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Tag: race

  • This is (not) only a test

    I’m going to present a scenario. I want you decide who if anybody is right. And who if anybody should be criminally charged. But you have make a decision before you hear about the race of the people involved. Just imagine that everybody is white.

    A guy lives in northwest Albuquerque. He may may not have been wondering around his neighborhood armed (I’m going to guess he was, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there). No matter, at some point somebody is this suburban-looking neighborhood sees an armed man near her house and gets worried.

    The man of the house gets involved. He’s got a permit to carry. So he gets in his SUV and goes looking for the suspicious man with a gun. He brought along his 15-year-old son for the hunt, as you do.

    He approaches a house, slowly, armed. In the driveway of this house is the guy lives there. He’s an Iraqi veteran. So this guy in his driveway sees a suspicious SUV approach and gets scared. He shoots… and misses. The man in the SUV returns fire. The man in his driveway is hit: “He dies from loss of blood, only a few feet from his own back door, dying in his own garage on his own property.”

    Do you charge the killer? Was the veteran who fired first defending his castle from an armed invader? Or was the man who killed a hero, killing a crazy armed man?

    Was a crime committed? After all, a guy was killed standing on his own property.

    Now what if I told you the guy killed was white and on his own property and the killer was a black. What if I told told you the killer was charged with homicide. Not hard to imagine. But what if I told you no charges were filed against the killer of the Iraqi veteran killed defending his home? Would you be outraged?

    [pause to think now]

    But what if I told you that the guy killed was black and the shooter was a white veteran? Would that change anything? Seriously… would it?

    Try and play with the race and veteran status. But the question is: is it fair to charge the killer with the killing?

    The answer in the comments.

    Not according to this story (also the source of the above quote).

    Another story with some more details.

    Hell, there’s even helicopter footage.

  • Five charts Ray Kelly Doesn’t want you to see!

    Five charts Ray Kelly Doesn’t want you to see!

    (Can you guess I was just on buzzfeed? A better headline would be “Murders way down in NYC. And so are stop and frisks. And nobody seems to care.” But what kind of clickbaite would that be?)

    1) Breakdown of NYC stops by race.

    Indeed, as often reported, 83% of stops have happened to black and hispanic people.

    2) Breakdown of NYC homicide victims by race.

    But ninety-one percent of homicide victims were black or hispanic. Wow. Actually, this is the chart Ray Kelly wants you to see. Critics of stop and frisk generally don’t like talking about this issue (as if the racial disparity in violent crime will just go away if we ignore it). But it is relevant. It may not excuse the racial bias of stop and frisk, but it goes a long to explaining it. Cops are where the violent crime is. Cops stop people where cops are assigned. Ergo cops stop black and hispanics disproportionately. “Racism without racists,” it’s sometimes called. It’s not that individual cops are racists in their day-to-day work, but the end result of a stop-and-frisk policy can still racist.

    3) Hit rate for stops of black people.

    (this and then next figure are taken from Mother Jonesand the data from the Center for Constitutional Rights)

    One in 143 stops of blacks yields guns, drugs, or other contraband. Compare this to the rate for whites who are stopped.

    4) Hit rate for tops of white people.

    One in 27 stops of white people yields guns, drugs, or other contraband. Same yield with 19 percent of the stops.

    Wow.

    One way to interpret these data is that white people must be 5.4 times as likely as blacks to be packing heat or drugs! Of course that’s unlikely. So why is contraband 5.4 times as likely to be found on white people? Because white people are more likely to be stopped based on actual suspicion (there is much less pressure to produce stats in low-crime neighborhoods). Black people are being stopped because Compstat and “productivity” pressure in high-crime neighborhoods mean some officers stop people simply because the feel they need to stop people to fill out the UF-250s (the stop, questions, and frisk form).

    So how about this for a goal: get the “hit rate” for blacks up to the same level for whites. Not only would this be fair, it would be good policing. It would also go a long way to mitigating the problem of excessive stop and frisks. And it’s not hard to do. Make smart stops, not more stops.

    5) Stops and homicides are both down!

    For years Bloomberg and Kelly were basically saying that every one of the five, six, and seven-hundred-thousand stops was necessary to keep the city from exploding in crime. An inevitable part of the crime drop in New York City.

    And yet stops have plummeting in the past two years (2013 figures are estimated year-end totals based on latest available data). In part this is from pressure from the top and in more recent part instructions from the PBA.

    And homicide? Must be way up, right? Because Bloomberg and Kelly have insisted we need all these stops to keep homicide down. And yet we’re on track from just over 300 homicides for the year in NYC. (Again, estimated year end total).

    What did I just say New York City is on track to have just 318 homicides this year?! That’s amazing. Why is this not front-page news? This 22 percent reduction is not from a crack-fueled high of the late 1980s but from the record low year of 2012! The 2013 homicide numbers are an amazing accomplished. (I mean Baltimore City used to top 300 homicides with just 650,000 residents.)

    Homicides in New York City are down 22 percent this year and nobody seems to want to take credit! Attackers of stop and frisk never like to highlight any evidence that might be used to imply stop and frisks are effective. But defenders of stop and frisk can’t reconcile a huge crime drop that correlates with an even larger decline in stop and frisks. In two years stops have been cut in half and homicides are down by one-third. (Of course there might be a delayed link between the end of stop and frisk and a rise in crime, but I think the past year or two should be enough time to see such a lag effect).

    So for crying out loud, give the NYPD some credit! Just last year academics, once again, were saying crime had bottomed out; crime won’t go down; crime can’t go down any more. And yet, once again, it did. This was not inevitable. This is not irreversible. But as Bill Bratton likes to say, “Cops count and police matter.”

    So give the NYPD credit for a record low number of murders, but remind them that this amazing reduction in homicide has happened without unnecessarily stopping and bothering another 350,000 innocent black and hispanic New Yorkers this year. That matters.

    We now know that all these stops were not needed. Throw out that bathwater! But be careful, because there is baby somewhere in that murky water. Surely some of these stop are needed. You know, the stops based on officers’ reasonable and honest suspicion.

    The crime reduction can continue at the same time unnecessary stop and frisks and ended. One goal should be to raise the hit rate for blacks stopped to the same level as found for whites who are stopped. This alone could reduce the total number of stops (and misdemeanor marijuana possession arrests) more than 80% from the 2011 high. The good news is we’re already half way there.

  • Sorry about the shooting, Brian, but it’s not profiling if it’s the totality of the circumstances

    A few posts ago I linked to nice article by Brian Beutler. He explains very well how he didn’t succumb to the “ecological fallacy” (of assuming what is true for the individual is true for the group, or vice versa) even after being held up and shot. I particularly like the line, “Everyone who’s ever shot me was black and wearing a hoodie. There just aren’t any reasonable inferences to draw from that fact.”

    But I’ve since heard Beutler on the radio (On Point with Tom Ashbrook, but I can’t find the link to the segment). What I heard makes me think Beutler doesn’t understand policing. And to say (I’m paraphrasing here) “I’ve been shot by two blacks guy and still don’t think police should have stopped my shooters” is like a left-wing equivalent to the right-wing mindlessness of wrapping yourself in the flag and saying “September 11th!” whenever somebody considers that it may not be right for the US to kill or capture and imprison and/or torture some innocent person.

    Beutler said that these two guys, the ones who shot him, were doing nothing that he and his friend weren’t doing that night. So police had no reason to stop them. And if they had, it would have been racial profiling. But of course the two criminals were doing something that Beutler and his friend were not doing. The two black guys wearing hoodies were carrying a loaded gun and looking for people to mug. This intention matters because, as any street cop can tell you, it changes your behavior.

    Cops are trained and have experience noticing things. I’m not talking about some vague “leave crime to the professionals” bullshit. I’m talking about concrete behavior that would give observant police officers reasonable suspicion to suspect and stop these thugs before Beutler got shot. That really is what we train and pay police to do.

    Beutler, I assume, was going from point A to B. The criminals may have walking around the block, or back and forth on one block. The cops might have known of previous armed robberies in the area the past few days and been looking for two young black men who actually did match the description… or were the actually criminals pictures in a previous robbery.

    A cop could have noticed the walking that is characteristic of a man carrying a gun in his pants: a sheltering hand, a favoring gait, a possessive pat, or a heavy weight in the pocket. A good police officer would also notice that the two criminals were very alert to their surroundings, their heads jerking in all directions while they walked with a practiced nonchalance that doesn’t coincide with said hyper-vigilance. Or maybe the cop just know these two from a previous arrest.

    Now none of these reasons alone may give police reason to stop a person (though a few of them would). But my point is a good cop could see many suspicious aspects of criminal behavior that a dumb-ass politically correct liberal would be oblivious to.

    At some point the “totality of the circumstances” (Illinois v. Gates) allows a cop to build a case for the reasonable suspicion needed to make a legal stop. Had a good cop been there and done this, he could have preventing the the shooting of Beutler. The only thanks he may have received from Beutler was being called racist: “Why didn’t you stop us, the white guys. I was doing the same thing they were.”

    But no, Brian, you weren’t. And this is key: The criminals weren’t (hypothetically) stopped because they were black. They were stopped because their behavior was suspicious in a way that would lead a reasonable police officer to suspect that they were about to mug somebody. Just because all you see is race may say more about you than it does about police.

  • Stop & Frisk: They Had It Coming

    Stop & Frisk: They Had It Coming

    A (cop) friend in Baltimore asked me with regard to stop and frisk: “What the hell is going on?” I emailed back:

    You know, leaving aside the decision was entirely predicable based on the judge not exactly being a friend of police, her decision is actually kind of mild. All she f*cking asks is for cops to stop making illegal stops. It’s really not too much to ask for.

    The idea that cops can stop and search (because we both know how frisks can turn into searches) somebody and not even have/be able to articulate reasonable suspicion is absurd (because we both know how easy it is to articulate reasonable suspicion). They have these stupid forms in NYC (called UF-250s) and all the officer has to do is check a box — no writing required, because the forms were made to be idiot proof, which helps turn some cops into idiots — saying “furtive gesture” or something. It is a little absurd.

    A few months ago she instructed politely, and the police department ignored her. The NYPD got what they were asking for. They refuse to rational engage/debate even with people who don’t hate cops. So now they get some smart-ass judge telling them what to do. Kelly had it coming.

    I think the NYPD could reduce stop and frisks by 75% without any impact on crime — because probably 75% are quota driven and not based on valid suspicion, but instead are based on the end of the work period, not having 5 UF-250s that month, and worried that the sgt will chew you a new asshole. So you stop the first young guy in baggy jeans that walks by (who happens to be black).

    What worries me is what will happen if the cops stop doing that last 25%, the stop and frisks that are actually based on reasonable suspicion. Then shootings will go up.

    I still haven’t gotten my head around the federal monitor, however. And I’m kind of excited about the pilot camera program. I can’t imagine it will work well, but if it does it should help police tremendously, despite what police fear. Ten years ago I was against cameras (I think), but technology has moved forward. Cameras are there whether cops like or not. So it’s good to have a camera with a police POV.

    [Update: this is worth reading, by John Timoney. On the plus side (though he presents it as a negative) look at all the overtime cops are likely to get!]

    Related, there’s an excellent piece in Salon by Brian Beutler, “What I learned from getting shot.” Walking down the street in D.C., Beutler was held up by two black guys in hoodies and then shot three times. He was very lucky to live:

    I didn’t buy a gun, though several well-wishers seemed to think that night would’ve ended better if I’d been armed and had initiated a saloon-style shootout in the middle of the street. Other well-wishers wondered — let’s not sugarcoat it — if the experience had turned me into a racist.

    Those emails were easy to respond to.

    [Kal] Penn got in trouble for touting the supposed merits of New York’s stop-and-frisk policy. To the objection that the policy disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos, he responded, “And who, sadly, commits & are victims of the most crimes?”

    But that’s a non sequitur. A false rationale. Take people’s fear out of the equation and the logical artifice collapses. Canadians are highly overrepresented in the field of professional ice hockey, but it would be ridiculous for anyone to walk around Alberta presumptively asking strangers on the street for autographs. When you treat everyone as a suspect, you get a lot of false positives. That’s why above and beyond the obvious injustice of it, stop and frisk isn’t wise policy. Minorities might commit most of the crime in U.S. cities, and be the likeliest victims of it, and that’s a problem with a lot of causes that should be addressed in a lot of ways. But crime is pretty rare. Not rare like being a professional hockey player is rare. But rare. Most people, white or minority, don’t do it at all.

    …

    Everyone who’s ever shot me was black and wearing a hoodie. There just aren’t any reasonable inferences to draw from that fact.

    And file this under Right Wing Lies (VIII). There’s an ad in the Greek-American paper, the National Herald, for John Catsimatidis. He’s a Republican running for mayor. The ad shouts: “DON’T BLINDFOLD OUR POLICE!” And there’s even a picture of a ranking officer violating rules by mis-wearing a uniform for a political ad (those are two separate violations). The ad is about The Community Safety Act, a not very significant anti-profiling bill passed by the New York City Council. Catsimatidis says, and it’s presented as a quote:

    The Community Safety Act is nuts

    and should be called the Community UNSAFETY Act.

    If somebody robs a bank in your neighborhood,

    You can’t say if the suspect is ASIAN, BLACK, WHITE, or HISPANIC.

    You can’t say if the person is MALE or FEMALE.

    You can’t say if the person is 20 OR 60 YEARS OLD.

    THIS MAKES NO COMMON SENSE.

    Leave Law Enforcement up to COMMISSIONER RAY KELLY

    and the professionals of the NYPD

    The problem, and I bet you can see where I’m going with this, is that those statements are bald-faced lies. The law is about police profiling. Of course you can describe a suspect. Shame on Cats, the lying Greek.

    But I can picture Greek grandmother in my neighborhood. She always suspected those Democrats loved crime and supported criminals. And now she knows it to be true because she read Yannis say it in the Herald.

  • Worth Reading

    Ta-Nehisi Coates on Stop and Frisk. It’s also well worth scrolling down to read his posts on Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman. Coates is one of the main reasons I haven’t written very much on the subject (another being I was on the road). Coates wrote what I was thinking. And he wrote it very well.

  • Zimmerman Trial (2): Justice vs. Stand Your Ground

    I received this interesting and thought-provoking email from my friend Alan (bold added):

    It seems to me that if Zimmerman is convicted of a felony, then the Florida laws are apparently defensible. Sure, a guy is allowed to shoot someone in certain circumstances; in this case such circumstances did not present and so he’s going to jail. The laws did not apply and the state justly punishes the perpetrator.

    On the other hand, if the prosecution fails and the court acquits, now we can assert the Florida laws have accommodated the brutal slaying (since you can’t call it “murder”!) of an unarmed youth, and now we can more easily make a case that the FL laws are ridiculous.

    In other words, as liberal pacifists who appreciate the state’s monopoly on armed force, a guilty verdict serves us poorly. It has the welcome effect of obtaining immediate justice for Trayvon Martin’s death (since repealing the laws presumably wouldn’t remove Zimmerman’s protections that applied at the time), but Florida civilians can continue to walk around with concealed weapons and use them with impunity. The long play here is to pull for an acquittal.

    I prefer the short-play here and would like to see the killer of Martin convicted. But I think the Florida stand-your-ground law is so broad (and poorly written) that I can see a legal case for Zimmerman’s acquittal (though not a moral one).

  • Zimmerman Trial (1)

    Prof. Carl Hart on modern reefer madness:

    Harry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the
    Federal Bureau of Narcotics (predecessor of the Drug Enforcement
    Administration) declared, “Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug
    in the history of mankind.”

    Seven decades and hundreds of studies later, we no longer have an excuse
    for indulging the myth of “reefer madness.” It has no place in our
    courts — which means Mr. Martin’s toxicology report doesn’t, either.

  • Give Peace a Chance

    “The years between 2000 and 2010 do not simply constitute a war on marijuana, but a war on black people who use marijuana.” Well said, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

  • "It's Torching" — A Traincrash of Speech

    There’s a a video on youtube of a guy and his friend (and baby, in babyseat in the back seat) driving toward a fire and then explosion of a train blowing up just outside Baltimore (don’t worry… according to authorities it’s just “toxic” but nothing to worry about).

    So I’m watching this video thinking, “These guys are likely candidates for The Darwin Award.”

    Regardless (and these guys seemed to survive just fine), I also couldn’t help but notice how these two were speaking to each other. They were speaking, well, the way these two African-American guys speak to each other while stupidly driving towards a cool fire (and subsequent explosion). I’m not here to judge. They’re probably very nice guys.

    The Baltimore Sun has about 12 videos of recordings and people describing what they saw. Many of them are worth watching just for the great Baltimore accents. I love Baltimore accents.

    But my point isn’t to make of accents or the way people speak. I couldn’t care less. I like when people talk like where they’re from. I think people should talk like where they’re from. (I wish I had more of a Chicago accent; but I’m from Evanston and my parents were too middle class, I suppose.) One time I asked a white guy in the police academy (who had a thick Bawl’mer accent) why he was making fun of how black people in our class talked. I thought it was ironic because to my ears his accent was more strange sounding than ghettoese (more politely known as African-American Vernacular English). 

    My point is this: there are about a dozen videos on the Baltimore Sun website. And this is the only one where the audio has been silenced. It’s the same one. These guys weren’t hamming it up for the camera. It wasn’t just that the “bad” words were bleeped (and by my count there 20 in two minutes, not including “damn”). The entire audio is just silenced. To rough for tender ears, I suppose.

    Or is it just too black?

    What does it say about our culture (or the media) that the way some Americans speak in casual private conversation–Americans whose ancestors have been in this country and speaking English longer than my family–still can’t be broadcast for public consumption?

  • Right-Wing Lies (VII) – Free Obama Phones for the Poor

    A while back I started hearing rumors about “Obama phones.” You know, Obama taking our hard-earned money to give free phones to undeserving poor people in the ghetto. Really? I keep hearing about this, so I thought there must be something to it. Take this facebook post from a Baltimore cop friend of mine:

    Beautiful day out and then I see the all to familiar free cell tent a block away from the methadone clinic. I am so happy I PAY my cell phone bill so the “disadvantaged” can get a free phone. WTF!! The best part is both clinic and tent had the same people in line!!

    Almost always (not in my friend’s case) these posts are racistly linkedto President “Hussein Obama”. OK. I know there are racists out there (not my friend, but it’s impossible to do online research into this matter without coming across a lot of them), but that’s not the point. What I want to know is, is this true?! Are there tents in poor neighborhoods giving away phones? If so, why? And is it an Obama plot?

    Let me put it in FAQ format:

    Q: Are they really giving out phones in the hood?

    A: Yes!

    Q: You mean they’re really giving out free phones? Like with minutes on them?

    A: Yes!

    Q: Is the government really taking our hard-earned money and giving poor people phone service?

    A: Well, Yes. More or less. Actually a charge on your phone bill rather than a straight-up tax. But whatever.

    Q: Why can’t I get one?

    A: You might be able to, if you’re poor enough to qualify for food stamps (gross annual income of less than $14,160).

    Q: What’s the cash value that these moochers get?

    A: About $10 a month.

    Q: Is this a secret Islamic Socialist Obama plot to take they money of hard-working white Americans and give it to poor ghetto drug addicts?

    A: No, you stupid schmuck!

    Q: But what about that video of the woman saying “Everybody got an Obama phone”?

    A: She’s an idiot. As is anybody who believes Obama gives out phones.

    Turns out this subsidized phone service for poor people (many of them rural whites) began under The Great American Socialist, Ronald Reagan.

    In 1996, when Clinton was president, people got the choice of using this subsidy for cell-phone service instead of land-line service. Fair enough.

    Then in 2005, the program was expanded during the liberal Bush administration.

    So go ahead and blame Obama. Why not? He is our president. Born in the Ol’ U.S. of A. He does happen to be African-American. So go ahead and blame Obama for whatever you want… but don’t blame him for phones subsidies for poor people! [You could, of course, blame him for saving the economy, killing Osama Bin Laden, getting out of Iraq, and keeping this country safe from a terrorist attack.]

    The actual cell-phone giveaways did start, by chance, in 2008, right before Obama was elected. Why then? Not because Sharia law was creeping over America, but because cell phone costs actually came down so much that right around then private companies could actually turn a profit by taking money from this program, even with the expense of giving away a phone.

    But you know what, maybe giving phone to poor people is actually a good use of government money. Crazy, I know. But think about it. Because you can’t get a job if you don’t have a phone! Certainly when I was a cop, most homes I went into did not have phone service. [Many didn’t have electricity, either. After a while I felt kind of silly asking for a phone number, much less a “work” phone number. Seriously, you don’t know what f*cked up poverty till you’re a cop in Baltimore’s Eastern District.] I seriously doubt people were poor because they don’t have a phone. But, should perchance you want one, it’s almost impossible to get a job if you don’t have a phone phone number to put on the job application so your future employer can call you!

    Meanwhile, on April 15, I was with all those middle-class home-owning folk lining up at the Post Office to get my Obama money. You know, mortgage interest-tax deduction. Thank you, Mr. President. I spent mines on booze!