. Seattle's city officials, rather than clearing the protests, assigned police to shut down the highway entrances to allow people to illegally protest them.
This ended when a college student from Africa took the off-ramp onto the highway and hit two protestors on accident, killing one and permanently crippling the other.
Twitter posted a bird's eye view of the accident and declared it a murder by Trump supporters. The story spread internationally as proof of Trump's deadly hate speech, and Seattle subsequently unfurled giant banners to BLM from their skyscrapers.
In the same week, in my neighborhood of Bothell, a young police officer was shot dead during a routine traffic stop. Outside of Bothell, nobody cared.
That police officers are leaving the service is not surprise. To be law enforcement was never the nicest job, hours are long, pays is mediocre, stress in risk are high. Put people wanted to serve and protect their communities, and took pride in their job. Also communities respected and valued their police officers.
Today, honestly you need to be crazy to want to become police officer in many metropolitan areas in US (Portland, LA, Seattle, NYC, DC to name some). Hours are worse than ever before, crime is booming, streets are effectively not safe, but the worst of all, thanks to MSM and politicians large part of population are treating Police Officers as root of all problems and criminals victims of the system. This leads that this part of population elects politicians that implement laws that further make law enforcement impossible. Since many public prosecutors have became woke, entire policing has become Sisyphus work, where police arrests criminals, for those just to be released by some progressive prosecutor next day.
No wonder moral is low and nobody wants the job, when large part of politicians and MSM is constantly calling you racist, white supremacist for simply trying to enforce laws that those same politicians implemented.
Yes there are issues in police, lack of training, over militarization, unions that protect bad cops, but for every bad one there are 100 good, who do their job with pride.
Sadly this demonization of police will just make things worse in long run, because less and less people will be willing to serve, crime will go more and more up, making job even less attractive than it is now. This wont affect elites in Martha's Vineyard, Manhattan or parts of Silicone Valley, they will just pay private security and not worry. Its middle class and lower classes that will suffer the most, because they will be left on mercy of criminals (what is already happening)
George Floyd was not murdered. Let's start there. If Chauvin's appeal is ignored, what self-respecting human being would become a police officer? Frothing-at-the-mouth pitchforkers ran out into the streets burning shit down in response to a video with MISSING PIECES. Floyd laid himself on the ground after ingesting the rest of his drug wad. He'd done this before. That "knee on the neck" was a sanctioned restraint against excited delirium. Perps claim that they "can't breathe" all the time. Floyd is the first person -- and perhaps the only person -- who had COVID but didn't die of COVID. If anything -- one could call it manslaughter. But it sure as hell wasn't murder and that this was decided by the jury -- to protect themselves -- is nothing short of tragic for us all.
Now only the real thugs and racists and what have you would dare become police officers. All those morally panicked USEFUL IDIOTS made their racist dreams come true.
And even worse -- when I tried explaining to people why Chauvin had his knee on Floyd's SHOULDER, and that there were pieces missing in the video (if you watch it in its entirety you'd see how polite and almost deferentially they were treating Floyd -- so I am even more baffled beyond belief at the outcome of this trial) THEY WOULD GET UPSET AND START SCREAMING AT ME....like irrational little babies...
If this is the state of our so-called "educated class..." -- and our judicial system....and yes, the media is at fault, but even so: our "educators" are tyrannical ideologues who do not teach their charges to do the damned research.
The mission statement of "Black Lives Matter" openly stated that they were a communist revolutionary movement dedicated to overthrowing the culture of the USA. They took it off their website in 2020 when hundreds of millions of dollars of private and corporate money flowed in.
When Cubans protested their communist government in 2020, inspired by the protests in the USA, BLM released a statement in support of the whiter communist government rather than the Afrolatin protestors. The protests ended very badly for many of those black people. They did not receive millions of dollars of luxury properties.
BLM was never about the welfare of black people, and they've done nothing to restrain black on black violence in the years since their political victory. Instead, there are more black crime victims than before, and DEI officers positioned in every institution in the USA.
This is what a communist cultural revolution looks like from the inside. And so many people are afraid to push back, lest they be denounced by the revolutionaries as the terrible "r" word.
I left policing in Georgia (patrol officer in a county police department) back in 2019 after five and a half years of it. The job was sprinkled with good times and bad times, humor and horror. I’m glad it was something I got to do, but in the end, I didn’t want my family subjected to the whims of Twitter in the event I had to take action due to someone else’s poor choices. Maybe if it was just me, it would have been different.
I’ve shared this article before, but I think it compliments today’s post quite well and is worth a glance.
https://www.police1.com/public-perception/articles/a-letter-to-the-american-public-why-you-must-decide-what-you-want-from-cops-d4qW0mL97LU0w5eX/
I wonder how many police officers retired or were terminated because they didn’t want the jab. Didn’t Ron DeSantis offer jobs to out of state police officers fired for not complying?
The lies told about the occupation of police officer are among the most glaring and obvious of the “new order” progressives. In this new order, we don’t trust local police, we don’t trust our religious leaders, they’ve infiltrated our respected doctors and universities: just trust the federal government and shut up. Those who believe that in order to create an equitable future and redistribute wealth the existing structures must be burnt down, are doing a smashing job. Nothing in this piece is news nor shocking this many years into this nonsense, where progressives collide with China toward their mutual goal of the destruction of the US, but these individual stories must be told until the silent majority wake up and demand their basic rights of safety. We should respect and reward our officers, like our military, who shoulder the burden of our freedom and safety, anything less is a crime.
Remember folks, today's Democrats - everything they touch, they ruin.
I’d guess those twelve murders in a few days in Richmond and Oakland were all blacks. Congrats regressives, you’ve made black lives hell, almost as if they really don’t matter.
The left, doing what they’ve done since reconstruction, the KKK, Jim Crow and now BLM, hollowing out our major cities. Performing systemic racism along with planned unparenthood.