At least for a moment, antagonists on either side of polarizing issues could see beyond the epistemic horizon of their most comfortable talking points. Black Lives Matter activists thanked the police for their protection and sacrifice. Conservative Republicans, most notably House Speaker Paul Ryan and former speaker Newt Gingrich, spoke movingly about race in America. Gun-rights activists were dismayed that Philando Castile, the man shot by a police officer in Minnesota, had followed all of the rules — he had a gun permit, cooperated with the officer, etc. — and was still killed.
So are people able to view this along one another’s axes? I doubt it.
1. Progressives, who communicate in terms of the oppressor-oppressed axis, stress entrenched racism.
2. Conservatives, who communicate in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis, stress the importance of maintaining respect for police.
3. Libertarians, who communicate in terms of the freedom-coercion axis, stress that laws from the state ultimately are backed by force, so that if you want less state violence you need fewer laws.
Judging from my facebook feed, some libertarians also seem eager to align themselves with progressives.
My own feelings are mixed. On the progressive side, it seems reasonable to me to hold police to a standard that they should respond to the same behavior in the same way, regardless of the person’s race. Shopping while black should not be presumed criminal.
On the conservative side, it seems reasonable to me to want an active and assertive police force that is treated with respect. It seems likely that an active and assertive police would be particularly beneficial to poor people living in dangerous areas.
Is it sensible to be completely race-blind when criminal behavior is so skewed by race? I am a young white male with a shaved head, and I support getting more aggressively screened heading into a sporting event or airport than the old lady behind me. Of course, there needs to be boundaries…but those boundaries should be commensurate with the risk. Unfortunately, being completely race/sex/age-blind is a wildly inefficient means of threat prevention. Isn’t Israel the best in the world at this, and don’t they rely heavily on various types of “screening?”
And on the libertarian side, racial fairness is, indeed, an important issue, but not the most important one. Police militarization (middle-of-the-night SWAT raids), excessive use of force, over-the-top reactions to perceived disrespect, and policing with asset forfeiture as a prime motive (that sometimes amounts to armed robbery by the men in blue) are all serious problems regardless of race.
Blue privilege trumps white privilege.
Regarding your last point, largely forgotten in all this is the fact that the tough-on-crime approach was strongly backed by black community leaders and politicians back in the 80s and early 90s, because black people were the ones bearing the brunt of the crime wave. That doesn’t mean it was good policy, but the “Progressive” assertions that this constitutes some kind of racist war on black people is grossly ahistorical.
The big question about the fall in crime is why and will it continue to remain lower? (It has gone up marginally the last 2 years.) In the early 1990s the African-American community was not as bothered by increased stops as it was a local way to change the course of crime. Now in the 2010s with crime way down in the inner cities and a new generation in which the gansta Compton days are past history. Is there any data about the number of stops of African-Americans? Has it increased? I found it shocking that Senator Tim Scott was pulled over 7 times. I haven’t been stopped 7 times in my 46 years.
Unfortunately, it appears the Trevyon Martin case signaled the change of African-Americans be stopped in their communities.
This has nothing to do with your three axis model, but I have a pet theory I have yet to articulate and this is as good an excuse as any to do so:
I forget where I read about this and now I can’t find it, but there is a phenomenon similar to the Environmental Kuznets Curve where, as people grow wealthier, they become less willing to tolerate different kinds of personal risk. People can afford more safety precautions and they have more to lose when those risks they face turn sour. For most people, this manifests itself in demands for more regulation of things like environmental quality and product safety, as well as the occasional panic over drugs or satanism (’80’s), assault rifles (’90’s), child molesters and kidnapping, children being left in a hot car (’00’s), etc. The result is some weird stuff like schools built like fortresses, playgrounds built on giant pads of rubber, and left turns becoming basically illegal at any intersection without a stoplight with an arrow.
My suspicion is that police are not immune to this trend, and this, unfortunately manifests itself in a higher frequency of the use of debilitating force when interacting with members of the public deemed to present a risk to the officers’ personal safety. The tendency is to taser first and make up the answers to questions later.
Throw in some Coming Apart trends where a growing underclass is increasingly divorced from middle class attitudes and behaviors and you’ve got a toxic mix of trigger happy cops trying to police a large, segregated, insular lumpenproletariat completely at odds with most of the rest of society, and the two sides predictably wind up absolutely loathing each other.
BLM rests on the idea that black people are systematically harassed by the police for no reason other then the racism in their deep dark hearts.
There is no evidence for this though. The discussion is always the same. Black people have X% interactions with the police and Y% arrests. That’s more then white people, therefore racism.
When you point out that given the level of black crime, black belligerence and attitudes, and the fact that police officers operate in limited information environments where those two factors are the only information they have, that X% and Y% actually seem pretty normal and there is no racism problem they just deny deny deny.
If there is no racism problem, then BLM is just a hate group trying to do a shakedown. There list of demands when they shut down the Toronto Pride Parade is a good example:
http://americablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/blm-demand.jpg
Though I still think that gives them too much credit. I think a more likely analogy is like a political version of “flash mobs” trashing convenience stores.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocCcMIhAHi8
This can be heard to get across to white people, because they are empathetic. They like to imagine themselves in another person shoes. “It would take an awful lot for *me* to chimp out on a cop or act like BLM, therefore there must be something to what these people are doing.” Having been taught that all people are the same, they assume this logic holds. It doesn’t though, because the underclass is fundamentally different in its behavior and nature.
Watch that flash mob video. Can you imagine yourself doing that? We are talking about people who are fundamentally different then us.
There is nothing to learn here. The other side has no legitimate argument. Nothing can really be changed because their dysfunction is genetic.
If you really wanted to end crime in the ghetto you would dispense with constitutional rights and treat the underclass in the way it needs to be treated. It’s really the only way to keep them in line. That’s how people have seen things throughout most of time (and still see them in Asia).
“It seems likely that an active and assertive police would be particularly beneficial to poor people living in dangerous areas.”
But has it worked out this way in practice? I don’t think so. Maybe in some state of the world an active and assertive police would be beneficial in poor and dangerous areas. And maybe to an extent they are beneficial in the current world. But they also appear to be harmful in some ways.
I can see the theoretical logic of the conservative side, but in practice it doesn’t appear to be working out that way.
One thing is that when people think they are being pro-cop, they are really being pro semi-random stops and the collections of procedures and assumptions built into the current status quo of standard operating procedures. They assume the current procedures serve law and order, but they are not the people to make that determination, because they would never question cops.
I doubt the current system of traffic stops fishing for outstanding warrants or visible drug paraphernalia and random sampling through hunch stops or stop-and-frisk would pass a statistical process control sanity check. Even if it did, where is the mountain of empirical studies proving its superiority versus alternatives?
It is easy to be pro policework without being pro gestapo-style cop tactics. In fact, the latter is not pro policework to me.
Active and assertive policing works if its actually active and assertive. Not if you allow general lawlessness but occasionally pull people over for a traffic ticket. The police in Baltimore have done nothing to stop the criminal acts against me or my friends. They did nothing to stop the rioting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_5KQC7k8Lc
It’s really hard to call that “active and assertive”. If this is what its like in the gentrified neighborhoods, imagine what its like in the actual ghetto. A better description rather then “active and assertive” is “random and furtive”. I have no doubt random and furtive doesn’t do much.
A look at the way law and order is handled in Asia would give an idea of what it takes to keep people in line. They aren’t squeamish about corporal punishment and skirting of constitutional rights to keep order. They are also A-OK with racial profiling. You need to make it very clear to people what kind of behavior is acceptable and harshly and immediately punish all transgressions. I think a big part of the problem is middle class white people assuming that the underclass can operate under the same rules as they can. They can’t.
This also matches up with my own experience. My mother worked at one of the best public schools in NYCs Puerto Rican neighborhoods. It was the best because the ex-nun principle did a ton of things that were illegal and racist to keep the gangs out. They were also necessary.
If you think police are “active and assertive” while crime spirals out of control and nothing it done about it your crazy. Real “active and assertive” policing could clear out crime in the inner city within a year. It would be an ugly transition though, too ugly for pearl clutching progressive to bear. So we get half assed policing instead, because no-ass policing would mean people coming into the gentrified parts and full-ass policing would be too much for sensibilities.
Instead what we have in Baltimore is 15% of the force quitting since Freddie Grey even as crime sky rockets. And every armchair liberal who thinks he knows the “proper and correct way” to deal with underclass savages offers his armchair analysis. Meanwhile, people that actually have to operate within your bullshit rules increasingly say fuck it and quit.
Does policing work? Sterling’s shooting will be justified legally, Castille’s probably should not be, but what exactly did the policing hope to prevent?
It is like justifying traffic enforcement by agreeing that we want safe traffic but never actually wondering if it actually works.
You attribute none of the fall in inner-city crime to policing? If not, then you must also attribute none of the recent jump in inner-city crime to less-tough policing. If policing doesn’t work why do inner-city populations constantly ask for more in response to crime?
I attribute it to 1. Unleaded gas and 2. The increased incarceration that resulted from leaded gas. But nobody knows.
Current “policing” of the random stop variety? Indeed I attribute none, except to the extent it increased incarceration. But that says nothing of the value to cost ratio.
Unleaded gas? Christ your insane. Do you know how easy that is to debunk.
People will do ANYTHING but admit to underclass dysfunction. Wouldn’t want to be RACIST!
No. It is not easy to debunk.
It is far easier to debunk the idea that policing suddenly got tougher all at the same time in ever single everywhere.
Go for it.
Ni, insane strawmanning jerk, I do not deny genetic differences.
So, blacks got less bad and impetuous over a couple decades?
Or did I just say increased incarceration. Please try more reading and less impetuousness.
Crime rates rose because blacks got EVEN WORSE!
Then crime rates fell, because…blacks got better…and because we made Rudolph Giuliani king.
Wow, that’s some great insight you have there, fdsa.
No, it is. Lead is blamed for everything. Yet strangely lead in Asia and Asian neighborhoods didn’t make them act like pathological blacks.
Nor did the lack of lead close the black/white IQ gap and turn the next generation of blacks into the “solar engineers of the future”.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/07/lead-poisoning-and-great-1960s-freakout.html
Crime rates in general a skyrocketed starting in the 1960s, along with lots of other pathologies. They reached a local maximum in the early 90s because of the crack epidemic peaking, but really the entire post 1960 environment has to be regarded as one giant high crime equilibrium which is fundamentally different then what came before.
When we go back to our pre-1960s crime rates, or achieve what developed NE Asia has achieved now, I’ll be satisfied on crime.
Oh, I see. You don’t understand that we aren’t Asia, and don’t want to be, and never will be, thank God.
Nor do you seem to know what “debunking means” or ceteris paribas or words like “everything.”
I suspect lead does what we know lead does.
Antarctica doesn’t have our crime either. But that is just as silly as saying Asia has any bearing. I bet Asian crime is below white crime. I guess we should institute caning and replace all our whites with Asians.
Japan is a punchline. They have an island. They practically practice eugenics. They won the genetic lottery of the world and compared to the bundled good US freedom their results are garbage.
I just said people assume policing works.
And I definitely believe police can negatively affect security. I talk all the time about how if you punish good guys for self-defense (or announce you will not protect the public, as cops in Brazil are doing in order to strong-arm for better pay) that can have short-term effects on crime by the “tyrannical anarchy” effect.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/page/ct-crime-baltimore-murder-ferguson-freddie-gray-broken-windows-perspec-0607-jm-20150605-column.html
Looks like this “Ferguson effect” is not even a hypothesis yet.
One important dimension that is missing from the three axis explanation the issue of local governance. Local police departments are generally independent and are free and willing to adapt to the preferences of local majorities. This shouldn’t require a national referendum or national discussion.
If local communities want gentler police service, or they want stronger protections from crimes, those should be discussed at local city councils and implemented by city mayors eager to please their their residents.
What I don’t like is the Democrats want to assert control over local police from the federal level, and take credit for things that go over well, but when things go badly, they can assign blame to locally owned police departments.
How do we know that Castile cooperated with the police officer? Castile seems innocent of any serious crime, the police officer seems wrong, and even if Castile was difficult or non-responsive, that certainly doesn’t warrant lethal force, but the public video only shows after the shooting. I don’t see how you can rule out the possibility that Castile wasn’t fully cooperative.
One issue that I see is the media pushing the Progressive narrative.
Based on TV coverage, what percentage of people shot by police would you think are black?
I’d estimate that CNN spends at least 80% of their time covering people who are shot by the police on black victims. Maybe my estimate is wrong, but I’d be shocked if it’s below 50%. In reality, 25% of those who are shot and killed by police are identified as black. That’s disproportionate to their representation in the general public, but not the all out race war that the media wants to portray. I wouldn’t be shocked if this narrative they push helped influence the shooter in Dallas.
“As of Sunday, 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015. Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).”
That quote is from here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/
Here’s one recent example of a white teen being shot to little public interest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/06/an-unarmed-white-teen-was-shot-dead-by-police-his-family-asks-where-is-the-outrage/
To be summarize:
Too many people are shot and killed by police. Blacks are shot at a disproportionate rate, and far too many are shot and killed by police. I certainly wouldn’t rule out racism on the part of some police officers, even if there may also be other factors at play. But this isn’t quite the Police vs Blacks war that the media wants to stoke. The police make a lot of mistakes that include other groups as well.