Updated: November 15, 2017 Also see this 2020 update. And an important caveat. Using data from 2014 through mid November 2017 (killedbypolice.net for 2014 and the Washington Post thereafter) Oklahoma City Police kill an average of 6.3 per year; NYPD 0.57 a year. The rate in Oklahoma City is 11 times as high. The rate per officer is 27 times…
I’ll cut right to the chase, I think this is a bad shooting; but not as bad as many people seem to think. (In my very first sentence, I probably just pissed everybody off.) Terence Crutcher wasn’t armed. And I don’t think he was an imminent threat when he was shot. Therefore it wasn’t reasonable. And that’s the legal standard…
[This relates to my previous post] Years ago, like when I was 13, I was with my father, driving from NYC to Chicago, on a baseball road trip (he drove). Between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, we spent one night in Johnstown, PA. (Remember the Johnstown Flood!). After watching the Johnston Jonnies play baseball, we had dinner in a local bar. My…
John McWhorter on the developing taboo of using the phrase “black-on-black crime.” (Spoiler alert: “We need to nip the burgeoning of this new and useless taboo in the bud with all deliberate speed.”): “What’s wrong is to refer to black on black crime as evidence of something uniquely pathological about black people. … [But] to instead classify the term “black…
Update: The links have changed (oops!) since these were first published. Here are links to all my August 2016 posts on the DOJ report on the BPD. 1 https://copinthehood.com/initial-thoughts-on-doj-report-on-2/ 2 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-1-2/ 3 https://copinthehood.com/the-dojs-war-on-broken-window-2/ 4 https://copinthehood.com/cant-you-take-joke-2/ 5 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-2-n-word-2/ 6 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-3-that-damn-kid-on-2/ 7 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-wrong-4-on-diggs-dig-2/ 8 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-1-2/ 9 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-2-actual-department-is-2/ 10 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-3-actual-department-is-2/ 11 https://copinthehood.com/the-doj-is-right-4-actual-department-is-2/ From Vice Magazine: Of course, some former Baltimore cops take issue…
From the Times: Two teenagers were killed and at least 18 people were wounded early Monday when attackers raked a crowd with gunfire outside a nightclub here that had been hosting a party for young people, the authorities said. Sound familiar? Yeah, because it is. But this isn’t even the main story of the day. It kind of started as…
John McWhorter wrote this article about race and racial discourse. I doubt most readers here subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s behind a paywall, and you can’t access it back-door style through google. So though this excerpt doesn’t really do his whole argument justice, it’s better than nothing: After the horrific shootings in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and…
This past week John McWhorter and I were both (separately) on Bloggingheads.tv with Glenn Loury to talk about race and all the recent shootings. McWhorter emphasized race as a factor of those shot by police and: challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so…
This police-involved shooting is bad. And unlike the killing of Alton Sterlingin Louisiana, I’m willing to call this one before the polls have closed. This more recent shooting in Falcon Heights, Minnesota reminded me of Joseph Schultz. Schultz, you probably don’t remember because you’ve never heard of him, got shot in the face in 2003 by FBI agents who were…
Apparently, in the Stanford rapist case, the judge. If you’re still in denial that our justice system can be mean and even racist, would you at least consider that it often benefits the rich and privileged? And then can you see that these two statements are essentially one and the same? Here’s very interesting take from Ken White, a defense…