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The price for this should be massive. Doing this once or twice corrupts the justice system and destroys public trust in police. This invites gangs to become the law and order. Look how that’s worked out in Chicago.

What goes on in Chicago and its gangs goes far beyond the police and the indiscretions that go on there. Case in point:

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/October-2016/Chic...

Drill rap, the music of Chicago's gangs, is ultra violent and serves as a method of calling out other crews and taunting them into a response. Thanks to Youtube, Soundcloud, and social media the spread of this music is now easier than ever. The threats that come from this music are often followed up on.

Why do they do it? As one rapper says: “If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?” “You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.”

Is that "Whataboutism?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Er no. It's not. I'm not saying police conduct in Chicago isn't an issue. I'm saying that the issues of inner city Chicago are much larger than just police conduct. To properly understand the issue you need to consider all the angles.

Yes, but Chicago seems to be a fairly unique place. Also, most of the police shooting incidents don't come out of Chicago. What are you trying to say by pointing out that gang violence is bad in Chicago?

The post guildwriter answered to specifically called out Chicago.

Ah, sorry I missed that.

The point that I'm making isn't that gang violence is bad in Chicago. I'm trying inform others why and what drives a significant portion of gang violence in Chicago and show it from the perspective of the people who drive that violence and what they're about.

The parent poster was talking about how gangs become the law and order because of the lack of trust in police. I'm saying the issue is wider and deeper than that. If you read the article, it becomes clear that one of the large driving factors for these rappers is the notoriety and fame they get from doing this is oftentimes the only way they can feel significant. It's a way for them to get money, sex, notoriety. Maybe even a record deal so they can get the hell out of the place they are in. What kind of chances and opportunities does an inner city youth really have?

This notoriety can twist back in its own ways too: "The guy having the hardest time was Blaze. He seemed to be battling depression. At one point, after a shooting on a corner, he said to me, “Man, I’m so sick of this. I feel like a prisoner in my own neighborhood. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go to my job because I don’t know if the opps will be there to come after me.” He was wallowing in how badly he wanted to be done with the gang life. He told me he wanted to move to California, but his reality felt inescapable to him. He started using PCP at an alarming rate. It was his way of coping. He became difficult to be around. He would stutter and trip over his words. His complexion got bad. His hygiene, too."

It's one hell of a life and not one that I could begin to imagine.

I think I saw a segment on maybe Vice about Chicago. Yes, it is a hell scape. There are a lot of reasons, and some date back to the founding of the country. I think presently, the three big ones are: 1. As a country, we don't take care of our citizens, 2. The only solution we have to our societal everyday type problems is to call the police and let them handle it, 3. Police are trained to be police in the traditional sense, so their go-to method is to be aggressive and arrest people.

It's a downward spiral that has been going on for decades. To make matters worse, policing is delegated to the state and local levels, which aren't under the microscope that the federal government is.

It's also not just a black or minority problem. I say this because I believe many white voters are more complacent because they don't believe they would be affected by it. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong police officer, you aren't immune to disastrous results. White voters shouldn't fool ourselves to believing they are unaffected. Remember blacks get killed disproportionately to the national population, but whites get killed in higher numbers.

It's depressing.

Yes.

I increasingly believe there are kinds of anti-system crimes which should be punished with highest sentences. I'm thinking of crimes that have disproportionate, negative impact on stability and security of society. Like this. Or fucking with vaccinations, like CIA people did.

(Incidentally, I also believe that the guy responsible for fake bomb detectors (from the other thread on the frontpage today) should get at minimum a murder-level sentence, for willfully putting lives of lots of people in danger.)

Perhaps I'm taking what you say too literally, but you couldn't equate it with murder. It would be mass attempted manslaughter. So it would have to be at that level.

That's not to say we shouldn't treat it as seriously just that it's a different intent.

Yeah, I meant the less literate version. It's obviously not murder, but I believe it should be treated at least as seriously.

Murder? Quite frankly, that's either akin to terrorism or it is terrorism. It destabilises entire regions of harmless civilians.

The CIA did this as well in Central and South America in the previous century. They got away with it as well, of course. The series Narcos and movies American Made and Che Part One and Che Part Two are albeit partly about these subjects. Not to mention more recently the collateral murder video.

I'm not entirely sure why? I guess if you got the military and economic high ground you get away with doing things like that?

Absolutely agree on both counts.

Holding public office is a privilege that rightly should come with a different threshold of privacy/transparency.

And yes, no nation is taking the issue of police conduct seriously if it's not even recording wrongful death consistently and reliably.

Some colleagues ran a trial on body cameras and found improved metrics, particularly around stop-and-search. The success rate of stop and search increased, officers reported feeling safer. They also noted an increase in allegations but I don't think dug into that as much as they wanted to (it may be an area where the behaviour feedback loop was slow enough to need a longer study duration).

http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/trial-results/measuring...

I agree with you in an ideal world. These concepts are obvious. Unfortunately, we don't see this implemented so I'm pretty sure that it isn't our timeline.

The police are not here to protect you, but to ensure the functioning of society. This isn't pessimism; it's a fact of legal precedent - they have no obligation to protect any citizen [0].

Justice only happens when the crime unpunished would lead to undesirable destabilization of society. Sexual harassment was rampant in Hollywood for decades, only now that it threatens stability does it receive attention.

Our ideals of justice and freedom only but tools and illusions to keep the gears of society turning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

> which differs sharply from the actual data on race/crime/police lethal force

Can you show me the data set that breaks down police killings by race of the killed person please?

Or can you even point me to the dataset that just lists all police killings?

There is no good database.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

This is probably the best there is that I know of and it only goes back 2-3 years. The federals don't have anything complete.

I did some investigation based on the Washington Post data for Skeptics Stack Exchange [0]. There's a significant difference between black and white killings.

[0]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/39887/37853

Look at the data from the data source used in that stack exchange.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

    white killed by police: 495 (49.5%)
    black killed by police: 259 (26.1%)
    hispanic killed by police: 172 (17.3%)
    other: 67

About 13% of the US population is black, and 12.5% is hispanic. Both groups ARE over-represented in police shootings, with black people being about 2x more likely to be killed than their population figure would suggest. Compared to the way this is portrayed in the news, however, I would suggest that these figures already run contrary to the narrative that this is primarily dictated on the basis of racist behavior by police. The fact that there are more white people killed by police annually ALONE (despite their larger representation in the population) is a fact that most people would be surprised to hear.

What really offsets the data is once you begin to include racial statistics on crime. Obviously police officers aren't just taking individuals out of the population and random and killing them (isolated outliers not included), so it would be irresponsible to just compare the racial component of police shootings with population representation. This data, however, varies greatly by area. However, in urban environments in particular, the racial component in crime is enormous. In Chicago, for example 75.3% of homicide was committed by black people, 24.6% by hispanics, and 3.5% by white people. To expect equal representation in police shootings, given those crime statistics, would be completely insane.

So the long story short is: given a straight comparison to population distributions, there is an overrepresentation of black/hispanic shootings by police. With the inclusion of racial participation in violent crime though, the motivation for police fatalities cannot responsibly be attributed to a racial motivation without a serious multivariate analysis.

I replied to the user below you with some breakdown of data.

I would add Education to the forefront of accountability. Police officer careers require no more education than a high school diploma/GED and the police academy, which is roughly 27 weeks. Imagine if being a police officer meant having a deep understanding of ethics, psychology (not just tactics) and law.

Stop accepting any physically fit hothead off the street because they can be trained into the role. Lastly, as a citizen, be willing to pay more in taxes knowing that the person who pulled you over cares, is qualified, and will not shoot you and try to cover it up.

Police have also gained the hard-fought-in-court prerogative to screen candidates on the basis of intelligence, excluding anyone unusual in any direction. It creates a monoculture as opposed to an ecology of diverse intellectualism.

I don't think training on ethics is required, nor would it be sufficient if not accompanied by a substantial change in accountability. Today's police are virtually untouchable. They know it, and act accordingly.