Thoughts on the Dallas police shooting (Part 2 of 2)

Continuing the thought exercise on race and police shootings, (you can find Part 1 here), I neglected to mention on Saturday that my thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of the murdered police officers. The loss of any human life is tragic, but double so for those who selflessly serve others in the community.  Police officers and Firefighters have some of the riskiest jobs around and they deserve our appreciation, not our hatred.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Yq1iZjSpY

The police walk a fine line in our society.  As a civil libertarian leaning person, I do not want the police to intrude into my life whatsoever.  I don't live in a police state (admittedly in Canada, but the police here are relatively similar to the police in America - more on that later), and I'm sure most people do not want to live in a society like that either.  On the other hand, how often do we see TV interviews with victims or witnesses to a crime saying "the police never came!" or "it took forever for the police to get here!"?  The job itself is often thankless and difficult and finding the right balance for everything from police visibility in your neighborhood to the appropriate level of response to a situation that protects victims of crimes, perpetrators of crimes and the police themselves is something that cannot come down to a formula.

It's tricky.  It's complex.  And a lot of people with a civil libertarian attitude or an inherent bias of their own or a chip on their shoulder do not help matters.

On the weekend I also came across this video made by country music singer Coffey Anderson.  It's simple, it's sensible, and helpful.  Looking at the comments he got a lot of backlash for this video (along with a lot of positive comments).  The negative comments are ridiculous because he's trying to help.

Stop the Violence Safety Video for when you get pulled over by...
What do you actually do when you get pulled over by the police? Here is a video that helps diffuse tension at traffic stop, it gives solid steps into ways of staying safe, and getting home. SHARE this. It's a must for all to see and show to your loved ones.
Posted by Coffey Anderson on Thursday, July 7, 2016

Granted, it seems a little bit police state-y to have to go through this if you get pulled over by police (regardless of your race), but it something we should all think about because it makes the situation easier for all concerned.  If you have no reason to hide anything (okay, maybe you were speeding but you did nothing else wrong), then it's a small price to pay for actually having police around and not so full of adrenaline when you don't need them to be, and prepared to react with force when it is required.  Every little bit helps, and if you aren't willing to do even that, you are just being negative for negative purposes.  If that is the case, I have little respect for your opinion because you are not offering any positive solutions you are merely complaining for the sake of complaining.

Ben Shapiro destroys that position in the video below, particularly from about 2:15 onward (he uses some short-hand arguments that I would take issue with per Part 1 of this discussion, but he is predominantly correct).

The point is do not make this about race, because if there is a problem with police training and how they react to situations, it is not a black and white issue (no pun intended). By that I mean that police are not given one set of instructions to deal with African Americans and another set of instructions to deal with white people. There is no institutional racism unless you count the Democrat party which promotes social policies that relegate African Americans to poverty and social second class by leveraging welfare to perpetuate poverty and single mother households in poorer class. That's not even institutional racism, it's institutional classism.

Thoughts on the police shootings in Dallas (part 1 of 2)

It's never as easy as the numbers.  This morning I was surfing around Facebook and I came across a couple of items regarding violence and the police. No doubt it's a hot topic because of the police shootings in Dallas.  First I found this picture and there's a couple of problems with it.

Firstly, the comment added at the bottom of the image, as a commenter pointed out, doesn't take into account the population percentages.  Because non-Hispanic whites represent 62.6% of the population they apparently should account for roughly that percentage in the statistic above. They actually account for 51.75% of the cases where the race was reported (including the unreported race in the denominator is misleading and I have excluded it from consideration.  They could be all white, all African-American or all Asian for example - we don't know).  The comment too is overly simplistic.

African-Americans are over-represented in the killings by police.  However, they are also over-represented in violent crimes committed, accounting for 28% of all violent crimes and 49% of all murders. Given that increased rate of violent activity it makes sense that African-Americans are over-represented in the police killings category, not necessarily because of police intent but because they could have been killed in the process of committing a violent act.

From the overly simplistic graphic above it is impossible to tell if there is a systemic bias of some kind.  Furthermore, the source of that variance in rates of violent crimes is in itself a topic for debate.  Is it born of poverty and desperation? And is that poverty a result of the disproportionate single mother households in the African American community?  Is it a racial bias on the part of African Americans that causes them to be disproportionately violent towards other races?  A chart on CNN is grossly misleading.

What is also missing is the reverse statistic regarding how many police were killed in the line of duty. The video below is also from 2014.  Not only were 108 police killed in the line of duty, how many attempted assaults or murders of police were also committed?  The video below is a reminder of the dangers that police officers face daily.  It is easy to see why, despite the overwhelming restraint police show given how many millions of incidents occur without negative consequences, that there are situations that escalate, and that mistakes can happen.  That is not to say that individual officers cannot be racist, some surely are, just as within any other population.  But to credit all police killings to race is not only overly simplistic, it's intentionally misleading.

Watch the video below and tell me you would not also be extra cautious and perhaps a bit quick to react if you were a police officer.  We ask them to protect us and to sometimes put themselves in harms way to do so.  To expect perfection is unreasonable, and still the vast majority day in and day out perform remarkably close to that level and deserve our respect.

Most will never understand.
Posted by 53 Hours on Monday, August 3, 2015

As I stated in my post title, it's never as easy as the numbers.  I say that as a numbers guy who thinks that numbers don't lie.  Benjamin Disraeli originally said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Statistics are a great tool for understanding things, but dangerous when used incorrectly. It's not the numbers that are the problem, it's how the numbers get used that is the problem.  It's kind of like the same notion as guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Part 2 will follow on Monday.