I try and fight them lies on both sides. And finally one ace reporter, William Freivogel of St. Louis Public Radio, sets the record straight regarding ProPublica’s lie that that black teens are “21 times” more likely than white teens to be killed by police. This is the first light of day my lengthy bitching on the matter has received.…
Tag: race
Racial progress, nicer white people, and black-on-black crime (Or: Why don’t white people care about justice?)
There is a great interview with Chris Rock in New York Magazine. What stuck with me was his insight that “black progress” is a misnomer. What America has seen over the years (in fits and starts) is “white progress”: So, to say Obama is [black] progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president.…
Why are white people so loud?
Or (though you didn’t know it) a favorite subject of mine: White People Rioting for No Reason. I’m surprised there is nothing from College Park on the list. I have no moral here. Other than you can’t fight stupid.
Who do you believe?
Let me start by saying we’ll never know for certain what happened when Officer Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. [Update: but we not do have a much better idea based on a DOJ report.] No. Seriously. Think about it. You don’t know what happened. I don’t know what happened. So whatever you think, whatever I think… the only thing…
*Let’s* Monday Morning Quarterback
Imagine, say, you get a call for an armed person waving a gun in a park. Here’s what you don’t do: drive right up to that person on muddy slippery ground to put your partner in an unprotected and defenseless position a few feet from the suspect. I feel sad for the officer involved. He does have to live with…
Those pesky facts
What if everything you thought about Michael Brown was wrong? Do you believe in evidence? Science? Evolution? Global warming? Can new evidence change your opinion? Is your conviction that a police officer killed an innocent surrendering black youth in Ferguson, Missouri, so strong that facts and evidence simply do not matter? Might you accept that there are racial injustices in…
“Why we need to fix St. Louis County”
Well said by Radley Balko in the Washington Post: When a local government’s very existence depends on its citizens breaking the law — when fines from ordinance violations are written into city budgets for the upcoming year as a primary or even the main expected source of revenue — the relationship between the government and the governed is not one…
Racial disparity in police-involved homicides: 4:1
Trying to set the record straight is a bit like pissing into the wind. The substantively wrong pro-publica story has now been repeated by every news source I can find. I suspect that over time the idea that from 2010-2012, blacks males 15-19 years-old were 21 times more likely than non-hispanic-whites males to be killed by police will simply become…
Black are 4 times more likely than whites to be killed by police
[Update: Cut to the chase. You might just want to read my summary post.] Related to the “not 21 times” previous post, I received a tweet from one of the authors: “Differences in our methodologies: you count Hispanic homicides as white… deflate the results.” So back to running stats for me. But there’s a problem in that the UCR homicide…
Black teens are not 21 times more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police
[Update: Cut to the chase. You might just want to read my summary post.] One of my liberal de Blasio-loving not-so-fond-of-cops friend send me an email with the subject “you gotta check yo facts” and a link to ProPublica: “Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white…