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My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

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Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#291

Post by dragonwriter »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #283
hinkley wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the fact that you are only 10 times more likely to die from a civilian as from a police officer is an appallingly bad ratio . That ratio should be over 100:1, not 10:1, and certainly not 9:1. This conversation is missing another statistic: The percent of citizens who are also LEOs, which I'm seeing is about 1 in 300. Which means your chances of dying during an encounter with a random civilian are about 30 time…

> Which means your chances of dying during an encounter with a random civilian are about 30 times less than your chance of dying during an encounter with a LEO. The vast majority of police killings are of people who were armed and chose to get in a fight with them. Even of the few unarmed cases, most of them were asking for it. So if you're just going about minding your own business, the chance is minuscule.

> The vast majority of police killings are of people who were armed and chose to get in a fight with them

As the NY State report on police-on-police shootings I posted an article about elsewhere in the thread notes, rapidly turning your head to identify the source of a verbal command from a previoisly unseen police officer is the kind of thing that, to police, constitutes non-compliance and choosing to get in a fight with them. Even when you are an off-duty or plainclothes cop who has called for backup, and, much more likely if you are a Black or Latino out-of-uniform cop in that situation.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#292

Post by GhostVII »

Invictus0 wrote: post #262
jeffdavis wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x. For such a remote occurrance, a small factor doesn't justify the difference between carefree and paralyzed by fear. Automobile accidents kill a lot more people than police do, but I doubt most people bother to know the risks of cars within a factor of 2-3x. The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers. Blacks are also dis…

> Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x. I'm having a hard time figuring out the truth on this particular point. I've seen conflicting reports, such as this study from a black Harvard economics professor which found no racial bias [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi...

Black people are certainly killed by police at a disproportionate rate relative to their population, that is an objective fact. This does not necessarily imply that there is racial bias by the police, however. For example if black people encounter the police 2-3x as much, you would expect them to be killed by police more frequently as well even without any bias.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#293

Post by jeffdavis »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #272
jeffdavis wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x. For such a remote occurrance, a small factor doesn't justify the difference between carefree and paralyzed by fear. Automobile accidents kill a lot more people than police do, but I doubt most people bother to know the risks of cars within a factor of 2-3x. The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers. Blacks are also dis…

It's not just murder, it's being beaten by the cops, arrested and being hauled through the system and a variety of other things.

We would have to try to come up with numbers around how often beatings happen by police versus by criminals, to compare.

That might be interesting, but the numbers around those things are much less reliable. Numbers about deaths are usually better data, more objective, and easier to find.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#294

Post by glitcher »

austincheney wrote: post #99
psychometry wrote: post #7

This is why we need civilian oversight of every police department. Cops are generally too corrupt and/or too incompetent to investigate their own. They've proven their inability to hold themselves accountable for their actions, so it's up to the rest of us to do it.

Is there evidence that indicates police are more corrupt than anybody else?

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

The OP's comment may be poorly worded, but in the context of current events your contributions to this discussion show virtually no sign of attempting to make good faith arguments.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#295

Post by brm »

jeffdavis wrote: post #241
pjc50 wrote: post #22

> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.” Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police. (Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the…

Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x. For such a remote occurrance, a small factor doesn't justify the difference between carefree and paralyzed by fear. Automobile accidents kill a lot more people than police do, but I doubt most people bother to know the risks of cars within a factor of 2-3x. The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers. Blacks are also dis…

If being black caused police cars to steer towards my car when in their vicinity I'd find that perilous.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#296

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wccrawford wrote: post #259
jeffdavis wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x. For such a remote occurrance, a small factor doesn't justify the difference between carefree and paralyzed by fear. Automobile accidents kill a lot more people than police do, but I doubt most people bother to know the risks of cars within a factor of 2-3x. The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers. Blacks are also dis…

I think it's further exacerbated by the fact that the whole point of police is to protect people, so when they do the opposite, it's much, much worse. Others have pointed out that it's about a 9:1 ratio of civilian killings to police killings, which is an absolutely appalling ratio, made even worse by the fact that there are far fewer police than civilians. But something I have seen here yet occurs to me after typing…

> Others have pointed out that it's about a 9:1 ratio of civilian killings to police killings, which is an absolutely appalling ratio

It' important to note that it's about a 10:1 ratio of civilian murders to police killings. Murder is by definition wrongful killing, but some significant majority of police shootings are a legitimate use of force.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#297

Post by treis »

vangelis wrote: post #94
jf22 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is people don't deny black-on-black crime is a problem. Society is in agreement that we don't want that. Bring up racism and police brutality though and people strongly deny it's a problem.

Weirdly, it only seems to come up when you mention police brutality!

That's disingenuous. Police brutality almost always comes up in the context of BLM and in this specific case the article made it a racial issue. You can't do that and then say "why are we talking about race" when (the general) you started the conversation talking about race.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#298

Post by fastball »

throwaway_jobs wrote: post #274
creato wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is comparing murder to every instance of police killing someone, justified or not. Police murdering someone is much more rare. The ratio you are talking about probably is in fact well over 100:1.

I don’t know about the ratio being 100:1, but You are right these are Classified police killings not murders...that said, also consider George Floyd’s death was on track to be swept under the rug as a Justified police Killing until the protests.

Considering the fact that 99% of people murdered by police are getting a lot of airtime right now, I think we can say that the ratio is closer to 100:1.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#299

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

corebit wrote: post #252
Pfhreak wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, this is what police were in the Northeast US. (In the South, police trace their heritage to slave patrols. I'm sure they would argue that these patrols were also just defending property. Gross.) Landowners and merchants hired private police to watch over their holdings. Over time, they convinced locals that it would be in the public good if the guards they hired were paid for by everyone. In the 1850s,…

It's become popular to regurgitate that bit about police and slave patrols but it has no real basis in reality. That isn't to say that there isn't some example of a slave patrol that was pressed into service as police, but Police are a concept that all of America inherited from the English roots of our governments.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Th US and the Caribbean have a slaver and white supremacists culture that didn't exist in the UK.

https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WLovR6DgNFEC&oi=...

https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#300

Post by glogla »

conanbatt wrote: post #111
kleiba wrote: post #37

It's crazy but from a European perspective, stories like this sound more like what I imagine police forces to behave like in dictatorships, not in a democracy. After living in Europe for six years now, my wife is still puzzled sometimes by the differences between Europe and North-America when it comes to the police: how they are experienced by the population and how they see and present themselves and which role they…

I do remember the police beating people for having the fake voting in Barcelona a couple of years back. Or the french police clashing with the yellow jackets. What (some) european countries have is a much lower violent crime rate, which might jade perceptions either way.

I think European police is about as brutal and vicious when suppressing dissent (like yellow vests or the Catalonia thing) but significantly less likely to just murder you for fun when you're just walking on the street.
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