Police use-of-force data is finally coming to light

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.

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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

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.

[1] http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/2015/

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)

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.