zlacker

>>mnm1+(OP)
Qualified immunity has become a get-out-of-jail-free card for law enforcement.

I believe it's the primary reason for the complete apathy law enforcement shows towards de-escalation and self-restraint in general.

Why bother behaving when the standard for prosecuting you is so high as to be laughable?

>>typeni+Yi
This is my feeling also, but in general I'm very frustrated at how this whole conversation is based on these "feelings" because the data is so poor. I think an important component is an independent oversight apparatus that (among many other things) is responsible for collecting standardized, high quality data that can be aggregated at a national level so we can conclusively answer questions like, "do police target certain races in their killings or is it an artifact of different crime distributions or etc?". It just seems insane to me that we keep going through this cycle over and over and spend so much time debating these questions, but we don't avail ourselves by the relatively inexpensive, straightforward step of collecting more/better data. Of course, not everyone will respect data over their own feelings/experiences, but (1) the data might agree with those feelings/experiences and (2) the rest of us can move toward a consensus at any rate.

>>throwa+Km
This "feelings" complaint is a major dog whistle you know.

The fact is, the relationship between unprivileged communities is such that:

- Crime rates to not reflect actual community grievances

- Community members do not want to rely on police even if they would like to bring in some sort of neutral authority / arbitrator to a dispute.

- The portion of would-be crime where the would-be victim is happy for the police presence is incredibly low.

- The portion of actual crime where the actual victim is sad for the police absence is incredibly low.

So it doesn't even matter if the statistics show the police kill extra in proportion to the neighborhoods the patrol and that in turn is proportional to the crime rate, because you haven't Baysianed deep enough to find the cycle. As exemplified by the latter two points, there is no way to find any value for the police as they currently with a democratic basis, and as such they must be defunded and replaced with something else.

>>Ericso+4H
Your “facts” are actually feelings or conjectures, and are demonstrably untrue. Black communities in fact want police (and the criminal justice system) to address high crime rates.

This article collects a number of statistics: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/12/black-community-...

> Finally, Atlantic Media’s “State of the City” poll—published this past summer—shows an “urban minority” class that’s worried about crime, and skeptical toward law enforcement, but eager for a greater police presence if it means less crime. Just 22 percent of respondents say they feel “very safe” walking in their neighborhoods after dark, and only 35 percent say they have “a lot” of confidence in their local police. That said, 60 percent say hiring more police would have a “major impact” on improving safety in their neighborhoods.

In fact, even today, a slight majority of African Americans say that the criminal justice system in their area is “not harsh enough” on criminals: https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/documents/899/download (Table 2). At the height of the crime wave of the 1980s and 1990s, over 70% of black Americans felt we needed harsher punishment of criminals. Half of African Americans today say we are spending “too little” on law enforcement.

Hispanics are even more strongly in favor of policing. 53% of Hispanic people supported NYC’s controversial (and unconstitutional) stop-and-frisk policy: https://www.blackenterprise.com/nypd-stop-and-frisk-poll-rac....

Notions of “defunding the police” are an idea dreamed up by people who don’t actually live in these disadvantaged communities. Poll after poll shows that is not what disadvantaged communities actually want. They want the law to be enforced; they can’t criminals brought to justice; and they want all that done with due process protections, just like police manage to do for white neighborhoods.

>>rayine+3O
Wanting criminals to be brought to justice in theory doesn't match the reality of the entire community being criminalized and treated as such.