The Week in Quotes: August 28, 2020

The standard should be "You don't shoot somebody unless they leave you no choice." Not "I had a suspicion that I might be in danger."

Every one of your points is correct.  I just question the passion and energy that goes into making them at this time.

Every time this issue arises, it seems like a large percentage of the population directs its energy into these "yeah, but" exercises.  Which would be totally understandable if rioting and looting was a persistent problem in society.  But it isn't.

How many times since 1960 has there been a riot in North America, or Europe, that wasn't a result of a race-related police incident?  I can't think of any, though someone may be able to correct me on this.

It seems to me that, regardless of a person's political affiliation, the logical thing to do is to seek solutions to improve the quality of policing and improve police relationships with all segments of the community they are supposed to protect.  Isn't that the best way to make sure we aren't stuck in this continuing loop?

My hypothesis is that many white people look at what happened to Blake and think "tragic, but that wouldn't happen to me / my family" and look at what's happening during the riots and think "that could happen to my store!"  And then protecting their stores becomes their highest priority.

And the problem with that response is that more police to protect my stores isn't needed most of the time, because rioting and looting doesn't happen, except following these incidents.  And, yes, I would love to be able to keep protests from turning violent, but I can't and neither can you and neither can anyone.  But we can make the protests go away, because there's one and only one issue that continues to cause them.

I wish we had half as many impassioned arguments in the media over which solution would be best to improve policing as we have over whether the actions of protesters are or aren't justified.

I appreciate your post and the reply above me. We need more thinking and discussion like this. I just want to, from a statistical standpoint provide more info and context and counter your reasoning a bit.

1. I honestly can’t find a single example of an officer dying as a result of the protests. There was a retired officer, David Dorn, who was killed defending a pawn shop in the St. Louis area but he wasn’t in the line of duty. Undoubtedly, officers have been attacked. But killed? No, I don’t think so, at least as far as I can find. I welcome counter-examples though.

One could argue that while there have been no deaths directly resulting from protests, people have been emboldened and officers are more likely to be killed in the line of duty because of the unrest. This article would support that, stating that police officer killings had gone up 28% to that point in 2020 (July 22). However, one could also counter that the link is correlational, only compares to the year previously which may or may not be a good comparison, and that in the month or so since the article there hasn't been a single new death, pointing to sample sizes issues (if 32 officers feloniously killed is a 28% increase then that's 25 last year) and the potential for random chance to be the cause of increased killings.

2. Yes, being a police officer is stressful. No doubt about it. One could even look at many situations that end in shootings and reasonably conclude that a situation was incredibly stressful and that an otherwise irrational action was in some way understandable from the officer's point of view. But that doesn't mean that a) officers shouldn't be trained better to de-escalate situations and better identify the truly dangerous ones; b) that an officer shouldn't be punished for an irrational action; and c) that we can't rethink whether police officers, trained and empowered to kill, are the best people to send in to many situations that may instead be better served by sending in a trained conflict resolver, mental health specialist, etc.

Each of those things (a, b, and c above) is supported systemically; police unions often fight vehemently against increased or different training requirements, punishing officers, or decreasing funding to police. Obviously it's complex, but over time we chose to put resources into growing police forces (and arming them and poorly training them) to the exclusion of other, arguably better choices for many situations. For example, sending an armed official to handle a homeless man sleeping on a bench is irrational; it also can needlessly and inherently escalate the situation to the point where the homeless man dies.

This John Oliver video on policing is a good resource for helping to understand my perspective on this front. At 11:04 he begins the lead up to a truly abhorrent police trainer talking about how police need to be killers to hunt down killers. This is an example of the training that police get.

3. Now to the crux of why I originally chose to respond to this. Your math is flawed, on three levels.

First, about 1,000 people are killed by police each year, which is 20x higher than your estimated figure.

Second, your argument about 99.999% of police interactions not resulting in a police shooting ignores needed context. First, the vast majority of those interactions hold zero potential for a shooting, and calculating the statistic in a way that includes them is misleading. Directing traffic shouldn't count, for example. Since we're on a football site and that's the context you put the statistical discussion in, imagine if in calculating a QB's interception rate we counted QB kneeldowns or hand-offs. Obviously we shouldn't do that for QBs or for officers. I'm not aware of any resource that calculates the percentage of potentially violent situations that end in a police shooting vs those that end peacefully, but obviously the percentage would be higher.

Third, and most importantly for the discussion we're having about protests and rioting: those police killings disproportionately affect Black Americans and people of color in general. Black Americans are about 2.4 times more likely to be killed by police than White Americans (31 per million people vs 13 per million people). White Americans are killed more in absolute terms but represent a much larger share of the population; the rate here is what truly matters. People of color are also more likely to be pulled over, searched, and police seem to require less reason to search them; Black Americans are more likely to be arrested for a drug-related crime even though drug use doesn't differ among groups; and juries are more likely to see ambiguous evidence as evidence of guilt in POC and more likely to be sentenced to death.

This is the crux of the issue: that not only are there huge problems with the criminal justice and policing system, but those systems and problems are racially biased. This is what people are protesting and rioting against. I see and hear your argument that this isn't a just reason to loot, riot, and burn. But as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "riots are the language of the unheard". Black Americans tried working through legislation, they tried peaceful protests, they tried kneeling on the sidelines, they tried convincing people on social media. But no one listened. These are not new issues. In fact they are very old ones, rooted in white supremacy. Black Americans have tried over and over not to resort to rioting and violence (which let's be clear, protesting has been overwhelmingly peaceful).

And finally, you say there is no justification for doing wrong. I disagree with you, respectfully. I wish it hadn't come down to a choice of remaining unheard or burning down strip malls. But when that choice is put on an entire race of people simply because of the color of their skin, saying that they are wrong for choosing to burn down strip malls ignores decades and decades of context and injustice and inaction on the part of the people in power.

I wish it hadn't come down to burning and rioting; it's terrible that people are losing their livelihoods like this. But let's be clear about the root cause of them losing their livelihoods: racially injust laws and systems, not the protestors. And what's more, these methods are undeniably working. We are having a real conversation about these issues all across the country (and on FO comment threads) because of these protests; George Floyd would've been just another name on a list of dead Black Americans without the protests that followed. Protests are divisive, but they also call attention to the issue. If burning a few shops is all it takes to gain the attention of a nation and make progress where there was no listening or progress before, that's a good thing in my opinion.

If you made it this far, thanks for your time. Have a good day and I hope you continue to contribute to fruitful discussions in the future.

"...my job can be stressful, but I don't deal with life-or-death situations on a daily basis."

Being the medical field (ICU/critical care), I have a stressful job, and like in law enforcement, mistakes can get people killed/maimed.  Of course the only difference is I don't have to worry about my patients trying to kill me (aside from a brief stint in a trauma center.....I must say the nurses I worked with there were rock stars at de-escalating situations and talking down violent patients....they could probably teach some cops a thing or two). 

We're all human, and we all make mistakes.  I don't think an individual officer should be excoriated for making a mistake when he/she is trying to do the right thing (I feel the same way about medical professionals...we ideally try to use mistakes as a learning opportunity moving forward).  The problem is that historically departments and police unions bend over backwards to protect the habitual excessive force offenders, when instead they should be aggressively weeding them out to protect both the public and themselves.  Instead we're left with this unfortunate mistrust between a lot of urban communities towards law enforcement.

Going back once again the medical analogy, my opinion is that some state medical boards are not aggressive enough in weeding out bad doctors (my state is...some would argue too aggressive).  This needs to be done to protect both the public and the profession.  I know there are cops out there (I know some of them personally) that feel the same way about their profession....but there are too many institutional obstacles right now.

I do agree with you to a degree about the rioting, but just like poverty leads to crime, it's the root problem that needs to be addressed.

The problem is, the protests and in particular BLM are vilifying the police rather than trying to open a dialog. 

We should acknowledge that the police have a very hard job and decision making under extreme circumstances can lead to a ton of mistakes. 

There needs to be a lot of two way acknowledgment that there is a problem and how we can fix it. But just castigating them all is not the way to do it.

"Poverty and the drug business are products of systemic racism; if one is confined by ethnicity and social class to an area with a complete lack of education and employment opportunities, the drug trade is one of the only available, upwardly mobile professions."

There's no proof of this statement. Oppressed minorities aren't necessarily relegated to a permanent underclass forced into crime. I can point to numerous counter examples across lots of countries across large periods of history. Strange how the Irish, Italians, Jews, Lower Caste Indians, Gujaratis, and others escaped this hellscape.

"(To speak of 'Asian Americans, by the way, is a pointless generalization. 'Asian Americans' includes people whose families came from dozens of countries with very different languages, cultures and behaviors. Also, there are plenty of Asian-Americans involved in the drug trade. My neighborhood in Sacramento was controlled by Vietnamese crack dealers who often became in involved in shooting matches with area rivals)."

Just as there are generalities across asians, there are generalities across blacks as well. Obama is half black. The bottom line is - asians on average do better in terms of life expectancy, education, credit ratings, home ownership, two parent households etc etc. If there is a country wide conspiracy against minorities, its strange and damn near unbelievable to suggest that there is a nationwide conspiracy to promote asian Americans.

Dig deeper and you find cultural norms play a great deal in explaining away poverty. Chinese immigrants during the railroad era, Vietnamese and Koreans during the respective wars, and then slew of Indians and Chinese who came later - their families stressed education and assimilation which is why they never were plagued with the issues African Americans are. I am not suggesting being African American by genetics forces you down a bad path. Its rather trying to be honest with the facts when assessing what cause and effect are. And here I echo the Sowell, Loury, Fryer and the McWhorter critique.