Shouldn’t this be biggernews? This is shocking (at least to me). Sure, “all of the gunshot wounds are non-life-threatening.” OK… but… that doesn’t make it OK. I don’t get it. Do we not care just because, I don’t know, white people be crazy? Imagine the outcry had the shooters been Muslim. Or black.
Tag: race
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Right-Wing Lies (XI): Donald Trump says…
There’s something that’s starting to scare me about Trump and his supporters. I mean, is it really inconceivable that he will win the Republican nomination for president?
Here’s a doozy of a Tweet posted by Donald Trump:
Leaving aside the racist imagery, Trump’s numbers aren’t even close to being true.
Here are the (approximate, but true) numbers (which, like Trump, omits hispanics):
Blacks killed by whites: 11%
Blacks killed by police: 4%
Whites killed by police: 10%
Whites killed by whites: 84%
Whites killed by blacks: 15%
Blacks killed by blacks: 89%
Can people really believe that 4 in 5 murdered whites are killed by blacks? Or is just something the fearful Right wants to believe? Either way, such a belief, with no basis in truth, is somewhat between ignorant and terrifying. (Also, there is no “Crime Statistics Bureau — San Fransisco”)
When the leading Republican candidate for President has behavior entirely consistent with fascist thuggery, I think he needs to be called out. Whether it’s Trump’s thinking that it might be good for his white mob to rough up a minority protester, his openness to the concept of registering all Muslims in America, him calling Mexicans rapists, his lies about Arabs in Jersey City cheering the fall of the World Trade Center, or his overall tone of lies and fear mongering.
I don’t know if trump is a fascist. I think he’s more just an attention whore than an ideologue. But maybe he really does believe what he’s saying. Certainly his followers love it. America has a long and ugly history of Nativism. And while not all Nativists are fascists, there is a bunch of overlap.
Source: (an actual real one) UCR, 2010-2013. Yearly police-involved shootings extrapolated from the Washington Post. Hispanics in the Post are reclassified as 86 percent white and 12 percent black. This is to be consistent with the UCR, which does not count Hispanic as a race.
Update #2:
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Do you mind if I search your black car I mean car?
It’s not so much that blacks are more likely to get stopped while driving, it’s that blacks get searched much more than whites after a car stop. This has been documented for at least 20 years. I’m a bit surprised it’s still happening at this level. It was a big issue after the bullshit “drug courier” profiling scandals in the late 1990s in Maryland and New Jersey. I sort of thought it faded away. Silly me
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It’s more dangerous to be black than to be a cop
I heard this somewhere recently and it made me go, really? So I thought I would double check.
Indeed, one is more at risk to be murdered as a black person in America than as a police officer.
For 2013 and 2014 I get an average of about 80 officers killed on duty per year (this excludes correctional officers, traffic accidents, a few other categories.) That’s a rate of 9.0 per 100,000 (based on 885,000 officers).
Meanwhile the homicide for blacks in 2013, men and women, is 15 per 100,000. (Based on a black population of 41.7 million and 6,261 homicides in 2013.) That’s crazy. Blacks are three or four times more likely to be shot and killed as on-duty police officers.
[Now of course one could quibble that cops are only on duty 1/6 of the time and a good chunk of cops never see the street. Meanwhile being black is a 24/7 job. So hour by hour it might be more dangerous to be a cop. But stop quibbling. Even with a flawed comparison, sometimes you just need a stat just to smack you on the side of the head.]
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One way to do it
I have an opinion piece in today’s Washington Post:
I told her to get back in her car several times, which she finally did reluctantly . I approached and asked for her license. She was on her phone saying she wanted a sergeant and another officer and added: “If I’m going to get shot, I want it to be recorded because I know this is recorded and I know my rights . . . if I get shot, I want it documented.”
She wouldn’t stop talking, yelling really, at me and into her phone : “He just pulled me over for being black. I can’t believe this would happen to me. There are all those drug dealers, and you’ve got to harass me!”
…
As I returned to my car, a call came over the radio for a woman being assaulted by a police officer at my location.
In light of the Sandra Bland car stop, I couldn’t help but think of this one car stop I did, many years ago. Nobody got hurt.
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The math of American racism: blacks are outnumbered by racists
This is one of the few things that really stuck with me from my grad-school days. A simple mathematical analysis of racism in America. It was in a class with Professor Orlando Patterson.
I think of this math when people say we should be post-racial. Or say that we need to condemn anti-white racists as strongly as we do anti-black racists. To be clear, we should condemn all racism. But no, anti-white racism isn’t the same problem as anti-black racism. It’s not just about the hate. It’s also about the demographics and the math and the very essence of what it means to be a minority.
Here’s the math. There are roughly 320 million Americans. Of those, roughly 41.7 million are black. About 280 million Americans are not black.
Now ask yourself: what percent of Americans are racist? Of course it depends on how you define racism. But can we use 15 percent as a working figure? Maybe that’s too high; maybe that’s too low. I don’t know. You can pick whatever percent you want. But let’s do the math for 15 percent.
If 15 percent of all Americans are racists, that means about 6 million blacks who hate whites (or Asians, or whomever). Since there are 280 million Americans who are white or another non-black race, the odds that you, a non-black, would come across somebody who hates you because of your skin color are pretty slim. If you’re not black, and you come across 100 Americans at random in a given week, maybe 2 of those 100 people will be blacks who hate you for the color of your skin. Also, and this matters, there are 46 of you for every one of them. So if there were some gigantic street brawl between all 6 million black racists and all 280 million targets of their racism, the racists would get crushed. When you are part of the majority, there is safety in numbers.
Now let’s flip it around. If 15 percent of all Americans are racist, that means there are about 42 million anti-black racists walking around. There are more racist Americans than black Americans. Blacks are outnumbered by racists. Think about that. If you’re black and come across 100 Americans at random in a given week, 13 of those 100 people will hate you for the color of your skin. When you are part of the minority, there is danger in the numbers.
Every time a black person leaves the house, there’s one racist sonofabitch out there potentially waiting for him or her. If there was a big street brawl between racists and blacks, the racists would probably win. That’s why we — our society, any society — need to be more concerned about minority rights. An attack on a minority group, any minority, is more dangerous because the group is a minority.
So even if you and your white friends aren’t racist, that’s nice. But it doesn’t really matter. And it certainly doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t happen simply because you don’t see it. It’s like pointing out to police that a lot of people in their post aren’t criminals. That’s nice… but the good people are not the ones you need to focus on. It’s the people out to cause harm that get your attention. And if there are more of them than there are you, then you’ve got a real problem.
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Cops shoot and kill unarmed man
No real point here. Except it happens. And you won’t hear this (except in Des Moines) because there’s no racial element to the story. Does that make the shooting any better or worse? I don’t think so.
Apparently there was a protest of one.
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Race, drugs, arrests, and hospital admissions
I recently got some interesting data over the email transom.
Here’s the thing: It’s largely assumed that white and black illegal drug use is about the same. And that’s based on legit sources. The kind of drug people take varies by race. For instance crack is still disproportionately black. Meth and LSD still mostly white. Generally.
But those who point to the racism of the drug war, myself included, start with the assumption that illegal drug use overall is not disproportionately black. Quick random links: 1, 2, 3, and 4. I did find one opposing view (but even that only questions a 20 percent difference).
Now the link between drugs and violence is disproportionately black thanks to the prohibition and the nature of illegal drug distribution. Public drug dealing equals violence. Buying from friends and family and coworkers? Much more copacetic.
Blacks are 32 percent of those arrested for drugs, which is roughly twice what would expect to find based on the number of blacks in America.
But the nature of drug dealing (and police presence and reaction to violence rates) does explain some of the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rate. You don’t get arrested for drugs unless A) police find them. And that sometimes often relates to B) people complain about it. (Street corner drug dealing in particular.)
So explain this: Why are blacks roughly one-third of those admitted to the ED (formerly known as the ER) for illicit drugs? This is rate 2.5 times greater than one would expect, based on 13 percent of Americans being black.
click to embiggen.
Leaving out when race in unknown, 60 percent of PCP patients going in to the ED are black, 50 percent of cocaine admittances, 15 percent for heroin, 28 percent marijuana, 9 percent meth, and less 1 percent for GHB and LSD. All in all it’s 33 percent. The ED admissions percentage, by race, is the exact same as the percentage of those arrested for drugs.
What gives? Perhaps the hospital data is bad. But I’m more likely to suspect that surveys on illegal drugs use are bad. Are blacks are 2.5 times more likely to buy bad drugs? Are blacks are 2.5 times more likely to go to the hospital if they have a bad trip? Maybe. I don’t know.
I can’t figure out how to reconcile these hospital admissions data with the long-established belief that illegal drug use rates are consistent across race. Any ideas?
[Update: A lot of people have good ideas. But I think it comes down to the fact that blacks are twice as likely (per capita) to go the ED (and there are a bunch of reasons for that). That could explain away 80% of the 2.5X disparity right there. The rest could be measurement error or anything. That’s close enough for me. I consider that a good honest answer to a good honest question.]
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Occupy the Corner
Protests in Baltimore against violence. From the Baltimore Sun:
“Occupy the Corner,” as it was called, was the opening salvo in another year of community outreach arranged by the anti-violence group known as 300 Men March. As they have for the past two years, members plan to gather every Friday evening into the fall to walk the streets as a group and engage residents young and old in an effort to make neighborhoods safer.
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“There are a lot of people who want to do something about the violence but don’t necessarily have the outlet,” Bahar said before Friday’s event. “That’s why we created ‘Occupy the Corner’ — to give people an outlet, not against police violence but more specifically the day-to-day violence happening in the communities, of young folks gunning other folks down.”
City Councilman Brandon Scott joined the sign-wavers, saying he hopes it will help reclaim the Penn North neighborhood from drug dealing.
“When we are engaged in our communities, we have less violence,” Scott said. Last year, the group focused its efforts in the Belair-Edison community in Northeast Baltimore, Scott said, because there had been a spate of homicides there. During the months of activity there, he added, the number of killings dropped.
Scott also drew a distinction between the anti-violence efforts of 300 Men March and the protests against police violence.
“Both issues are valid,” he said, adding that he may very well join the rally Saturday, too. But complaints about police misconduct are no excuse, he added, for failing to take personal responsibility for what goes on in the community.
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“This is very good, but it’s only symbolic,” said Field, 63, who leads African-American heritage tours. “As soon as the 300 crowd came, the evil folk left,” he said. But he added that “five minutes after they leave, it’s going to be a drug corner.”
If you really think that people (black people in particular) only care about violence when it comes from police, you’re either woefully uninformed or willfully ignorant.
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“If I had a hammer… I’d hammer out justice.”
This is the second paragraph of an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates:
When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t, or won’t, support their children at a level that we deem satisfactory. Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, “You deal with this.”
Nothing against women’s rights advocates, but I haven’t heard anybody question the logic of passing laws that lock people up for failure to pay child support. (And while I’m at it, can I just mention that mandatory domestic violence laws are racist, do not work, and have have hurt countless men and women.)
This is the first paragraph. It’s just as good:
There is a tendency, when examining police shootings, to focus on tactics at the expense of strategy. One interrogates the actions of the officer in the moment trying to discern their mind-state. We ask ourselves, “Were they justified in shooting?” But, in this time of heightened concern around the policing, a more essential question might be, “Were we justified in sending them?” At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems–homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one’s children, mental illness–are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can’t be every place.
And this if from the end:
Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors.
I’m pretty sure Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t trying to be pro-cop, but that’s the kind of line that will get carried off on cops’ shoulders at a police convention!
That last paragraph goes on:
The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.
There’s more. And you should read the whole thing. But that is my good-parts version.
