Police

Five black protesters shot by white supremacists in Minneapolis

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.

Police

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,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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