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De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

fivethirtyeight.com

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Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#231

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ikeyany wrote: post #132
briefcomment wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change does not require looting and beatings does it? Wouldn't looting and beatings simply give the police more power, and be counter productive against making police more accountable? Looters and those who bash people's skulls in are opportunists who don't care about change. The ones that want change see their opportunity slipping away.

The problem is that decades of peaceful protesting went ignored. Remmeber how kneeling during the national anthem against police brutality got mocked?

Getting mocked was its method of operation. Politicizing a sporting event is controversial and controversy brings media coverage. The fact that it got a lot of media coverage meant that it was doing something.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#232

Post by jamescostian »

lsh123 wrote: post #184
calvinmorrison wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That stat becomes more useful when you take into account black Americans are roughly 15% of the population.

I am not sure that per-capita is the right metric. I would prefer to look at it by police encounter or by crime or something like that. This is slightly old but has some interesting data on killings by race: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-hom... In these graphs you can see that total number of killings for white on white or black on black is roughly the same despite the 15% number you quoted…

> I would prefer to look at it by police encounter or by crime or something like that

How would that fix anything? Look at the numbers of white vs black people who were picked for stop-and-frisks (read: number of white vs black people who were suspected of crime) as well as the innocence ratings: https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data

To see how innocent minorities are, look at this article about stop-and-frisks: https://www.nyclu.org/en/press-releases/nyclu-releases-repor...

If 5% of a population ("Young black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24") accounts for 38% of the stop-and-frisk and is innocent 80% of the time, doesn't that sound like targetting? If you look harder for crime from certain demographics, you'll find more crime from them. Replace the targetted demographic with another demographic and you'll find way more crime in that other demographic. But get this - once you target people and get stats on them, you now have "statistics" and "facts" that show you were right and should continue to target them - even though your statistics are garbage collected on unrepresentative samples! This is why per-capita is the best metric to use - any other metric is tainted.

> total number of killings for white on white or black on black is roughly the same despite the 15% number you quoted.

What does this have to do with anything? Just because there are a lot of "black on black" murders doesn't justify the amount of black people killed by cops. Honestly, I don't even care if the officers are white, black, or any other race or ethnicity. It's the victims who matter. Just because an innocent black person is killed by a black police officer, does not mean it had nothing to do with the victim's race, nor does it mean we can ignore how disproportionately policing is applied.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#233

Post by alexashka »

It takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the protestors to make it go violent.

It also takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the police to make it go violent.

Protesting is largely a modern witch hunt. It lets people blow off some steam, rather ineffectively in the modern protest case, because you don't get to burn anyone alive at the end of it. Enough people long for that witch hunt finale, and that's why protests turn violent so often, it's the modern day equivalent of burning a witch.

I don't know if protestors realize that it is up to them to come up with ways of fixing systemic issues they're upset about (people in power are fine with the way things are, by definition) - burning down your local neighbourhood or yelling out in the streets can only lead to the powers that be going 'ok fine, go find some witches to burn to appease this mob'. It's never going to fix actual systemic issues, but perhaps burning witches is good enough, given our history, and going in circles indefinitely is the way of this species.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#234

Post by efnx »

ThemalSpan wrote: post #179
komali2 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we please not waste a second of thought on the relatively minor issue of broken store windows until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people? If you care so much, how about petition your local police force to dump their tear gas at the range and stop firing on peaceful protesters, turning a lot of sitting people into a riot.

I agree and I'm sorry that the empathy needed to understand is sorely lacking here. Lives over property always.

Sadly it’s expected here. We all know PoC are sorely underrepresented in tech. We are a reflection of the problem at hand - the result of years and years of systemic racism and sexism.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#235

Post by komali2 »

ineedasername wrote: post #159
komali2 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we please not waste a second of thought on the relatively minor issue of broken store windows until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people? If you care so much, how about petition your local police force to dump their tear gas at the range and stop firing on peaceful protesters, turning a lot of sitting people into a riot.

It's not a minor issue. It detracts significantly from the really issue at hand, making it nearly impossible to engage with protestors in a dialog as the small number of folks intent on violence and looting take all of the resources and attention, severely undermining the point of the protests, especially because it provides those disinclined to sympathy for the real issue to paint all with the same brush and so dism…

Before it was looting, it was that kneeling at a football game distracts from the game. Before that, it was "no, no, protest will never work, you need to get more black people elected! Try to get a black president maybe!" Before that, it something else equally absurd.

No matter how black people try to get their voices heard about police violence, there will be people who doggedly tear those voices down by any means necessary.

We're talking about the fact that 14% of the US population can't call the cops for fear of dying.

It's NEVER good enough for white america. NEVER.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#236

Post by frabbit »

pjc50 wrote: post #169
rectang wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always suspected that US police are shunted into sub-optimal patterns because there are so many guns here that the odds a simple interaction will involve a firearm are much higher than they are in less-well-armed societies. Does anybody know if I'm right about that? That doesn't mean that they can't do more de-escalation or take other steps, but the high prevalence of guns does seem like it would be a contribu…

White protestors were allowed to occupy a state building with guns without a single bit of teargas.

Not to mention the Malheur Refuge standoff where heavily armed protestors were handled with kid gloves.

Maybe it's to do with having guns?

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#237

Post by InfiniteBeing »

komali2 wrote: post #198
lsh123 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how your call statistics/number racist. Godwin's Law in action.

After adjusting your statistics to take into account that black people are 14% of the US population, I have come to the conclusion that black people are murdered by cops at a terrifyingly higher level than white people. Why didn't you come to the same conclusion? Is it a lack of knowledge of statistics, or is it an irrational value system that depends on confirmation bias to continue to exist, i.e., racism? It certai…

It's not really the case when you take into account their violent crime rate, homocide rate, rate of shooting at police and killing police.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#238

Post by bluk »

ineedasername wrote: post #170
markdown wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ideal protest in my eyes is a peaceful, effective one. This is the US; you only get to pick one of those.

Hardly. The civil rights movement is an excellent example of civil opposition done peacefully and effectively. It helped that there were many strong leaders in that movement across the country. Right now the energy is chaotic and undirected, without a strong voice of leadership to act as both the vanguard of the protests as well as the negotiators of change.

The one that involved the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. which led to riots in several of the nation's cities that eventually (but directly) led to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_assassination_riots )?

I am not in favor of rioting/looting but historically, it has been proven effective in some cases to get changes made.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#239

Post by frabbit »

daenz wrote: post #219
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #19

Imagine being a cop and having to deal with stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4L97igDjY They literally save this man's life and he kills the guy who saved his life. Cops don't work in a safe space. Years of working in a violent and hateful environment must take a serious toll on them.

I like to share this video with critics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi3Ndh3n-g to show how police have to be ready to go from 0 to 100 within seconds in order to not be killed. Notice the first thing the activist notices when he's done with the simulation: "I never realized how importance compliance is."

I never realized how importance compliance is.

Isn't that somewhere in the Bill of Rights?

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#240

Post by hinkley »

WillDaSilva wrote: post #6

"Of course, as Gillham pointed out, negotiating and managing a protest can’t really work if the protest wasn’t organized ahead of time. That goes double, he said, if the topic of the protest is police brutality. It’s hard to negotiate with someone about the best way to demand they be fired." This point is important. The police can't police themselves, and for a lasting solution to this problem to emerge there'll have…

Police brutality protestors should be meeting with the mayor’s office with representation from the police department and internal affairs, but the chief of police is not in charge. That’s the problem. When official channels fail to the point of Protesting in the streets, you can’t use the same channels to address the situation.

And I don’t mean “you are incapable” can’t. I mean, “You are not allowed” can’t.

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