Police use-of-force data is finally coming to light(techcrunch.com) |
Police use-of-force data is finally coming to light(techcrunch.com) |
I'm not asking that to start a fight over whether these shootings were justified. I'm asking because that word has a specific criminal definition, and news organizations typically have very strict policies on implying criminal guilt (witness the pre-conviction use of "alleged X" even in the most obvious of cases).
As I understand it, most of the names described here as "murdered by police" have not produced murder convictions or even murder charges against police officers.
Without getting into subjective discussions of 'guilt', does TechCrunch have a policy on language in criminal cases? What is it?
If it's impossible to get justice because the killer was wearing uniform what's the value in the judgements of justice system? If so many cases of behaviour that would lead to a conviction, don't, that conviction loses starts to lose some of its meaning. If an officer is so rarely convicted for murder, at what point does it remain meaningful to use the word 'murder' to mean a legal conviction where a police officer is concerned?
Or do we look at the stats and say that police are incapable of committing murder. "There is no murder in paradise" as Stalin is reputed to have said.
(I'm slightly playing devil's advocate here but there is a massive problem)
>Murder is the unlawful killing of another human being without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human being with malice aforethought. This state of mind may, depending upon the jurisdiction, distinguish murder from other forms of unlawful homicide, such as manslaughter.
Murder is both specifically unlawful (which is debatable in this case, even if we don't want it to be), and specifically premeditated (which it almost certainly is not). So I'd say murder is probably not accurate in common law jurisdictions, especially U.S. jurisdictions.
We've seen video of an officer shooting someone and then going back to his squad car and appearing to remove a gun from his bag and plant it on the victim. Carrying around a "burner" gun (in case you might need it) seems premeditated to me, but IANAL.
I mean otherwise we'd call lynching's back in the 1900's "alleged murders" since most of them also didn't have murder convictions nor murder charges.
Though I guess they could use "manslaughter" instead?
That, I guess, was my question. Print journalism applies this rule even when taking moral stances; what's the standard here?
And it's a shame because there definitely is an issue with police aggressiveness and violence and espousing a shoot first ask questions later philosophy for policing.
On the other hand, we have too many people with guns who should not own guns. I'm ambivalent about the second amendment but so long as we have it, strictly test owners yearly and anyone possessing one illegally has to do massive community work and pay prohibitive fines.
Your argument in paragraph 3: only the police should have guns.
Umm ...?
It doesn't sound like, according to the article, the California initiative is to prove racism but rather track, identify, and reduce police initiated violence. Is this the writer's bias?
Actually there is already data, and actually that data states that in fact, black people suffer more violence from part of the police, but LESS killings, is just there is a total bias by the media outlets that basically only show cases of police killings involving black victims and don't report the ones with white people.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [3] http://www.fatalencounters.org/
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-coun...
> When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.
> Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
> The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest
> The Ferguson unrest (also referred to just as Ferguson) involves protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014
The author describes three stages in collection, from no data, to third-party collections, and now to government collection.
The given Guardian link shows that blacks are twice as likely as whites to be killed, on a per-capita basis. This is consistent with the hypothesis that there is systemic racism, which previously was mostly conjectural due to lack of data. In the Poppler viewpoint, the racism hypothesis made a testable prediction, which was shown to be true.
Beyond that, the question is about what level of evidence is required before you can say here is proof. Some might say this is evidence which supports multiple hypotheses, others might say it's proof.
Still others might use the term "weak proof" when there some supporting evidence which isn't conclusive. For examples, http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-... says "Horoscope is a weak proof of birthdate: Supreme Court" and https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251 says "When compared to injections without steroids, there is weak proof that epidural steroid injections may result in some improvement in radicular lumbosacral pain in the short term, when assessed between two and six weeks after the injection."
Is "weak proof" a type of proof? (Is "dwarf planet" a type of planet?)
In any case, the author shows why data collection can be useful to test a hypothesis, then describes how the State of California will now be collecting the data, but doesn't make the concrete connection that CA will be collecting that data for that specific purpose.
As to the legislative history of the bill, in the summer of 2015 senators Booker and Boxer proposed the PRIDE bill for better nationwide reporting. Booker writes, at https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-... :
> Almost half a century later, tragic events across the country — in New York, Ferguson, North Charleston and Baltimore — have reminded us how critical trust is to the fabric of our democracy. These incidents have raised the public’s awareness and sparked a long overdue national debate about how police and citizens interact and how they should interact.
and how it's hard to act without good data. This shows that PRIDE is coupled to the question of possible influence of racism in how police deal with people.
That's a proposed bill at the federal level. It's not the state bill. The history of CA AB-71 is at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... . That bill started a few months after PRIDE. The analysis for the bill includes specific references to PRIDE. It sounds very much like the same concerns of Booker are also behind AB-71, which includes knowing if there is a systemic racial bias in police initiated violence.
So while the bill doesn't say it outright, the reason for the bill seems to include gathering the information which can help prove (or disprove) systemic racism.
If the shootings are correlated to, say, the demographics of murderers (which is probably more representative than the population at large), it might actually be evidence of racism against whites -- the number of murders committed per 10,000 people in blacks is about 8 times that of whites, which means if they're dying at only 2.5 times the rate per 10,000 people and the deaths are correlated to the murder rate, the police are killing white people disproportionately often.
I think that a lot of people, such as yourself, are being very dishonest when analyzing the police data because they're analyzing it against total population numbers while ignoring the correlations to crime demographics. Such as the Guardian numbers you cited.
I also think you're being racist. Against white people.
If we look at today's Philippines it's quite clear racism is not a necessary component of aggressive and violent policing.
I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational.
Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic.
The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general.
I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist).
Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?
No, "malice aforethought" does not, in modern US usage, actually equal premeditation; there are four distinct states all held to be encompassed within "malice aforethought" [0]:
i. Intent to kill,
ii. Intent to inflict grievous bodily harm short of death,
iii. Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"), or
iv. Intent to commit a dangerous felony (the "felony murder" doctrine).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malice_aforethought#United_Sta...
These are obviously not _normal_ situations are they?
Besides, is there excessive police violence on JP or UK?
In most other aspects of daily life, people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial evidence without rigorous quantitative work- you don't demand a formal Bayesian analysis of the day's weather before you decide to take an umbrella with you. But in issues like this, people who don't want to deal with it will plead "lack of sufficient data" until someone does an iron-clad study with five-sigma-significance results. So, that's what they're doing! Public awareness proceeds onwards and upwards through this kind of rigamarole.
But I do do a Bayesian analysis rather than a naive one: it's cloudy without raining here too often to carry an umbrella just because it's cloudy. That would be a maladaptive response, even if naive analysis is "clouds -> rain; prepare!"
Similarly, social issues tend to have enough complexity that you can't just resort to "clouds -> rain!" In this particular case, I'm just arguing that you need to control for background statistics rather than saying police shootings are randomly distributed across the entire population without any correlations.
No different than thinking a little about how often it's cloudy without rain before grabbing an umbrella. And I dislike that people like you are just screaming "DON'T THINK! CLOUDS! GET UMBRELLA!"
In a country with a long history of terrible racial oppression and documented contemporary racist sentiment, a large body of people are convinced by their lived experiences [1] that police violence is racially biased, and this conviction is further supported by a massive number of known individual cases. Among the huge space of possible injustices that could be claimed, this one particular form has received tremendous attention and accumulated consistent material evidence across the entire nation.
We as yet lack the huge amounts of data to settle the issue in a way that would satisfy a physicist. But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on.
[1] Taking this as distinct from the large body of people who are convinced at a safe distance via their TVs.
Are you blaming this problem on black culture?
Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
> Are you blaming this problem on black culture?
In part, yes. It's not popular, but I think that black culture has developed "pathological" behaviors, similar to the defense mechanisms we see in children, were the behavior was actually adaptive at one point in time (and likely essential for survival), but has become maladaptive now that the circumstances have changed. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of the backlash over "microaggressions" is that people think talking about "microaggressions" before those maladaptive behaviors in unreasonable and unfair, but we're getting on a tangent.)
> Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
Sure. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice).
My point is that you're getting like 10 variance points from what you wear, another 5-10 variance points from how you conduct yourself, and like 1-5 variance points from the color of your skin.
I'm not convinced there's not a racial component to the policing either -- I just suspect it's much like the wage gap, where what we find is that it's mostly social issues we don't really want to talk about (women leaving work force to have children; men having more variance as a gender; men skewing slightly more competitive) and a little bit actual problematic bias (that last 3-5 cents).
So I suspect we'll find a little bit of genuine bias in policing, but I think we'll find, once we dig further in to the numbers, that mostly what we're seeing is behaviors that correlate highly with facts that make us uncomfortable, and have to do with either economics, social class, or culture.
There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice).
This interesting piece was written by a well educated black lawyer living in a upscale neighborhood about being harassed by cops because his car broke down, so he walked home and a black man walking in his upper class neighborhood was reason enough to harass him:
http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/...
Okay, we know that there's an effect. No one is arguing that black people not only feel that way, but interact with (and are killed by) police at a higher-than-white per capita rate. That certainly should be addressed, and is a major social concern.
I think we agree on how to interpret the data at least this far -- that there's an effect, originally identified anecdotally by black people but supported by data, where black people are killed by police more often per capita. (Numbers I've seen are like 2.5x per capita -- but order of magnitude, I think we can agree on somewhere between 2x and 5x.)
Where we disagree, and I think we're just going to have to disagree, is that this is evidence that there's a lot of systemic racism going on. (Think "70 cent" wage gap, not "95 cent" wage gap.)
I think we're seeing a little bit of active racism, a lot of lingering economic effects of historic racism, a little bit of active cultural maladaptation, and a lot of general police violence. (That's me "thinking about the issue with an open mind" -- that distribution is basically the prior on social issue breakdown.)
You seem to suggest that the data suggests just "a lot of racism", which is where I disagree: I don't think the evidence is anywhere near moving the needle from the prior of "complex weave of the usual issues" to "outright, ongoing, systemic racism".
> But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on.
Finally, I just want to say, that this argument supports literally anything that sounds appealing, regardless of how likely it is to be true. There's a long history of creating new problems while attempting to solve problems by adopting solutions that make no sense upon detailed analysis, but sound good or appeal to our emotions in some way.
What I said was, there was a hypothesis, it made a testable prediction, and measurements support that hypothesis. This is sometimes called evidence.
I then pointed out that "proof" is not a simple concept. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(truth) :
> The concept applies in a variety of disciplines,[5] with both the nature of the evidence or justification and the criteria for sufficiency being area-dependent ... in jurisprudence the corresponding term is evidence,[10] with "burden of proof" as a concept common to both philosophy and law. ... Exactly what evidence is sufficient to prove something is also strongly area-dependent, usually with no absolute threshold of sufficiency at which evidence becomes proof
I then showed examples of how people use "proof" for something more like evidence than, say, how it's used in mathematical logic, including cases where the proof can be wrong.
Now it's certainly true that there are many ways to interpret the data. That's why I wrote "Some might say this is evidence which supports multiple hypotheses". You are in that group. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I actually agree that it supports multiple hypotheses, but I haven't looked at the data or any of the research on the topic. I haven't done the analysis. I am making the more pedantic point that it's not outside the bounds of established use to say "prove" here.
Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".
WP helpfully reminds us that in US law the lowest legal burden of proof is the far "reasonable suspicion". If you believe the data doesn't even mean that low burden of proof, then I certainly disagree.
If the hypothesis is "police are racist against black people when deciding to use force", then no, measurements don't support that hypothesis at all or too weakly to reject the null hypothesis -- we haven't measured the coupling to demographics to get a good prior estimate on the number of deaths. Without that, we need to sort of "average" over possible couplings, and end up with something like 0.5 to 2.5 times "appropriate number of blacks to number of whites being killed by police". Since that range includes 1, until we can refine the coupling between shooting distribution and demographics, we basically have a null result on our hypothesis.
> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".
> WP helpfully reminds us that in US law the lowest legal burden of proof is the far "reasonable suspicion". If you believe the data doesn't even mean that low burden of proof, then I certainly disagree.
I don't disagree that there's a "reasonable suspicion" of racism affecting the outcomes of policing -- but I think that's been the case for, oh, the entire lifetime of the country.
I disagree that there's a "preponderance of evidence" (which I'd argue is the lowest standard to reach a conclusion besides "we should check more" or "there isn't enough evidence to tell") that the dominant cause of the high number of black deaths is racism, that we even have a number of black deaths which are in some sense "in excess" of what we'd expect from "fair" or "not racist", and think people are likely a bit more... uh... "reasonable" than I am if they think there's a "reasonable suspicion" that racism is the dominant cause of the discrepancy between black per capita and white per capita death-by-police rates.
I'm not, however, against looking in to it more. People should totally do that, and I bet they'll get their name in some sociology book for proving the racist component exists.
I just think, you know, we should talk about the fact that police kill twenty people per state every year, rather than the few people in the entire country that happens to who happen to have it happen just because they're black. That is, perhaps we should talk about how POLICE ARE JUST BEATING AND SHOOTING TONS OF PEOPLE UNNECESSARILY, rather than about how we should fix it so that they do so to the same number of white and black people, who once you account for confounding factors, seem to get abused at a roughly even rate already (eg, +/- 10%).
> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".
I think that the "evidence" backing the claims hasn't even cleared basic Bayesian analysis, and is a case of people jumping on an emotionally charged things that sounds good.
It's not that I need 5-sigma to accept a social issue, it's that I need proponents to at least pass the basic threshold of "entirely statistical artifact". And right now, the rate at which blacks are being killed relative to whites is anywhere from 0.5-2.5x, which because it includes 1, is only a slightly skewed-basically-null result.
So with the police-are-racists claim hovering at "statistical anomaly", but the police-are-violent-psychopaths claim well documented, I think people who are focusing on the "racism of the police" are... well... misguided.
There's a very real, well-documented issue. It's just seems that it's a complex classism one, not a racism one, which is way less sexy to talk about.
I think applying statistics to societal issues is a right pain in the ass to get right, and even more of a pain to explain concisely without accidentally becoming misleading.
It's not dishonest to get something wrong, when that something is unfeasible or perhaps even impossible to get right.
However, I think places like the Guardian are being dishonest: they're telling stories with those numbers that the numbers don't really justify, and presenting those figures as if they're meaningful and carry some sort of utility, rather than just being random mishmash numbers that were easy to cook up.
>Among this larger statistical breakdown of police violence, Campaign Zero also discovered that there is no direct correlation between police violence and violence that occurs within a given community.
Which isn't to say I'm right either, and certainly raises a bigger question about it, but back to my point: we just can't tell, because there is a lack of detail in their analysis.
> This information has been meticulously sourced from the three largest, most comprehensive and impartial crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 91 percent of all victims in the database.
It also lists their definitions for "police killing", "unarmed", "vehicle", and "allegedly armed."
They also make the data available for download, so you can verify it. The columns are:
Victim's name
Victim's age
Victim's gender
Victim's race
URL of image of victim
Date of injury resulting in death (month/day/year)
Location of injury (address)
Location of death (city)
Location of death (state)
Location of death (zip code)
Location of death (county)
Agency responsible for death
Cause of death
A brief description of the circumstances surrounding the death
Official disposition of death (justified or other)
Criminal Charges?
Link to news article or photo of official document
Symptoms of mental illness?
UnarmedThey have 63 categorized as "Other". I'm not sure what counts as "Attack in progress" because looking at those under "Other", it looks like about 40% [2] of them involve the suspect charging at officers with a knife, or threatening officers or a third party with a knife and refusing orders to drop it, or trying to run down officers with a car.
That fits in with what I've seen when I've picked a random sample at killedbypolice.net and sorted them into "justified" and "unjustified" piles. There I got something around 80-90% seemed reasonably justified, at least based on the data initially available.
Did police have to shot all these people who were threatening with knives and such? Probably not. Better training and techniques could probably have handled those situations without anyone dying or getting seriously injured.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
[2] Warning: I arrived at 40% by looking at around 25 of them, but it was the first 25, not a random sample of 25 out of the 63. Since they are ordered chronologically, if there is some seasonal variation in the circumstances under which people get shot by police it could affect my estimate.
The tricky part is to look at how non-black people were treated in similar situations. If use of force would have been justified against white people, but non-lethal means were used instead, then it wouldn't show up in the resources you consulted.
But being biased towards violence when criminals match the demographics of violent criminals who previously have attacked you or your friends is an understandable human response, and not particularly racist.
My point is this: police are likely just violent douchebags who are actually trying to be a little anti-racist; they're violent psychopaths who escalate to fatal violence when someone who even vaguely matches a previous attacker resists their orders at all, but they actually respond that way slightly less to black people than the raw statistics of who murders who suggests they would, showing a sensitivity and attempt to tune that response.
Of course, this isn't an actual study or theory. It's merely pointing out that the narrative around the data was shaped before any real analysis of the data was performed (and by a group with a horse in the race), and there's perfectly coherent stories that aren't racist. I find it a little strange how quickly the orthodox view around the issue formed, and a little disturbing how viciously it's defended, even against moderate versions of the same view.
I don't think anyone is disputing that US police are unnecessarily violent, though.
I think of it like this: I don't want to be diagnosed sick, but if I'm sick, I want to be diagnosed. You can't treat what you can't accurately identify the cause of, in many cases.
I also think a lot of you are being uncharitable: I was involved with many of the civil rights issues before they came to mainstream awareness, and am merely frustrated with being spoken to about "facts" which are highly questionable, and usually detract from a deeper, underlying issue to draw attention to an easy-to-digest side issue.
That kind of sound-biting is insidious in that it is both a common human fault in thinking and a kind of control mechanism: it distracts us from deep, complex issues like the roles of social class and the police in the US -- which needs to be talked about, because it spans from violence to freedom and privacy to social control, and has reached dire straights -- and instead sidetracks us in the politics of race, at a time when race relations are the best they've been in hundreds of years and progressing in virtually every dimension we can measure.
As a black man once asked me, "Do you think it's coincidental we're talking about issues skin deep when we're both economic slaves?"
I don't think that there aren't race issues in the US, I don't think that there aren't issues with race and the police, but I do think that the modern movement about the two is a) likely going to go nowhere, because it's probably mostly not fresh racist attitudes and b) distracts from our deeper conversation about the role of police in the US, by making about racism, not police misconduct.
I am sorry you are feeling ganged up on, but I am an individual, not part of some group "lot of you." I am a medically handicapped woman with a shitty life who just likes talking with people and that's it. I was in no way judging you as an individual and I started out with stating that I have sympathy for some of your points.
But as a woman who has really had to deal with a lot of shit on HN and gets told all the time that I am basically imagining things, and as a homeless person who has very much experienced classism and exclusion while homeless, I think that "small percentage" that is attributable to the color of their skin is significant and not to be dismissed.
I try really hard to talk about just treating all people decently and in some places that gets my remarks routinely deleted. I am a white woman and part of my so-called "white privilege" is that I have a predominantly white genetic disorder that is the root cause of my poverty and homelessness and I get a whole lot of fuck you over that. With being homeless, I am presumed incompetent and people tell me to go seek out charity and are incredibly dismissive of my attempts to try to figure out how to establish an earned income that works for me in spite of my medical situation.
There are a lot of things I have dealt with in the last few years that are a huge head fuck and often make me suicidal because I feel strongly that my financial problems should not be anywhere near as bad as they are and are made far worse by classism and the assumption that a homeless person must be a total fucking loser with nothing of value to offer. And there are times when this just seems like an impossible trap that cannot be escaped.
I expect that I will escape it, but I have my moments where it just feels really hopeless because of the shitty attitudes and behaviors of other people unnecessarily compounding my problems.
So how do you propose to magically solve their poverty if that is "the real issue"? Because from where I sit as a homeless person, that comes across as an excuse to not deal with racism, which is real and does have an impact.
And maybe you can stop for a minute and think about how you are lumping me and others together because we happened to have all spoken to you in this one discussion and aren't all in agreement with you and that's the basis for this grouping and accusation that we all, as a group, are being uncharitable. And then wonder what that says about the personal experiences shaping people of color and other groups who do not know how to separate their color or other traits from persistent poverty.
If you have no solution for that poverty, how useful is it to say that is the "real" problem?
Thank you for replying.
> I think that "small percentage" that is attributable to the color of their skin is significant and not to be dismissed
It's not nothing, that's true. However, it's a smaller effect this decade than it was last decade, and the one before that. So it's going away if we just stay the course. We've got that problem not solved, but solving. (Well, as far as I can tell from the data, anyway.)
The issue of how the police respond to class is a much bigger issue (at present), which isn't getting better over time (and might be getting worse).
I can only deal with so much, so I think we should focus on the ongoing, growing problem that impacts everyone rather than the smaller, already improving problem that impacts just some people. I think the focus on "racism" in the policing is distracting from that -- it's treating the last 5% as the main 95% of the problem -- and worse, splits the two biggest demographics on a topic they really should align on.
It's not that the racist component is unimportant -- it's that it's just considerably less important than the underlying problem, so while they're right about there being racism, they're wrong about racism being the problem with the police. There'd still be a problem with the police killing blacks even if it were at the same per capita rate as whites! (And arguably, it already is under the "equal" rate, and police should kill more blacks to be "fair" or "not racist".)
> So how do you propose to magically solve their poverty if that is "the real issue"? Because from where I sit as a homeless person, that comes across as an excuse to not deal with racism, which is real and does have an impact.
I don't propose to magically solve their poverty. I expect to incrementally chip at the causes and traps while hundreds of thousands or millions suffer and die needlessly, because economic and social shift is hard. But there are economic policies we know of that can address poverty, and we are making in-roads at that problem, even if it's been hard.
My argument is that telling police who are already responding to economic and cultural incentives, not racial ones "don't shoot them because of their skin" does absolutely nothing, and worse than nothing if it discharges our emotional energy we might have used to tackle the real issues with class instead. In that way, correctly identifying the cause helps us even if we can't do anything about it directly -- at least we're still mad about it, instead of thinking it's all good when really, things will continue to deteriorate.
I did, however, already download their dataset to look through it later, when I have more time.
But if you want to address one rhetorical flourish in calling you out for assuming a link between police shootings and demographics which supported your position without addressing equally valid and likely links which didn't support your position as "racist" merely because it involved you assuming that one race (by virtue of being that race) was the victim of racism, when the data suggests that it's possible either is the victim of racism, then you are correct, it's not strictly speaking racist.
But you're well in to very technical arguments about why that's not racist.
And I suppose that sounds hypocritical. But I am just basically trying to get through the damn day and that's why I am talking with a stranger on the internet about a topic I tend to intentionally avoid as not a good use my time.
Peace.
Well, for starters, policy (and politics in general) is a big deal.
For instance, the city I'm in is spending about $50 per person in the metro on homelessness every year (which works out to about 1% of the budget). So not only does politicking shape how they spend my $50 yearly "contribution", it shapes how they spend everyone else's $50, which adds up pretty quickly in a major metro. It works out to about $13k per year per person currently on the streets, so programs with a 3 year duration would have about $4k per person per year to work with from the city.
That's, perhaps, not enough to just outright solve the problem -- but we're within an order of magnitude. And helping steer something within that kind of striking range of the problem is way more than I could do through other channels.
That being said, the next most important thing I do is tutor in poor areas. I charge a lot to teach privileged children math (and not to brag too much, but my students usually go on to do well in their future math classes), but offer those services at a steeply discounted or free rate for people who can't afford it. It'll only directly impact a few lives and only to a limited extent, but at some level, that's all it really takes. That if we really want to break things like cyclic poverty, we need everyone to put in a couple hours of professional effort a week/month, and sustain the adjustment for a generation or two. Again, advocacy is important -- we have to convince our peers that it's worth it to put that effort in. But that's how the world really changes, with the waxes and wanes of small, every-day social trends.
And I've been known to make the occasional spur of the moment donation or buy random meals, but I don't really count that. I mean, I'm sure it helps in small ways -- a good meal counts for a lot, and being acknowledged or treated as a person can mean as much -- but it's not really moving the ball forward on the problem. (Though, again, if everyone just did a little bit of that, it probably would make a big difference, cumulatively.)
But let me ask you this: when we live in a land and time of plenty, when we have enough food, wealth, and homes for everyone with margins left over, what makes you think homelessness is anything besides a policy and advocacy issue?
Homelessness (in the US) is an artificial outcome of our economic model, it's existence a choice we're making (as a society), and we should never forget that.
Long before I was homeless, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU. I am aware policy matters. But, I am kind of a fan of That government is best which governs least.
When I was first on the street, I went to meal sites, etc for a time. I mostly hate programs intended to "help the homeless." They mostly suck. Homeless people are just people without housing. If we get off the street, we stop being The Homeless.
If we focused more on solving things like the huge shortage of affirdable housing in this country, a lot more people like me could solve our own damn problems without having to go through some program where we will be treated like idiots who should be grateful for what is often rather abusive treatment. Let me recommend these two links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12639356
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-dece...
Thank you very much for teaching math. That is always a good thing. I tutored math for free as a member of Mu Alpha Theta (a collegevlevel math honor society) in 11th grade. A lot of math instruction really sucks. Props to you on that account.
Which is why I feel even more obligated to be involved on the advocacy side -- part (perhaps even all) of fixing the problem is changing the narrative in society about who the homeless are. Shaping that narrative, and the effect it has on choices about our economic model or policy decisions, really is the most direct thing I could do to combat homelessness, because it eats at the heart of what makes homelessness so damaging.
That being said, I'm also a big fan of more scientific methods. Things like "housing first" programs are showing HUGE promise in making lasting change, and while less glamorous, we're slowly tying the social safety net back together and working to make it more efficient, so less people fall through the holes (which got a lot bigger when certain people were in power and went around making tears, but c'est la vie) and become trapped in homelessness in the first place.
I have a lot of hope for involuntary homelessness being (largely) solved in another generation or two, if we can keep momentum on it. The problem of what to do with some of the people who are... less there mentally, and have trouble functioning in society at a personal level is of course difficult in the long term, because while we can give them houses easily enough, keeping them in them might require involuntary and on-going intervention at times, and that's a very touchy subject. Mental health care, particularly involuntary mental health care, has a dark history in this country.
I actually need to get going, but I've enjoyed speaking with you.