US Politics: Stamping out Chauvinism

[karaddin]

I'm sure plenty of people are focusing on the individual officer, but my focus at least has consistently been on the policies and training that instruct cops to take this course of action. As such, 

5 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I think you’re overestimating what one even with the best training in the world can reasonably be expected to act in a scenario like this.

doesn't really apply when I'm disagreeing with what the training says to do, rather than their adherence to the training.

[ThinkerX]

39 minutes ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

Jesus, the concept of a 2 day (!) security guard school where the question of lethal force is even coming up is alarming. 

Well, armed security guards are a thing.  And even back then - 30 years ago - we had to pass a background check (no criminal record), UA, get fingerprinted and the like just to make it that far.  That said, I do remember a couple guards getting fired on the spot for having their pistols out of the holsters (one was playing 'quick draw' behind a mall).

Really alarming part was the commentary given by the instructor, who lamented about the lack of security in the US and was all for a sort of police state.  

[DMC]

8 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Will Manchin back DC Statehood?  Without him how will Democratic Senators even muster a simple majority?

What I find amusing is DC statehood supporters are planning on protesting Manchin's houseboat on the issue:

Quote

Advocates for D.C. statehood are planning a protest on Thursday, Politico reported, and they'll be gathering at Manchin's house ... boat.

"Yes," Politico writes for those unfamiliar, "[Manchin] lives on a boat docked in the harbor when he's in Washington."

Indeed, the boat, Almost Heaven, is "anchored 8 miles south of the Capitol," a Time story described in 2014, going on to note that Manchin "routinely invites senators from both parties out for evening cruises."

"I wasn't crazy on buying any real estate in Washington, not at all," Manchin told Time.

The Washingtonian may have summed it up by writing, "Manchin lives on a boat because he doesn't like living here."

I'd expect Manchin would support the bill on an up or down vote.  Whether he supports the 51 for 51 movement - abolishing the filibuster for statehood votes (which is an entirely reasonable argument even if you want to preserve the legislative filibuster, btw) - is another matter.

Also amusing on the topic - Joe Lieberman is apparently prepared to lobby Senators on behalf of DC statehood.  That'll do the trick.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, karaddin said:

I'm sure plenty of people are focusing on the individual officer, but my focus at least has consistently been on the policies and training that instruct cops to take this course of action. As such, 

doesn't really apply when I'm disagreeing with what the training says to do, rather than their adherence to the training.

It is hard to separate the two though, and that's where some of the talking past one another in this conversation stems from. You can say on the one hand that the policies and training are substandard, the hiring practices are backwards as fuck (old article, but the point should hit home), the lack of accountability is appalling and the institutional racism at every level is completely unacceptable, both in policing and society as a whole, etc., but also recognize the unfortunate fact that as a result of our failings we end up with a situation where a cop has to make a split second decision whether or not to shoot someone about to stab someone else, before we begin to layer it with race, gender and age. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

9 hours ago, Centrist Simon Steele said:

I think white people are starting to realize they're in danger too. Sometimes cops shoot you if you call them for help as happened to Justine Damond. I'd say police brutality is out of control across the board--the cops in my town attacked and beat my father when he had early onset alzheimer's because he "seemed threatening and was wearing a hoodie" which they put in their report. And is illegal, so helped with the settlement. The next town over, an elderly woman with dementia who may have been lost was beaten and arrested (on video). Even when they're not killing us, all kinds of unnoticed abuses are happening. 

Eh not really;https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-views-on-black-lives-matter-have-changed-and-why-that-makes-police-reform-so-hard/

White Americans trust in the police have reverted back to it was pre-Floyd.

And personally  I’ve the existence of whites being abused or unjustifiably killed at the hands of the police as tool to obfuscate racist trends treating the problem as individual incidents of failure.

 

 

[Mindwalker]

Tucker Carlson's college yearbook has surfaced. Fun fact: He listed himself as a member of a) The Jesse Helms Society and b) The Dan White Society. (DW being the murderer of Harvey Milk.)

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Mindwalker said:

Tucker Carlson's college yearbook has surfaced. Fun fact: He listed himself as a member of a) The Jesse Helms Society and b) The Dan White Society. (DW being the murderer of Harvey Milk.)

 

How unsurprising.

[Zorral]

We cannot deny though, these stories are vastly more frequent and common than out-and-out undisputed justified killing by cops.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/23/virginia-isaiah-brown-sheriffs-deputy-shot

Quote

 

....The family of a Black man shot by a Virginia sheriff’s deputy this week says he is in intensive care with 10 bullet wounds, and they have no idea why.

Relatives of Isaiah Brown, 32, spoke with Washington TV station WRC about the shooting, which happened outside their home in Spotsylvania county early on Wednesday.

Brown was unarmed, they said, and they have not been given a reason why the deputy opened fire. The encounter was recorded by the deputy’s body camera, but state police said they will not release it pending an investigation, the station reported. The disciplinary record of the officer involved is not known.

“I’m just still trying to figure out where he felt the threat at, to feel the need to shoot,” Brown’s sister, Yolanda Brown, told the station.

Brown’s family said the same deputy had given Brown a ride home from a gas station after his car broke down. Tazmon Brown told the station that when they arrived, the deputy assured him that his brother was in no trouble, and had just needed a ride.

At some point later, 911 was called. The sheriff’s department called it a domestic disturbance, but Tazmon Brown said he thinks his brother just wanted a ride back to the car so that it would not be towed. The same deputy returned and encountered Isaiah Brown walking away from the home.....

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

12 minutes ago, Zorral said:

We cannot deny though, these stories are vastly more frequent and common than out-and-out undisputed justified killing by cops.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/23/virginia-isaiah-brown-sheriffs-deputy-shot

 

Your statement is absolutely true and regardless of anyone’s opinion about the death of Ma’Khia Bryant Law Enforcement in the US is in desperate need of reform.

[Zorral]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/makhia-bryant-adam-toledo-children-shootings.html

Quote

Minutes before the jury delivered their verdict convicting a former Minneapolis police officer for the murder of George Floyd, another police officer in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. Ma’Kahia joins Adam Toledo (13), Anthony Thompson (17), Iremamber Sykap (16), and Anthony Bernal Cano (17) on the list of children who have been killed by the police since the new year began, which includes at least five in the past month alone. Add to that the dozens of children who have been killed by police in the last decade and we have reason to be concerned about the sanctity of American childhood....

 

[DanteGabriel]

7 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

Tucker Carlson's college yearbook has surfaced. Fun fact: He listed himself as a member of a) The Jesse Helms Society and b) The Dan White Society. (DW being the murderer of Harvey Milk.)

 

What the suffering fuck has to be wrong with someone to even want to name a society after a murderer like that? This pretentiously bow-tied chud was born with every advantage in the world and he chose to do this with his life.

[Rippounet]

17 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Well the officer probably couldn’t in the few seconds he arrived on the scene to a girl attacking someone else with a knife intricate history and model of said knife.

Exactly.
To elaborate: what the footage clearly shows is that the split-second decision the officer made was whether to kill or not. Faced with a difficult situation, his training led him to take out his gun, stand back, and shoot to kill.
I don't want to be needlessly confrontational, but the position that the death of Bryant was justified is an a posteriori consequentialist reasoning that -unwillingly, I would think- also condones other similar split-second decisions.

[Ran]

3 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Exactly.

Is this case also a police failure? Still trying to understand when you consider lethal force justified. He only had a knife, and had only killed one police officer. Shouldn't several police be able to apprehend him without killing him?

[Fez]

In non-police news (is it time for a separate thread again for that?), here's a neat map I hadn't seen before:

The Gore 2000, Obama 2008, and Biden 2020 counties all make sense in where they show up. Being the pre-collapse in rural areas, the big blowout, and the demographic shift elections. But the Kerry 2004, Obama 2012, and Clinton 2016 counties, though rarer, are the interesting ones that make me want to know more. The 2012 and 2016 counties we can't just chalk up to demographic shift, otherwise they'd be Biden 2020 counties, but they didn't peak with Obama 2008 for some reason either.  The black belt counties getting better from 2008 to 2012 kinda makes sense, but what was going on in upstate New York for 2012 only? Or Ohio?

Likewise, Clinton peaked in Utah because of the 3-way race and in some Hispanic areas which then shifted towards Trump in 2020 and that kinda makes sense, but what's going on in north Texas and in Idaho?

And I've no idea what to make of the Kerry 2004 counties. Are they all just flukes or what?

[Old Zog]

46 minutes ago, Fez said:

[...] but what's going on in north Texas and in Idaho?

Don't know about north Texas, but I imaging Idaho is, like Utah, about the Mormon vote.

[Fez]

8 minutes ago, Old Zog said:

Don't know about north Texas, but I imaging Idaho is, like Utah, about the Mormon vote.

I thought about that, and maybe it is the case. Though an important difference is that Biden did better than Clinton in Idaho (he lost by 30 points instead of 32 points), whereas he did worse in Utah (losing by 21 points instead of 18 points). And Evan McMullin did far better in Utah than Idaho in 2016 (21.5% vs. 6.7%), so there were a lot fewer protest votes in Idaho. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Fez said:

Likewise, Clinton peaked in Utah because of the 3-way race and in some Hispanic areas which then shifted towards Trump in 2020 and that kinda makes sense, but what's going on in north Texas and in Idaho?

I’m curious why Clinton ended up doing the best in Miami-Dade. I would not have expected that at all.

[Fez]

8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I’m curious why Clinton ended up doing the best in Miami-Dade. I would not have expected that at all.

Democrats were successively improving their Hispanic vote share each recent election until 2020, when Trump managed to turn out a whole lot of Hispanics who hadn't been voting previously. So the demographic advantage peaked in 2016, and a lot of high hispanic populations areas like Miami-Dade, and Los Angeles, and some border counties all hit their high water mark. Unfortunately, Trump found a lot of new north Florida voters in 2016 so the Miami-Dade performance didn't matter. 

2020 was actually least the racially polarized election in a while, since Trump also improved among African Americans and Asian Americans, and Biden improved among Whites. Which is why the counties where Biden did the best are almost all white suburb counties instead.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 minutes ago, Fez said:

Democrats were successively improving their Hispanic vote share each recent election until 2020, when Trump managed to turn out a whole lot of Hispanics who hadn't been voting previously. So the demographic advantage peaked in 2016, and a lot of high hispanic populations areas like Miami-Dade, and Los Angeles, and some border counties all hit their high water mark. Unfortunately, Trump found a lot of new north Florida voters in 2016 so the Miami-Dade performance didn't matter. 

2020 was actually least the racially polarized election in a while, since Trump also improved among African Americans and Asian Americans, and Biden improved among Whites. Which is why the counties where Biden did the best are almost all white suburb counties instead.

Sure, but you know Hispanics are not a monolithic voting bloc and I believe Cuban-Americans are a plurality in the county. Cubans in that area largely hate Bill Clinton, and I'd assume that same hatred would have been directed at Hillary.

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

Being the pre-collapse in rural areas, the big blowout, and the demographic shift elections. But the Kerry 2004, Obama 2012, and Clinton 2016 counties, though rarer, are the interesting ones that make me want to know more. The 2012 and 2016 counties we can't just chalk up to demographic shift, otherwise they'd be Biden 2020 counties, but they didn't peak with Obama 2008 for some reason either. 

The map is kinda fun but rather limited - digging into change in margins and longterm trends would be necessary to develop any well-founded assumptions.  I think the big takeaways mentioned in the tweets are solid - Gore's "strength" is pretty intuitive, as is Obama's dominance.  Plus, Obama peaking in the black belt in 2012 makes sense in terms of those were some of the least likely voters to drop off from 2008.  Biden's strength in urban/suburban areas also makes sense, and is encouraging.

I'm not sure why we're calling 2020 "the demographic shift" election.  If anything I think it should obviously be called the "turnout" election.  I think it's safe to chalk up Kerry's counties to randomness, and probably Hillary's too beyond the Hispanic vote.

1 hour ago, Fez said:

Though an important difference is that Biden did better than Clinton in Idaho (he lost by 30 points instead of 32 points), whereas he did worse in Utah (losing by 21 points instead of 18 points). And Evan McMullin did far better in Utah than Idaho in 2016 (21.5% vs. 6.7%), so there were a lot fewer protest votes in Idaho. 

My first hypothesis with Idaho would be the population growth, but that's been most prominent in the Treasure Valley which is on the other side of the state.  The second would be yeah, Mormons, particularly the counties that are covered by the Salt Lake City market.  But that doesn't really work either.  Who knows, that Hillary cluster on the Wyoming border is curious, but I don't know enough about the area to speculate beyond the above two.