The Sins of the Chicago Police Laid Bare | Hacker News Reader

The Sins of the Chicago Police Laid Bare

nytimes.com

33 pointsteslacar6 comments

Note that this op-ed is from last year and the report it discusses came out almost a full year ago, in April 2016.

The link to the 190-page report on the NYT site is broken; it can be found here: https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Fina...

What's incredible is that a report of this length on the abuses of the CPD does not even mention Homan Square, the CPD's "black site" where over 7,000 people were detailed without access to a lawyer over the course of a decade and many were tortured into making a confession.

The Guardian reported on Homan Square in 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square...

The video mentioned is here (might be graphic): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2N6_jLAgA

The police report said he lunged at the officer, the video shows that wasn't the case. I hope we see increased body cam usage and availability of data as time goes forward, because the culture of covering up police crimes is a perversion of the point of civic duty. I hate that it has to be Police vs the People.

It's only "police" vs the people when you include officers who break the law, and other officers who defend them. What we need is not a "war" that people can "win", but rather, a shift of mindset of the departments themselves -- they need to be on board with everything being above board. That is where the battle is.

I wonder how closely the racial breakdown of who gets shot by police matches the racial breakdown of who commits murder.

I also think it's silly to act indignant about a disproportionate amount of police misconduct happening to a group that commits a disproportionate amount of crime.

In fact, if the volume of misconduct matches volume of crime (eg, same number of mishandled incidents for number of calls), that's evidence they arent racist, because you'd expect racists to have misconduct at a higher-than-usual rate for the amount of crime they're responding to.

Unfortunately it is impossible to know volumes of crime because you can't know about all crime and you can't rely on the reports of people who report the crime you do know about. Both of these are tainted by biases.

And even if you would know, and it turns out that blue men commit more murders than green men, would that make it not racist to shoot a blue man just because he is blue and therefore more statiscally likely to be a killer? He may also not be a killer.

True, but if blue people commit a higher number of crimes, then it's reasonable there will be a great number of witness reports describing blue suspects, and therefore you can expect a higher number of encounters between police and blue people. You can examine the link between suspect descriptions and the number of encounters and see if an ethnic group generates more or less encounters per description to check for racism in who police decide to encounter.

You can then look at the rate at which police encounters become violent, and if that rate is different than the rate for green people, that would also be clear evidence of racism on the police force.

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