I increasingly believe there are kinds of anti-system crimes which should be punished with highest sentences. I'm thinking of crimes that have disproportionate, negative impact on stability and security of society. Like this. Or fucking with vaccinations, like CIA people did.
(Incidentally, I also believe that the guy responsible for fake bomb detectors (from the other thread on the frontpage today) should get at minimum a murder-level sentence, for willfully putting lives of lots of people in danger.)
That's not to say we shouldn't treat it as seriously just that it's a different intent.
The CIA did this as well in Central and South America in the previous century. They got away with it as well, of course. The series Narcos and movies American Made and Che Part One and Che Part Two are albeit partly about these subjects. Not to mention more recently the collateral murder video.
I'm not entirely sure why? I guess if you got the military and economic high ground you get away with doing things like that?
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/October-2016/Chic...
Drill rap, the music of Chicago's gangs, is ultra violent and serves as a method of calling out other crews and taunting them into a response. Thanks to Youtube, Soundcloud, and social media the spread of this music is now easier than ever. The threats that come from this music are often followed up on.
Why do they do it? As one rapper says: “If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?” “You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.”
The parent poster was talking about how gangs become the law and order because of the lack of trust in police. I'm saying the issue is wider and deeper than that. If you read the article, it becomes clear that one of the large driving factors for these rappers is the notoriety and fame they get from doing this is oftentimes the only way they can feel significant. It's a way for them to get money, sex, notoriety. Maybe even a record deal so they can get the hell out of the place they are in. What kind of chances and opportunities does an inner city youth really have?
This notoriety can twist back in its own ways too: "The guy having the hardest time was Blaze. He seemed to be battling depression. At one point, after a shooting on a corner, he said to me, “Man, I’m so sick of this. I feel like a prisoner in my own neighborhood. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go to my job because I don’t know if the opps will be there to come after me.” He was wallowing in how badly he wanted to be done with the gang life. He told me he wanted to move to California, but his reality felt inescapable to him. He started using PCP at an alarming rate. It was his way of coping. He became difficult to be around. He would stutter and trip over his words. His complexion got bad. His hygiene, too."
It's one hell of a life and not one that I could begin to imagine.
It's a downward spiral that has been going on for decades. To make matters worse, policing is delegated to the state and local levels, which aren't under the microscope that the federal government is.
It's also not just a black or minority problem. I say this because I believe many white voters are more complacent because they don't believe they would be affected by it. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong police officer, you aren't immune to disastrous results. White voters shouldn't fool ourselves to believing they are unaffected. Remember blacks get killed disproportionately to the national population, but whites get killed in higher numbers.
It's depressing.
Holding public office is a privilege that rightly should come with a different threshold of privacy/transparency.
And yes, no nation is taking the issue of police conduct seriously if it's not even recording wrongful death consistently and reliably.
Some colleagues ran a trial on body cameras and found improved metrics, particularly around stop-and-search. The success rate of stop and search increased, officers reported feeling safer. They also noted an increase in allegations but I don't think dug into that as much as they wanted to (it may be an area where the behaviour feedback loop was slow enough to need a longer study duration).
http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/trial-results/measuring...
The police are not here to protect you, but to ensure the functioning of society. This isn't pessimism; it's a fact of legal precedent - they have no obligation to protect any citizen [0].
Justice only happens when the crime unpunished would lead to undesirable destabilization of society. Sexual harassment was rampant in Hollywood for decades, only now that it threatens stability does it receive attention.
Our ideals of justice and freedom only but tools and illusions to keep the gears of society turning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
Can you show me the data set that breaks down police killings by race of the killed person please?
Or can you even point me to the dataset that just lists all police killings?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
white killed by police: 495 (49.5%)
black killed by police: 259 (26.1%)
hispanic killed by police: 172 (17.3%)
other: 67
What really offsets the data is once you begin to include racial statistics on crime. Obviously police officers aren't just taking individuals out of the population and random and killing them (isolated outliers not included), so it would be irresponsible to just compare the racial component of police shootings with population representation. This data, however, varies greatly by area. However, in urban environments in particular, the racial component in crime is enormous. In Chicago, for example 75.3% of homicide was committed by black people, 24.6% by hispanics, and 3.5% by white people. To expect equal representation in police shootings, given those crime statistics, would be completely insane.
So the long story short is: given a straight comparison to population distributions, there is an overrepresentation of black/hispanic shootings by police. With the inclusion of racial participation in violent crime though, the motivation for police fatalities cannot responsibly be attributed to a racial motivation without a serious multivariate analysis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
This is probably the best there is that I know of and it only goes back 2-3 years. The federals don't have anything complete.
Stop accepting any physically fit hothead off the street because they can be trained into the role. Lastly, as a citizen, be willing to pay more in taxes knowing that the person who pulled you over cares, is qualified, and will not shoot you and try to cover it up.
And while the racial component of police shootings has been portrayed in a way which differs sharply from the actual data on race/crime/police lethal force, there IS still some element of uncertainty in the exact figures. The fact that there is any uncertainty at all in police killings being reported correctly is absolutely INSANE to me. This is not an area where we can have sloppy data. If a government agent is responsible for the death of a citizen, it is unacceptable that we not have a very clear record of all surrounding circumstance.