Ferguson in Context

[tvashtarkatena]

dood, suri works for skynet

[tvashtarkatena]

i think they used a Bugle Corn Snack for the doomsday machine

 

shiite, i could use a bag right about now, but papa aint got one

[JayB]

What tangible impact do you expect any post-Ferguson policing reforms, such as body cameras, to have on the number of black victims of murder, assault, robbery every year? How about the high-school dropout rate, percentage of two-parent households, etc, etc, etc.

 

 

 

 

you know full well those things are far more driven by economic conditions than policing reform, but then the point of such reform is to reduce the # of folks cops kill unnecessarily, not to make crime itself go away.

 

I'm all for ending the drug prohibition, etc, etc, etc so I'm fully on board with that, but I also think that you know full well that the number of encounters that a given population has with the police isn't simply a function of economics.

 

Just to take one example - is there an economic explanation for the reason that white southerners tend have a higher murder rate than whites in the rest of the country with comparable incomes? If not - what do you make of that?

 

 

[JayB]

My intent was to steer the discussion towards a focus on long term racial disparity in our criminal justice system. Thanks for playing along.

 

The Milwaukee is the most discriminatory jurisdiction in the country claim was made by Jeff Robinson, one of the most distinguished civil rights attorneys in the US, during the ACLU's Bill of Rights awards dinner this year. Jeff was a fellow ACLU board member for a year, before his many other duties called him away.

 

Jeff Robinson's credentials

 

Blacks are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than whites

 

Racial disparity in our CJS, per Farrakhan v Gregoire 9th Circuit (2010))

 

Plaintiffs (who won the appeal *sic*) relied heavily on the reports

of two expert witnesses: Dr. Robert Crutchfield, a Professor

of Sociology at the University of Washington, who has “conducted

extensive research on racial disparity in the Washington

State criminal justice system,” Crutchfield Report at 9,

and Dr. Katherine Beckett, an Associate Professor of Sociology

at the University of Washington, who “conducted a 2004

study entitled Race and Drug Law Enforcement in Seattle,”

 

Crutchfield and Beckett's evidence, as presented during Farrakhan vs Gregoire 9th Circuit (2010)

 

One excerpt from Crutchfield’s evidence:

 

”…an African American in Washington State was slightly more than nine times more likely to be in prison than a white American in the state. But, the ratio ofblack to white arrest for violent offenses was only 3.72 to 1. This means that substantially more than one half of Washington State’s racial disproportionality cannot be explained by higher levels of criminal involvement as measured by violent crime arrest statistics.”

 

This will help interested parties scratch the surface. There are a lot more supporting materials of course. Big issue. Get your wonk on!

 

"Violent offenses" is such a broad category that comparing incarceration rates across all crimes that involve violence isn't going to tell you anything meaningful about potential bias in sentencing and incarceration. You also need to correct for whether or not the defendant had a prior record, the nature of the said record, any other offenses that may have been committed along with the violent offense, etc, etc, etc, etc.

 

Are those stats that you presented net of controls for the nature of the violent offense, etc? I'm too busy to read through study any time soon, but it sounds like you've personally read through it carefully so perhaps you can cite the relevant passages in the methods section.

 

The disparity may be real, but the mere fact of a statistical dichotomy itself isn't convincing on its own.

[JayB]

Speaking of excessive force:

 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/lapd-officers-fired-22-shots-unarmed-driver-after-corvette-chase-f2D11779731

 

LAPD officers fired 22 shots at unarmed driver after Corvette chase, review says

BY ANDREW BLANKSTEIN

Three LAPD officers have been temporarily relieved of patrol duty after a departmental review found they fired 22 shots and killed the unarmed driver of a Corvette after he led them on a high-speed chase Friday night.

 

“After hearing the preliminary briefing, I am very concerned about the circumstances that led up to and resulted in this Officer Involved Shooting,” said LAPD Chief Charlie Beck. “Because of those concerns I have directed that the three involved officers be assigned home pending the final results of the investigation. Determinations regarding training or possible disciplining of the involved officers will be made at that time.”

 

The crash and the shooting were captured by local TV helicopters that had been following the Corvette during an hour-long chase through crowded city streets. Police opened fire at Brian Newt Beaird, 51, after he slammed his silver sports car into a Nissan at a downtown L.A. intersection, drove the vehicle onto the curb and hit a tree, and then got out and tried to walk away from the vehicle. Beaird was pronounced dead at a local hospital from multiple gunshot wounds. “No weapon was recovered” at the accident scene, said Chief Beck.

 

The LAPD did not immediately say how many shots hit Beaird, or offer an explanation for why deadly force was employed. Chief Beck made his decision to send the officers home, with pay, after the results of an initial review known as a “72-hour briefing.” Criminal and administrative investigations are continuing and could take months to complete.

[Pete_H]

I'm guessing the protesters won't be disrupting any Christmas festivities for the police shooting of just an unarmed white dude.

[ivan]

Just to take one example - is there an economic explanation for the reason that white southerners tend have a higher murder rate than whites in the rest of the country with comparable incomes? If not - what do you make of that?

 

duh, economics ain't everything. i remember the freakonomics bit on the confrontational culture of southerners being a product of the transplanted clan-culture of highland-scots to appalachia (and its subsequent transmission to even those not of scot genetic extract, but to all souls living in the sunny south) and that in turn an explanation for higher homicide rates (though, having lived there, i think it could as easily be the weather - i was so hot and depressed the whole time i lived there i could gladly have killed damn near anybody at any time )

 

sure, cultural factors play in - black folk have a natural hostility to authority, but that's hardly an irrational response at the cultural level, nor unsurmountable for black individuals or communities, which still value organization and authority in many, many ways - white folks of course also have plenty of history of such complex attitudes (the scots being an excellent example - so anti-english rule yet prone to developing extreme religious orthodoxy as in the fucking calvinists)

 

all that said, economics is still probably primarily the main element determining cop interactions - i fight like shit w/ the stupid fuckign cops i interact with, but those are only during my leisure hours out at beacon rock, which sadly are quite rare - most of the day i'm too busy working to have to contend w/ cops - if unemployment is rampant in your community though, or if the economic reality of your community is such that much of your work lies in the realm of the black-market (clearly the case in many of these incidents), of course you're going to have more interactions w/ the well-armed-Man

[tvashtarkatena]

if you dont have time to read the studies, then dont.

 

fucking kids these days.

 

 

[ivan]

[

 

I'm all for ending the drug prohibition, etc, etc, etc so I'm fully on board with that....

good news, though i think the sad fact is that we're still a long, long, long way off, b/c it's not just bringing weed into the legal market - it's the hard drugs too...and prostitution...and probably a few other things...and also not creating a tax scheme aroudn it such that the black-market still is attractive (the current washington situation is illustrative - i don't know a single person using hte legal market b/c it's twice as expensive as the pre-existing one - this guy choked to death in new york underscores this - north-east liberals, god love'em, want to end smoking by making it cost a fortune to smoke, but that doens't actually make people quit smoking, just look for cheaper ways to buy smokes)

[ivan]

if you dont have time to read the studies, then dont.

 

fucking kids these days.

 

read...fuck me! who has TIME to do taht these days? i barely can find 60 seconds on the can each morning to leaf through my selected works of thomas jefferson

[tvashtarkatena]

As long as the po po stick to shooting guys in Camaros and Beamers, they'll continue to enjoy carte blanche.

[G-spotter]

I'm guessing the protesters won't be disrupting any Christmas festivities for the police shooting of just an unarmed white dude.

 

he had a car

[Pete_H]

True, but the popular rhetoric seems to be whites get away with everything and blacks get shot for jaywalking. So I guess this one is convenient for the bulwarks of social justice to ignore.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/12/04/the-glaring-problem-with-crimingwhilewhite/

[ivan]

no, i think the "rhetoric" is that the police are generally too quick to violence, no matter the adjectives you wish to stick to the person they're violent with (though yes, part of that complaint is that the violence is particularily focused on folks of color) - the news paid plenty of attention a couple months ago to the south carolina cop that shot the non-black dude who was reaching to get the drivers license the cop asked for, for example.

 

i think to some extent its inevitable - you give a guy a gun and a badge of authority and he's gonna start dreaming of a day he can plug a bad-guy and get a medal, plus you give him reason to fear (why else would he need a gun?)

 

i don't know how to do it, but training the fear out of cops seems of paramount importance, since that is obviously a big part of why they shoot people within seconds of encountering them - sure, cops do get killed on the job occasionally, but so does every other kind of employee under the heavens - cops don't even make the top 10 - fishermen, farmers, truck drivers, and garbage collectors get killed way more often (though i'll concede them truck drivers kill more than a few innocents too )

[tvashtarkatena]

end the drug war for starters. reform our mental health system, which warehouses a large number of mentally ill people who shouldn't be there would make a huge dent as well.

[tvashtarkatena]

A couple of issues with body cameras:

 

How long can the police store the videos?

 

Who has viewing access to them? Bellingham jurisdiction is currently flooded with FOIA requests for body cam videos. They estimate it would take 3 years to satisfy them. What's to prevent videos of people's homes showing up on the web?

 

The ACLU WA is lobbying for body cam regulation to address these two issues - stakeholders (those with encounters with police wearing body cams and law enforcement) have 60 days to flag a videos where something worthy of flagging - as evidence, or when violence occurs. If no flagging occurs, videos must be deleted within a short time thereafter. Only said stakeholders have viewing rights to such videos to protect privacy.

[Pete_H]

end the drug war for starters. reform our mental health system, which warehouses a large number of mentally ill people who shouldn't be there would make a huge dent as well.

 

Very much agree with you on those points. I think how to end the war on drugs is a complex question. Hopefully we'll learn a lot from what's going on with mj laws right now.

[Pete_H]

no, i think the "rhetoric" is that the police are generally too quick to violence, no matter the adjectives you wish to stick to the person they're violent with (though yes, part of that complaint is that the violence is particularily focused on folks of color) - the news paid plenty of attention a couple months ago to the south carolina cop that shot the non-black dude who was reaching to get the drivers license the cop asked for, for example.

 

No that dude was black too. Unless there was a similar shooting in Carolina at the same time.

 

But in general I'm pretty sure it's become a race issue. Have you been paying attention to the media recently or read the washington post article I linked?

[tvashtarkatena]

CA PROP 47 just reduced nearly all drug possession to misdeamenor - retroactive. decrim all drug offenses retroactively. stay tuned in WA. thats now an objective.

 

the ACLU just got a 50 M donation to end mass incarceration, BTW.

[ivan]

 

No that dude was black too. Unless there was a similar shooting in Carolina at the same time.

 

But in general I'm pretty sure it's become a race issue. Have you been paying attention to the media recently or read the washington post article I linked?

my bad, so many of these gawd-damn cases its kinda hard to keep'em straight

 

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/25/justice/south-carolina-trooper-shooting/

 

holy shit though, that video is nuts - crazy to think you can be in a gas station and within 10 seconds some cop is shooting the shit out of you for nothing - reckon that's the status quo though for residents of mogadishu?

[glassgowkiss]

I think how to end the war on drugs is a complex question

 

Actually it's a very simple issue in a way. Substance abuse is a medical issue. If you approach it from this perspective, you eliminate everything down the chain. So in order to eliminate the demand, you have to treat drug use as an illness, exact the same way as heart disease or cancer.

[tvashtarkatena]

The ACLU's preliminary strategy for ending mass incarceration:

 

End the War on Drugs. Legalize marijuana, decriminalize other drugs. Reform our drug treatment and education systems.

 

Eliminate one size fits all policies like minimum sentencing and 3 strikes, so that judges and juries can act on a case by case basis once again.

 

Reduce the severity of non-violent crimes, like California just did.

 

Ban for profit prisons.

 

End the school to prison pipeline.

 

End our debtor's prison system by applying pressure to the worst actors.

 

Reform our mental health system so that the mentally ill don't wind up being warehoused in jails in huge numbers, as they are now.

 

This will be a strategic effort using all the tools available - initiatives, referenda, legislation, litigation, public education. Key swing states and those with the worst criminal justice records will be targeted, as will the low hanging fruit where reform will come more naturally. These successes will then serve as examples for action in other states.

 

Actions will be timed coincide and influence the next two presidential elections - where voter turn out is higher and candidates will be under pressure to address the issue on the national stage.

 

This will take a coalition of national organizations, of course - but many are primed for such a campaign already.

 

It's going to take a while, but that's no reason not to start getting on it in a big way. Voters are already there in sufficient numbers to move things along.

 

This will necessarily have to be a bi-partisan effort, and one that involves law enforcement in a big way.

 

 

 

[Pete_H]

I think how to end the war on drugs is a complex question

 

Actually it's a very simple issue in a way. Substance abuse is a medical issue. If you approach it from this perspective, you eliminate everything down the chain. So in order to eliminate the demand, you have to treat drug use as an illness, exact the same way as heart disease or cancer.

 

Except that a cancer patient is unlikely to steal your car stereo.

 

So,if we just decriminalize hard drugs it solves some of the problems such as not incarcerating the end user. However, there would still be a black market,drug gangs, and all of the violence and social ills that come along with it.

 

Do we want to have a completely laissez faire approach with like the Phillip Morris of hard drugs producing meth? Or is the government going to make and supply drugs to eliminate the black market? How do they do it in Holland?

[glassgowkiss]

I think how to end the war on drugs is a complex question

 

Actually it's a very simple issue in a way. Substance abuse is a medical issue. If you approach it from this perspective, you eliminate everything down the chain. So in order to eliminate the demand, you have to treat drug use as an illness, exact the same way as heart disease or cancer.

 

Except that a cancer patient is unlikely to steal your car stereo.

 

So,if we just decriminalize hard drugs it solves some of the problems such as not incarcerating the end user. However, there would still be a black market,drug gangs, and all of the violence and social ills that come along with it.

 

Do we want to have a completely laissez faire approach with like the Phillip Morris of hard drugs producing meth? Or is the government going to make and supply drugs to eliminate the black market? How do they do it in Holland?

 

Theft is a fallout of a drug addiction, isn't it. And criminal justice system is set on punishment only, without rehabilitation. If you toss addicts in prison without drug rehabilitation (which has to start with controlled detox), what do you think is going to happen, when they leave and are on streets again?

Also remember that a big part of people with substance abuse have untreated psychological and psychiatric issues. Add a healthcare system, which creates a fair amount of addicts, far more then you think (particularly a large percentage of heroine addicts are former chronic pain patients).

Also add alcohol to the list, which I think is far more dangerous then most of other drugs combined. If you ever visit medical units in any given hospital, you will see equal amount of misery caused by alcohol as all other drugs combined.

I am not advocating letting people off the hook, when they do commit crimes, even if they are addicted, but treatment has to be first, and the punishment second.

I also know that in probably more then 50% of cases, the attempt of treatment will be unsuccessful. Drug courts have somewhere 30-40% success rate, but normal judicial system has pretty much 0% success if only applying incarceration, so treatment first, punishment second is the best tool we have at the moment.

[Jim]

Speaking of legalization - seems the pot business in WA has an issue of sustainability. Didn't anyone think of tax implications BEFORE this became law?

 

There is a single chief concern shared by many people currently involved in Washington's recreational marijuana industry: The 25 percent excise tax that the state levies on pot at each step in the supply chain — as it moves from growers, to processors, to retailers — cannot be written off when businesses file their federal taxes. This is because of a provision in the U.S. tax code, known as "280E," which prohibits businesses from claiming any tax deductions if they are trafficking drugs the federal government considers illegal.

 

"If you’re in this industry and you don’t know about 280E, you’re screwed," said Todd Arkley, an accountant, who owns Arkley Accounting Group, a Seattle-based firm that provides bookkeeping and financial management services for marijuana-related businesses. "If companies are not setting money aside for their federal tax bill right now, they are going to go bankrupt."

 

As of Dec. 4, Cannabis City owed $631,171, one quarter of the shop's $2,524,685 in total sales, to the state in the form of excise tax, according to state Liquor Control Board figures. Because of the 280E provision this excise tax expense cannot be written off. The Internal Revenue Service would view the $631,171 as income and tax it accordingly.

 

"I'm being taxed on the tax I'm paying the state of Washington," Lathrop said.

 

Dean Guske is an accountant who has about 150 clients in the cannabis industry. He sees the excise tax as a critical challenge for Washington's marijuana businesses.

 

"I would say that the biggest problem right now under 502 is the current structure of the excise tax," he said, referring to Initiative 502, the ballot measure that voters approved in 2012 legalizing recreational marijuana in Washington. "It’s making it extremely difficult for retailers in particular to really be profitable."

 

Pot is one thing - but the underground market for cocaine, heroin, and prescription drugs will remain - I don't see that changing anytime soon unlike pot - the public isn't going to bite on these more significant drugs.