Ferguson Shooting (Is my thinking on this all wrong.......)

by out4good3 229 Replies latest social current

• 

  Simon

  Here's the problem. There are social issues in America that need to be addressed but the Michael Brown case is not the place to try to address them. Neither was the Trayvin Martin case.

  Both should only ever be about the facts of the cases involved with no regard to any larger social issue that may exist.

  Whether black kids are more or less likely to be shot is of no matter to *this* case. All that matters is whether this shooting was justified or not based on the evidence available. But some are trying to make it into a trial of society and the justice system which it cannot and should not be.

  Mark Omara has a very good artilce about this:

  http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/31/opinion/omara-ferguson-grand-jury/index.html
• 

  designs

  We could wish it were so but that is not America. We are a divided country by wealth, race and several other important factors. If you are poor you get a Public Defender and if wealthy a legal team and the outcomes differ. You can rob a bank and spend the rest of your life in prison, you can be Jamie Dimon and cook the books for over a Trillion dollars and only pay a Fine (known as the cost of doing business in the finance world).
• 

  Simon

  White collar vs blue collar crime is a different issue entirely.

  Even if someone with money evades a prison term it doesn't affect the guilt of someone who robbed a bank

  Yout are trying to use relativism to excuse some crimes by presenting outlandish extremes of people getting away with others. Really, a trillion dollars?

  It's a little like complaining that other motorists were speeding when you get stopped. Yeah, some may even have been going faster ... if you were speeding you need to pay the fine and what happens to others doesn't affect your guilt.
• 

  AlphaMan

  the 'They' oh you mean the Negroes.

  Do you believe if the youth had been a preppy white guy...

  See you are still trying to make it about race. With your logic, I suppose if the 6-4 292# Michael Brown was white, the 5-7 170# Officer Wilson would just have let Brown continue to beat the hell out of him and take his gun. Or maybe you imply that only a black Poilice Officer can fatally shoot a black thug attacking them like that. The whole incident was escalated by Michael Brown.
• 

  Simon

  Please refrain from emotive expressions.
• 

  breakfast of champions

  Against my better judgement I will comment on this, although I am not really taking a particular stance:

  In social psych class we learned about experiments done with regards to race/prejudice/violence.

  What they found in this one simulation/experiment was that white police officers will shoot a "black suspect" with a greater frequency than a "white suspect."

  They also found that black police officers will shoot a "black suspect" with greater frequency than a "white suspect."

  I am not entirely sure what this means, but it doesn't looks good for "black suspects."

  Honestly (and this is just my gut) I think the "divide" that has emerged in the US is more along socioeconomic lines rather than racial, i.e., a black kid (or any kid, for that matter) simply has a better chance of encountering violence of any sort being in a "poor" neighborhood as opposed to a more "wealthy" neighborhood.

  I'm not an expert on this stuff though.
• 

  Violia

  no, they means those who think the shooting was based solely on MB being a black teen and the officer being white. Race baiters, haters and troubler makers , of all races.

  Designs said the 'They' oh you mean the Negroes.
• 

  Giordano

  First off my gut feeling is that MB, based on the tape of what appears to be a strong arm robbery of a box of cigarillo's, was 'acting out' for reasons that have not been explained. There is some evidence that he continued this behavior with the police officer with deadly results.

  There is a larger issue then MB's death.

  "Black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by cops then white teens, according to analysis of 1,217 fatal police shootings reported to the FBI from 2010 to 2012. Blacks ages 15 to 19 were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while white males were killed at a rate of 1.47 per million.

  http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white The data is incomplete because many police forces do not post their deadly force information. In reading this article I felt that the numbers could be far worse.

  From the same article

  What were the circumstances surrounding all these fatal encounters?

  "There were 151 instances in which police noted that teens they had shot dead had been fleeing or resisting arrest at the time of the encounter. 67 percent of those killed in such circumstances were black. That disparity was even starker in the last couple of years: of the 15 teens shot fleeing arrest from 2010 to 2012, 14 were black.

  Did police always list the circumstances of the killings? No, actually, there were many deadly shooting where the circumstances were listed as "undetermined." 77 percent of those killed in such instances were black."
• 

  Simon

  I don't think you can take one single statistic in isolation - you'd need to include how likely different groups are to be in gangs, committing crimes, assault police officers etc... to get a complete picture. At the very least, it should be based on 'interactions with the police', not just population numbers. I doubt the police are driving round shooting black kids at random. The question should be: is a black kid committing crime more likely to be shot than a white kid committing the same crime and responding in the same way?

  Again, what matters more though are the facts of any individual case. If in this case the evidence shows that the shooting was justified then it's still included in there as a statistic to "prove" that it wasn't. So the statistics themselves are of less importance than the actual individual cases if they are to be convincing.

  There needs to be concrete "x cases where the shooting was not justified" figures otherwise we're effectively taking "being shot" as proof of innocence.
• 

  Simon

  Here's the problem if you rely on trend and overall statistics to try and prove some disparity. They can be countered by more statistics.

  The statistics show that for every combination of white / black interracial crime that white on black crime is the lowest. So the implication that white police officers are intentionally killing black teenagers would be in stark contrast to the general pattern within the population as a whole which they of course come from. I'm not saying that it's not possible, just that it doesn't fit the pattern. Of course it's possible that all the racist whites decide to become police officers so they can shoot black kids ... but that seems a stretch - the number of shootings is pretty low to make all that effort and intervening work in law enforcement sound realistic.

  Sadly, the figures show that blacks are disproportionately more likely to be committing violent crime so is it a surprise that the disparity then feeds through into law enforcement incidents involving them? (given that apprehending people who commit crimes is their job).

  From Bureau of Justice Statistics (based on FBI figures for 1980-2008)

  Blacks were disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders

  • In 2008, the homicide victimization rate for blacks (19.6 homicides per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (3.3 homicides per 100,000).
  • The victimization rate for blacks peaked in the early 1990s, reaching a high of 39.4 homicides per 100,000 in 1991.
  • After 1991, the victimization rate for blacks fell until 1999, when it stabilized near 20 homicides per 100,000.
  • In 2008, the offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000).
  • The offending rate for blacks showed a similar pattern to the victimization rate, peaking in the early 1990s at a high of 51.1 offenders per 100,000 in 1991.
  • After 1991, the offending rate for blacks declined until it reached 24 per 100,000 in 2004. The rate has since fluctuated, increasing to 28.4 off enders per 100,000 in 2006 before falling again to 24.7 off enders per 100,000 in 2008.

  The report has many more crime stats and trends. I couldn't get Table 1 to copy but it's worth looking at too particularly the offending rates vs population rates.

  Also, if you look at things by age, teens are far more likely to be committing crimes. So put the two sets of figures together and "black teens" becomes a large group that is disproportionately represented in both the crime statistics and the incidents involving law enforcement which then seems less surprising.

  http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

  The bottom line is - if you are going to cite statistics as 'evidence' then they need to be complate and comprehensive to provide the full picture. I actually think the police are more likely to shoot black suspects but not to the extent that is claimed or because they are black per-se ... it's possible that socio economic factors, differences in attitudes, responses and behavior and things like the three strikes rule + previous offenses make those from some groups more likely to run / resist arrest etc... which is then going to feed into the figures.

  The figures are a symptom, they are not proof of anything or a judgement other than that is a count of what has happened. We need more than the figures alone to be able to say "why" anything happened and again, the only way to do that is by having an investigation of each incident to determine the cause and if there is any fault or not.