curtkram,

Although you are quick to trot out the strategy of trying to attack and disqualify the source of information you cannot argue against, Scott Alexander (yes, I know that's not his real name) has politics much closer to yours than mine, and as a clinical psychiatrist who spends lots of his professional life parsing and evaluating data and statistics in medicinal studies, knows how to read and interpret this kind of thing very well (really. if you doubt that, go look up his writing on that subject). The studies and data he cites in that piece are rigorous and mostly non-partisan. All he's doing there is reviewing and summarizing the literature, as well as looking at the statistical analysis for validity. And the graph regarding shootings in NYC comes originally from Mother Jones magazine (hardly a bastion of reactionary dogma).

But you wouldn't know that because you jumped in with the DISQUALIFY attack to try and dismiss the source of something you don't like before actually reading what he wrote or addressing any of its substance.

CD.Arch:

Did you quote that from a Hallmark card or was it something you heard in kindergarten once?

A black Denver resident is three times more likely than a white resident to be shot by law enforcement. Latino residents are nearly twice as likely to be shot.

Well, BulgarBlogger...I guess a white American might find it more funny to be made fun of because she only has one third the chance of being shot than a black American.

I mean, being three times more likely to be shot would be inversely proportional to your sense of humour regarding others' perception of your race (especially when those doing the shooting are much more likely to be from the group who have one third of the chance being shot).

tammuz,

They are more likely to be shot by police. But notice how that graphic conveniently fails to note how much more often they are likely to be committing crimes (particularly violent crimes). As an comparative example, in New York City in 2007-2008, African Americans were significantly more likely to be shot by police than whites or hispanics. But, NYPD statistics also show that African Americans during that same period were responsible for 86 percent of all gun crimes. Eighty. Six. Percent. When the African American percentage of the population of that city is only 25%.

So, for that Denver infographic to be meaningful, we need to know what percentage of violent crimes in Denver are being committed by black people, and how that compares proportionately to the number of police shootings (PROTIP: that's what the Mother Jones graphic I linked shows for NYC).

Why is purple used to represent the black population in TAMMUZ's graph?

gwharton: "They are more likely to be shot by police. But notice how that graphic conveniently fails to note how much more often they are likely to be committing crimes (particularly violent crimes)."

gwharton, I note, more clearly, your assumption that they would be more likely to commit crime and a further assumption that committing a crime somehow deserves or justifies or  reasonably incurs being a target of a cop's bullet (something only reasonable in very rare exceptions).

These are assumptions and assumed associations on your part. What is factual is that this issue is about race and racism. And it is not the victims of this racism that have to de-"racialize" it...the onus is on the one with her or his hands on the holster reacting proportionally to the pigmentation of the skin colour of her or his target.

tammuz,

Since we know for a fact that a disproportionately large fraction (even a majority) of violent crimes are committed by African Americans (a statistical fact, according to the FBI and BJS) when they comprise only 13% of the total population, and that a US city's violent crime rate correlates very highly with the percentage of its black population, it's a fair question to ask. You are saying that black people are more likely to be shot by police. Statistics say that's true. But that all by itself doesn't mean much (unless you are somehow assuming that they commit violent crime at the same rate as everyone else, which we know isn't true). You also have to take into account how much more likely it may be for police to wind up in confrontations with violent offenders, who are overwhelmingly African American. So, while black people may be three times more likely to be shot by police in Denver, how does that compare to the frequency of black violent crime in Denver? There were 7,000 violent crimes in Denver in 2013 (7,800 so far in 2014). What fraction of them were committed by whites vs. blacks vs. hispanics vs. whomever? And how does that compare to their relative proportion of Denver's population (5.1% of which is African American)?

Those are important numbers, which your infographic fails to provide.

As an illustration of why it's important to know the relative offense rates, consider that if you remove black-perpetrated crime from the national statistics (per the FBI and BJS), the USA has a murder rate lower than Belgium's.

As a follow-up to my point about relative offender rates above, consider that the custodial arrest rates reported by the Denver PD are as follows (rates are number of custodial arrests per 1,000 population):

• Asian: 10/1000
• Black:  140/1000
• Hispanic:  70/1000
• Native American: 30/1000
• White:  40/1000

So, in Denver, black people are 3.5 times more likely to be subject to custodial arrest than white people (a number which is slightly higher than the differential in rates of police shooting shown in your infographic). And, since I know tammuz is going to trot out some rhetoric about "privilege" and "institutional racism," 14 times more likely than Asians. Who knew that Denver PD was discriminating so strongly in favor of Asians against whites, hispanics, and black people?

gwharton, Tammuz doesn't exactly see both sides of a story or like being confronted with facts....wasting your time

gwharton, how is that pertinent in explaining away, in any way, the fact that being black makes you three times more likely to be shot?

firstly, the topic of crime and race is much more complex than "blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites". Who is overall more disadvantaged, economically and socially? Who has lived a unique history of suffering  that sets them apart from the privileged sectors of society, etc? Who bears unresolved issues with regards to their disadvantaged state? Yes, there is most definitely a symbiosis between race (remember, defined not by the victims of this racializing - ergo racism- but by the predominant white) , economics and crime. And that tells is that, in itself, the increasing likelihood of committing a crime by one group of people is testimony not to any inherent proclivity on their part but rather to being a symptom of an ailment going beyond economics and crime - ie a consequence of historical racism that continues under the rubric of a cruel economy that favours the already priviledged.

In other words, even the increased likelihood of crime could itself be a pathological aftereffect of racism. Instead of increasingly blame and attack the black community for some "inherent" trait, better to talk about the real issues that restricts them, more than others, from getting a good education, living in good neighbourhoods, etc. Continuing in the manner that you do is a pointless which comes first, chicken or egg, crime or black people. Even a criminal may have reasons that drove him to commit crime. We're not talking about mass murdering here for goodness's sake.

Furthermore, why is the higher percentage here relevant? Is it somehow more reasonable to shoot someone and kill someone because a higher number of people from her or his race commit more offences than the , say, cop's? Is it more "reasonable? or "understandable"? That's blatant racism, literal racist profiling to think that it is. The fact that one would rather find more reasons within FBI percentages that explain nothing rather than hear what the whole community of black people are saying and complaining about is further testimony to the disrespect and nonchalance being paid to them.

summary of tammuz post above: "Math is hard."

I see that first graphic, and the question I ask is Why 41 suspects were fired upon while only 12 fired upon police?  I know these are all gun related incidents, and while it is possible (or even probable) that they may have been protecting the public while not being fired upon themselves, I missed an explanation of that definition (apologies if it was there).  Isn't one of the underlying issues a question of whether police are using appropriate tactic and restraint?  41 to 12 seems like a very wide spread to me that should be investigated.

summary of yours, gwharton: outmaneuvered, so resort to belittling and mocking.

jitter12: Do keep in mind that police are not obligated to wait for you to take the first shot at them before they respond to a threat of deadly force in kind. While that might be considered sporting in the Hollywood-fantasyland version of law enforcement, it would be foolhardy in the extreme if practiced in reality.

tammuz,

I'm mocking you because you're writing stupid things. Do try to keep up.

The question of "why" black people are more likely to commit violent crime is irrelevant to the issue of whether they do or not (And they do - the statistics are unambiguous). The facts are not even remotely on your side in this. Black people are vastly more likely to commit violent crimes than other ethnicities in the USA. Committing violent crimes puts people in confrontation with police. When in confrontation with police, being violent and aggressive runs a risk of getting you shot, as Michael Brown learned to his detriment. As a general rule, criminals are far more likely to be shot by police than non-criminals. I mean, DUH.

In fact, the statistics noted above (black people 3.5 times more likely than white people to be subject to custodial arrest - e.g. for a Class 1 Misdemeanor or Felony - versus 3 times more likely to be shot by police) not only exactly matches my point on that, but also matches the national statistics which show that, comparatively, black people are actually LESS LIKELY to be shot by police than any other race or ethnicity relative to their proportionate rates of arrest and commission of violent crimes.

gwharton, in the nevada case, a bunch of white guys pointed guns at police and didn't get arrested (or shot)

that kind of supports the point that black people are treated different.  in your statistics, black people are more likely to get arrested or shot than white people.  granted at waco white people were killed for gun violations, but white people really do have to try harder to get arrested, don't they?

i'm not discrediting scott alexander who's name isn't scott alexander.  i'm not familiar with him as a news source.  if you really do regularly visit his site then you can just say that you are a regular visitor of that site and trust his opinion as well vetted.  if you posted something like gizmodo, i would expect it to be click bait since i am already familiar with that site.

of course i read what he wrote.  that's what makes me think you're cherry picking data to support a point you want to be true.  if i didn't read it, i wouldn't know his name wasn't scott alexander, would i?

curtkram,

I generally do trust Alexander when it comes to thorough statistical and data analysis. He tends not to mess that stuff up, and has not shown any tendency toward cherry picking in my experience. Usually the opposite.

He also tends to be pretty non-partisan in any conventional sense, though he does have some left-libertarian and extropian quirks (he's a regular contributor to LessWrong). I read his stuff because I like to read widely among writers whose perspective is different from my own. I don't always (or even often) agree with Alexander, but I read him regularly because he's smart, thorough, and what mistakes he does make are only rarely ordinary.

Why is it that the most educated in this country are the least rational? 

Because some ideas are so wrong that only intelligent, highly-educated people can believe them to be true.

Posting from a phone so excuse the lack of line breaks...

From http://m.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/24/1324132/-How-Often-are-Unarmed-Black-Men-Shot-Down-By-Police How often does that record get put on in the iPad when Police want to drown out the cries of an outraged public, until they forced to find out what really happened and it's not anything like the Police initially claimed? How often do Police shoot and kill unarmed suspects who pose no real threat to them?  How often does this happen to Black People?  How often does it happen to White People? Or anyone? The truly frightening thing is that we apparently don't know.  We have no idea.  Not even a clue.  We've been tracking the statistics about Crime for decades at individual police agencies and in the FBI Uniform Crime Report, But those reports don't document exactly when Cops become Murdering Criminals.  This fact - which has sparked police riots and racial unrest going all the way back to the 1960's - is still a mystery. According to Fivethrityeight.com - no one tracks this. Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics. Is being shot down by a cop in the street something that's just as likely to happen to White Suspects as a Black person, or do those who've sensed a decades long pattern here actually have a point? Why don't we have this information?  Could it be intentional? If we want to know how many Justifiable Homicides occur by Police or Private Citizens we can get those number easily.  This is them. Justifiable Homicides: Year     Police      Citizen 2007   398       252    2008   378       265 2009   414       266 2010   397       285 2011   393       260 2012   409       330 But if we want to know how many Law Enforcement Shootings are "Unjustified" - we get no answer from the FBI.  None. One source, in a report called "Operation Ghetto Storm" says that in 2012 that of the 739 "Justified" shootings shown above from 2012, 313 of them were Black.  44% of them or 136, were unarmed. 27% of them (83) were claimed by Law Enforcement to have Gun at the time of the shooting, but that could not be later confirmed or the "gun" was in fact, a toy or other non-lethal object. 20% of them (62) were confirmed to have been armed with a gun, knife or cutting tool.

So let's see, I've proposed two analogies that all of us architects and humans would likely disagree with: that a good working relationship can be formed when one party belittles the other and treats them with no respect, and that one subset of humans has such an accepted history of violence that the entire subset should be treated harshly no matter what the specifics of a given situation are.  But you guys can't refute either of those proposed scenarios because....?

​I know why: because the logic isn't sound.  Of course all men shouldn't expect to be shot because some other man raped a woman. Of course good communication can't happen when one party intentionally belittles the other. But if you break down your arguments you're proposing that both those scenarios are sound.

Tammuz-

At the heart of your argument lies a very strong pacificst stance and agenda. It would be great if no one killed- EVER. 

But honestly- I think your head is wayy up in the clouds. Bullets dont discrimate. All it takes is one. So when you or somone in your family dies because a white man or a green man or whoever, decides to rob a store for fun and starts shooting things without concern for the humanity of others- there will be people who undergo the metamorphosis from a pacifist to a hardcore radical. 

Thats why I firmly believe that education is the base that neuturalizes the acid in our very racially-charged and polarized society.

It takes smart people to have a discussion about things. Uneducated people and adults with the impulsive behaviors of 5th graders may perhaps shoot you if they disagree with you. Take a look at gangs.

"Many Americans view colorblindness as helpful to people of color by asserting that race does not matter (Tarca, 2005). But in America, most underrepresented minorities will explain that race does matter, as it affects opportunities, perceptions, income, and so much more. When race-related problems arise, colorblindness tends to individualize conflicts and shortcomings, rather than examining the larger picture with cultural differences, stereotypes, and values placed into context. Instead of resulting from an enlightened (albeit well-meaning) position, colorblindness comes from a lack of awareness of racial privilege conferred by Whiteness (Tarca, 2005). White people can guiltlessly subscribe to colorblindness because they are usually unaware of how race affects people of color and American society as a whole."

Race doesnt matter- class does.

b3tadine[sutures], funnily I agreed before-the-fact via : "And it is not the victims of this racism that have to de-"racialize" it...the onus is on the one with her or his hands on the holster reacting proportionally to the pigmentation of the skin colour of her or his target."

its a privilege for some to see this as a non-racial issue because they do not experience the daily lives of black, especially disadvantaged, people. Thus, their viewpoint flattens totally the picture, that of a black person committing crime and that of a white person committing crime, comparing statistics devoid of the  racial and socioeconomic context that contains a big piece of the puzzle.

This is, of course, not to mention the possibility that they might well be haunted by deeply engraved fears of black people (committing various crimes) that border, if not overlap with, racist stereotyping.

Anyway, it is, at the least, due to the lack of empathy.

Personal sidetrack: I recall a class mate telling me how he was always being stopped by cops. He was black, he walked with a cool swag and had a very amusing way of dressing up and talking.  And he was a very intelligent guy who cared deeply about educating himself, although he liked to play the part of a fool to set some people up. Anyway, he was telling me how we got stopped once and the cops started beating him up (this happened in Toronto, by the way, so not in the US...but close enough) for doing absolutely nothing wrong. Maybe he had smoked a joint or something and that was all. But the gist is, he was actually used to being stopped by cops simply because he was black, not because he was up to anything. As a consequence, he hates the cops and I could also tell that his ways of thinking were not free of this constraint being placed on him for no reason other than the colour of his skin. In fact, he liked to overact this nonchalant coolness -and a defensive dose of disrespect to figures of authority- specifically because he felt maligned. I am not pretending this is the story of a whole group of people...but it made me much more aware of how this is  the story of a person living under conditions far harsher than his white counterparts. Its a total psychological displacement that the latter would not be subjected to.

Don't you mean "If I were a black man who just so happened to have had the exact same experience the white man I am has had, I would..."? Because otherwise your perspective on the matter is through a lens that is distorted.

i think sneaky pete's point stands.  if you're not a black man, you probably wouldn't know what a black man would do, because you haven't experienced the things that a black man has experienced.

While I do think there is an issue with racial profiling, I'm not sure the best story to convince people of the issue isn't one about a guy who liked to provoke people and break the law being stopped by the police often.

As a white guy who grew up in a poor and primarily black area of town, I'm quite used to being harassed by the police as well. Whenever I visit my old neighborhood there's a good chance that I'm getting pulled over and having my vehicle searched for drugs or weapons or something. The cops have lied plenty of times to me on why they pulled me over. To be fair though, there was a lot of drugs and weapons to be found in the area. I've been to poor white areas, poor Hispanic areas, it's all the same. Cops play the odds game, and the odds of law breaking in a disadvantaged area are pretty high no matter what race is involved.

I won't say that racial discrimination isn't a factor, but it may not be the main cause for every incident. And I know none of this is fact, it's just a personal opinion from the experiences I've had. It's why this issue causes such conflict, because we've all had different experiences and have different perspectives on the issue.

Just want to poke my head in again and say that I mean no personal insult, CD.

CD-Arch, I don't know why you're agreeing with me.

In fact, I'm saying that the onus is NOT on the victim of racism to rid itself of racial identification but rather on the party authorizing this racial discrimination to begin with. The onus is NOT on black people to be pissed off at or to disown crimes other black people have committed (with the hindsight of my argument above, that even crime is explicable within its context and that its far easier to accuse black people on the principle of guilty-before-proven-anything).

Do you ask white people to consider that crimes committed by other white people are in someway associated to them in order to further assume that they should be pissed off?

In reality, what is happening here, is a contradiction between the foreground and the background of your thinking:

1- We should not be racializing black people and black people should not be "self-profiling" themselves; however,

2- We may associate one black person's action to another black person...but we don't do the same with white people. Thus: White people are people . Black people are black people. White is the undifferentiated, normal, contextual. Black is the clique, the group that stands out., the stranger. (in tandem with b3etadine[sutures]'s reference).  Donna Sink's  replacement of racial categories with gender ones to elicit an analogy is spot on. I would add that it is so not only because the assumption that generally men are deserving, in any way, of being suspect of being rapists is a ridiculous one, but also because men - in relation to women- have traditionally been the more authoritarian agents, the ones controlling the values of society. Just like white Americans have been traditionally in relation to back Americans.  Thus, Donna's analogy serves a dual purpose: underlining how irrational it is to make assumptions based on racial or gendered grouping and how , however irrational it is (because fear, hatred, love of power, discomfort with the different..all these are not subject to rationality) , such assumptions are constructed by the dominant group and subsequently forced on to others. This is how, for example, women have been viewed to be "asking for it" simply for wearing what is, in the perception of the rapist, provocative clothes. In the same way, your argument establishes that black people are also "asking for it" because of the warped perception of them and because of a history that constructed them as a disadvantaged group.

Thus, there is an inherent background racializing in your thinking even while you call on the black people to release themselves of racializing themselves. This denial is equally a translation of the denial of history having an impact and cannot be divorced from the present. And of the denial of the cause having an effect. And of the denial of the conditions that black people in America have to live under that translate into this expression by their communities. And the denial that this is not just about the death of one person that resulted in the riots and violence, but was an expression of outrage for a e history of bad treatment - not one incident-  by the authorities that tipped the scale.

I made this post a couple of days ago...

Yesterday, I made mention that I would post a one time opinion or, rather more accurately, an observation on the recent events going on in America. As I stated before, I do not know the facts. I was not present when a lot of this was going on. There are reports on both sides and facts and misdirection happening on both sides. I find that removing myself from either side and trying to understand the circumstances that led to the terrible outcomes, it has helped see things a little better without bias blurring the vision.

With that being said, two deaths happened in two different situations. The underlying tensions notwithstanding, the use of force in this country has become a bit of a problem. It makes no sense to subdue an individual who is being non-threatening with a potentially lethal restraining move. It also makes no sense to then fail to indict the officer(s) in question when there is clearly video evidence that the use of force was extreme. Grand Juries are not used in most of the developed world. I wonder why that is.

Pertaining to the Ferguson case, I can sympathize with both sides. The death of an unarmed, albeit aggressive, male teen is unacceptable. Warning shots, non-lethal force, disabling the person by inflicting damage to an arm or leg would have been the best way. Losing your nerve when faced with a dangerous individual leads to these sort of mistakes. Now, I understand why Mike Brown was frustrated. I cannot understand why he would attack the officer, if he did. Being a black male in America, I've faced police officers trying to intimidate. I've also been helped immeasurably by officers as well. While I am still skeptical and make sure to cross my t's and dot my i's when I walk out the door, I do not hold any inherent hatred towards them. Ultimately, they do their jobs well. As with every profession, there are those that are not qualified.

The political spin machine wants to distract all of us with bigoted comments and racial undertones. They don't want to have the discussion that race is a major factor in a lot of cases of injustice. Sure, black people kill each other. Sure, being in a low income neighborhood that was abandoned by the government is a large contributing factor in the crime rate. When no one else cares if you live, why would you care about others? It is a sickening mindset. If you want to change, change yourself first and let that change spread outwards. You have to change your environment to see the change take place. The world needs to be fixed and only we united together can get it there. The political spin machine uses these type of distractions to keep the power over the people and then they manipulate the world. Why is this bigger than the immigration policy of this nation? Why is this bigger than the need to re-establish our space exploration in this nation? Why is this bigger than the MIC that keeps a populace terrified and slowly take away freedoms? Why is this bigger than a slowly climbing industry and economy? Why have you not heard about a lot of these?

It is past time that we as a nation and a global community sit down and have these discussions. They will be uncomfortable. There will be anger. There will be frustration. But what will come out of it will be an understanding and a new perspective on the culture, community, mindset,and plights that everyone faces. This is why we have hearts. To feel for another person. This is why we have brains. To try and understand. If we cannot let our differences unite us to create similarities, then we as a species is doomed. We are not so different in that we can't have open discussion and vent. We need to admit that we all have racism and prejudices in our lives. We must admit that we do tend to behave different towards others than we do to others who are similar to ourselves. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted from serious issues that will only hinder us as a global community in achieving what we are capable of accomplishing.

Don't let the elite and politically connected manipulate your mind and reason. Do not let the hatred and bigotry of the past linger in your lives. It is 2014. It is time that we move on and unite together as one global community. What we can achieve if we all united is magnificent. I am doing my part the best I can with what I have. Are you?

"Warning shots, non-lethal force, disabling the person by inflicting damage to an arm or leg would have been the best way."

This was written by someone who obviously has no knowledge or experience of physical conflict, firearms, or human anatomy beyond what he or she has seen in movies or read in books. Unfortunately, it's an attitude that is as common as it is ignorant. I don't say it that way to be rude or pick on any specific commenter here. It is a fair and accurate characterization of the comment and the attitudes behind it, and the fact that so many people believe nonsense like this is a big part of the problem. So I'm going to take a moment here to lay out a few facts for the general audience.

Firearms are deadly weapons. Being shot in any location on the human body by any kind of firearm can be fatal and/or crippling. The whole "shoot him in the leg" or "it's just a flesh wound" thing is a movie trope that has no connection to reality whatsoever. So too with "warning shots." Bullets are deadly. You don't starting hurling them around as "warnings." If you're going to shoot, you are shooting to kill, whether you succeed or not. Anybody who has ever been through firearm safety training, and this includes ALL police officers, has this drilled into their heads from day one. A gun is a deadly weapon. Merely pointing it at somebody is a direct threat to their life. Pulling the trigger is a decision to destroy. There is no way to fire a gun at somebody non-lethally unless it's by accident. And if you fire it away from somebody as a "warning shot", the bullet has to go somewhere, where it will destroy whatever it hits.

Not only that, but the stress of a conflict situation makes using any device, let alone a firearm, with any precision extremely difficult. That's why police officers and other folks who are entrusted with the official use of deadly force go through so much training. Even then, you often hear stories of shoot-outs between police and criminals where dozens of shots were fired at "close range" and nobody involved was actually hit (collateral damage is another issue). In a shoot-out, studies show that people firing pistols in real fights are generally too inaccurate to hit a human-sized target beyond a range of about 11 feet unless they are very highly trained and disciplined. Even for trained shooters, hitting a moving target as small as a leg with any accuracy is essentially impossible in a fight unless the range is less than about 3 or 4 feet. Even then, it's an iffy proposition. Now, keep in mind that a typical assailant can cross a distance of 20 feet or more from rest in under a second when going on the attack. Human reaction times are sufficiently slow that it takes a couple of seconds at least to recognize a threat, draw, and aim any kind of weapon: taser, firearm, pepper spray, or whatever. This is why police pay a LOT of attention to physical cues and reading intentions, and will draw their weapons quickly if someone is displaying any kind of aggressive behavior that looks like it could turn into a deadly threat.

On the opposite side of the equation, the human body is evolved to be resilient to damage and keep going, particularly in high-stress, life-and-death situations. It is VERY difficult to "disable" somebody who does not want to be disabled or is fighting back without killing or maiming them. Again, movie tropes utterly misrepresent this. Tasers CAN incapacitate IF they hit in the right spot and the probes aren't dislodged and the target isn't fighting that hard to begin with and is within the specified weight range and isn't amped up on adrenaline or something more exotic. Even then, they only work for as long as the charge is flowing and no longer. And only the taser guns which shoot the wires with hooks work at all, and are pretty finicky to begin with. Those handheld things that look like cattle prods deliver a shock and a burn, but can't incapacitate in any meaningful way. Use one of those, and you're just going to piss somebody off more.

Pepper spray doesn't incapacitate. CS gas can incapacitate if you use enough of it, but it's an area-effect weapon that can blow back on those who are using it. Plus, it's a military-grade weapon and can kill people. I could go through all  the supposed "non-lethal" methods with similar results, but I hope you get the idea. Non-lethal incapacitation is very difficult to accomplish and no technology which claims to affect it is either highly-effective or foolproof.

At the same time, guns are not the only weapons which can kill or maim. Virtually anything can be wielded as a deadly weapon if the intent to fight is behind it. Even fists. A few years ago, a man walked up to another man on the street in my city and cold-cocked him right in the head, knocking him down to the ground where his head then hit the pavement. He was killed instantly. This kind of thing happens more often than the movies would lead you to believe. Particularly when an assailant has a weight and aggression advantage, fists can be just as deadly as guns.

Rendering a human being unconscious against their will is very dangerous to all parties. Human anatomy is highly-evolved to prevent this from happening. It's a fundamental matter of biological survival. Anything that is capable of rendering an unwilling person unconscious is capable of killing them. And the margin between safely made unconscious and dead is usually very fine. Even in controlled conditions in hospitals, anaesthesia still kills people. In a street fight, there's no safe way to knock somebody out. Whatever you do, you run the risk of killing them. The harder they fight back, the more likely that gets.

Law enforcement officers are trained in all kinds of physical techniques to minimize the risk to life and limb of everybody involved when they act to subdue and arrest. Those techniques are aimed at defusing the will to resist or fight. But they are far from foolproof or universally effective. One of the reasons "resisting arrest" is a crime itself, and there is no legal right TO resist arrest under any circumstances, is that by resisting when you are subject to arrest, you dramatically increase the risk that somebody involved is going to die or be crippled. It also dramatically escalates the response from police, because now they are dealing with trying to incapacitate somebody who is fighting back. They have no choice.

I don't write all this to excuse the recent trends in police brutality or paramilitary tactics. Those things also unnecessarily escalate situations into the danger zone, and should be penalized. But part of why the police feel it's necessary to be brutal and utilize paramilitary tactics is because they are dealing with lots more people who are fighting back. Unlike the rest of us, they deal with the worst kinds of people and their bullshit on a regular basis. Few of us probably know anybody who's ever been to jail or committed any kind of serious crime. The police deal with people like that all the time. It's their job. And it's been getting worse as our society has been getting bigger and social trust has significantly eroded. They are highly-sensitive to and trained to pattern-match signals of aggression and bad intent.

And let's face it: it's really easy to not get shot by police. All you have to do is not fight them. If they are wrongfully arresting you, you'll get your day in court. If they behave very badly toward you, you can make them face legal consequences for it later. But if you harass them, fight them, try to grab their guns, be aggressive toward them, or anything like that, they must respond. Their job is to enforce the law, and they are legally required to act where they see the law being broken. The circumstances under which they can yield or stand down to aggression are extremely narrow, and only apply when they are completely outgunned and need to strategically retreat while they get backup. As soon as Michael Brown stuck his arm in a police vehicle, even if he hadn't punched Wilson and tried to take his gun, he was going to get arrested. In fact, as soon as he refused to obey a lawful order by Wilson to get out of the street, he made it pretty likely that he was going to get arrested. And then when he resisted that arrest and further tried to attack Wilson again, he sealed his own fate. Wilson had no choice but to kill him, and was well within his legal authority to do so when he did it.

We can speculate all we want about why Brown did something so incredibly aggressive and stupid, but the fact is that he did and paid the price for it. He was young and very large man. As such, acting aggressively made him a direct threat to the life and limb of whomever he was being aggressive toward. I'm not as big as Brown, but I'm a big enough guy (6'-5" and 210 lbs) to know that I can be very dangerous to other people if I want to be, and that police are very aware of how hard it would be to subdue me if I did not want to comply. I don't give them reason to think I'm a threat.

One thing that has been noted elsewhere is that our education system has been operating for many years now on a de-escalation and deferral model for conflict resolution. When kids in schools, particularly the public schools many poor and minority children attend, are aggressive and hostile toward other students or faculty, the typical response is for the school authorities to defer to the problem student and try to de-escalate. The net effect of this policy is that kids with aggression problems grow up thinking that the best way for them to deal with authority figures and institutions is to pre-emptively escalate their aggression so that the authority figures will reflexively stand down.

Out in the real world, authority figures (like police) are legally required not to stand down, but confront. And to confront with superior force. This is a practical and legal necessity of maintaining peace and lawful order that cannot be changed without dire consequences for our whole society. But these kids have never experience that in any meaningful way and don't know how to deal with it. This mismatch of experience and expectations often results in tragedies, as people who have been trained by a pusillanimous education system to always escalate hostility in order to win conflict situations run up against authorities who must escalate to subdue threats in all circumstances. We don't know why Michael Brown first punched a cop in the face through the window of his car, and then later aggressively charged him when the cop had his gun drawn and was ordering him to yield. But I think it's a safe bet that Brown was doing what he'd always been trained to do: escalate aggression to win.

Which was exactly the wrong thing for him to do.

"And let's face it: it's really easy to not get shot by police. All you have to do is not fight them. If they are wrongfully arresting you, you'll get your day in court. If they behave very badly toward you, you can make them face legal consequences for it later. But if you harass them, fight them, try to grab their guns, be aggressive toward them, or anything like that, they must respond. Their job is to enforce the law, and they are legally required to act where they see the law being broken. "

These two statements are false. The first demonstrably so through many cases where the police have shot people without the stipulations you mention. I'll let you google it, since I don't have the will to reread these cases.

The problem I see is that the prosecutors are necessarily in bed with law enforcement, and biting the hand that feeds can lead to consequences most people wouldn't want to face. They have no reason to force and indictment and therefore the possible crimes go untried and the accused walk.

Well we have drifted from design solutions to an argument over identifying the problem, not that there is a problem we all seem to agree that violent crime is a problem. Racially motivated inappropriate and or illegal actions of the police are a concern. And some people through willful ignorance or a lack of personal experiences don't know all they need to know on this subject.

let me attempt to digress back to what is in the physical environment by looking at some characteristics of the people who live or work in Rogers Park a North Side neighborhood of Chicago.

In the Neighborhood That I live in we have some serious crime problems, about 1 fatal shooting a month, mostly involving a turf war between two African American (Blacks in Rogers Park also includes Haitians and Senegalese immigrants among others I fail to remember right now) Gangs. Most of the gun crimes are attributed to a hit on someone or a case of mistaken identity where the intended target is someone who looks similar to the victim.

Some Observations over the year I have been there

1. Rarely see Hispanic children out on the streets with out a parent close by.

2. streets with well cared for yards tend not to be the seen of violent crime

3. The McDonald's on Clark and Pratt is often the seen of violent and fatal crimes

4. Homeless folks ride the EL more often than the bus

5. Kids like to play soccer more than basketball

6. mostly white young millennial women walk under viaducts and other dark spaces alone at night.

7. Often see white and especially Hispanic parents walking kids to school, only once saw An African American parent walk a kid to school, we have 4 schools nearby

8. The several gay bars and social clubs tend to be viewed as safe and crime free

9. People tend to only grill out at the park along the lake and not the other parks

I have no idea what this all means but locally we have a problem of people not knowing each other, this divide is along Race, Ethnicity, Language, Class, and Home Ownership

Any ideas from the smart and opinionated folks here to improve things?

Over and OUT

Peter N

gwharton, I served in the USMC and I have a pretty well rounded of human anatomy as I studied to be a physician before I decided to pursue architecture. I know you didn't mean to make it sound rude, but unfounded claims of another's intellect is ignorant. At least ask me of my history that would make me make the statements I said. And it was reported that he had fired 12 shots. Brown took 6 of those. The others are errant and could have struck any number of bystanders. Keeping calm in a situation like that is for the best, especially if you have a weapon. While simply having a weapon is not a deterrent to some, it is powerful enough to slow the situation down when it's essentially 1v1. 

I agree with most of what you wrote, I just had an issue with your use of calling someone you know nothing about as ignorant.

A community development by the community itself with psychologists and architects would be a good start as those two can take the culture of the community and the feedback from the people who reside in them to create a place they can be proud of. Getting them involved in all aspects of the design and construction phase should give them a sense of importance and a sense of responsibility to maintain that area. You can't plop something in the middle of a place without the locals input. Then they'll get a negative attitude that I don't think is the expected outcome.

"And let's face it: it's really easy to not get shot by police. All you have to do is not fight them. If they are wrongfully arresting you, you'll get your day in court."

Talk about ignorant. gwharton, that's about the most simplistic, uninformed thinking about the justice system, i can imagine, and i should know, i've had my day and have had police lie on the stand.

Legal right to resist unlawful arrest.

If the state does allow someone to resist an unlawful arrest, there are still several limits on what can be done:

• A person can only use the amount of force that is reasonably necessary. Some states have limited this even further by refusing to allow any force against police officers performing their authorized duties, regardless of whether the arrest is legal.
• Some states also have exceptions for good faith arrests, where an arrest by a police officer acting in good faith cannot be resisted.
• A person cannot resist arrest because he believes the law under which he is being arrested is unconstitutional. 

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b3ta, as we have all seen - repeatedly - the rule of law means nothing. Lest anyone get the wrong idea:

What Should I Do if I am Arrested Unlawfully?
Because of the limits in many states, resisting an unlawful arrest can be a very risky thing. In most states, it will still be a crime to resist a police officer, even if the arrest would be illegal. It can be very difficult to know under what circumstance, if any, it is permissible to resist arrest and what amount of force can be used. Because of this, if you are being arrested you should go peacefully. If you then feel that you have been wrongfully arrested, you can file a complaint for police misconduct.

Racism is dead in America

Justice?