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Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, better just to skip straight to the linked report that Vice is just lifting from - (https://citizenlab.ca/2020/09/to-surveil-and-predict-a-human...)

The executive summary does a far better job at articulating the situation, its problems, its negative implications, and proposed mitigations than most of us will be able to manage in an HN comment.

Note that the report suggestions are not to ban predictive approaches. I think the report recommendations are reasonable under the assumption of competence and good faith among all parties. If you don't think that the limitations the report suggests are sufficient, I think that's a reasonable sign that you're not assuming good faith and competence - which is fair, but does totally shift the argument.

If you're just assuming that the police will abuse this regardless of safe guards (that's fair), you can just make that argument up front, and cut through all the shit, and then you can get down to arguing over real conflict points.

View on HN

The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith. But maybe if we decide to keep them around, these recommendations, along with better civilian oversight to ensure they're actually implemented, will mitigate the dangers of predictive policing.

>>The police have shown us that they don't act in good faith.>>

There are ~650k police officers in the US employed by ~18k agencies. Can you provide more detail on how it is that that group has shown us a lack of good faith?

By not publicly and consistently condemning and/or holding their fellow officers accountable when they should be.

The blue wall of silence.

To be fair after the murder of George Floyd you did see some officers and police chiefs doing this in the initial round of protests.

Generally speaking though police departments have proven incredibly difficult to reform - there’s a lot of entrenched behavior, such that even if one officer isn’t engaging in anything illegal themself, the police culture brings huge pressure to bear against anyone who might condemn another officer for breaking the law.

This. "Good cops" would be pressuring police unions to crack down on bad cops, and taking the infiltration of American police departments by white supremacist militias seriously. Ergo, there are no good cops, or they are stifled into silence and might as well be bad cops.

But as someone else pointed out, this article is about Canada, so I digress…

This is such a silly claim. There have been a handful of cases of white supremacists managed to get hired. Out of 800,000 cops. Terrorists, spies, and gang members manage to join government agencies and the military as well.

Also, if you don’t know how many bad cops there are, and you don’t know how many good cops there are, and you have no clue how many good cops report on bad cops, you can’t even begin to make that claim. You’re just being an “ACAB” guy, despite the fact that you desperately need police.

True. But I do have one anecdotal story. My brother was beat up in custody by local police but they forgot they were on camera or something so my brother got a hold of the footage through a lawyer and they paid my brother enough money he was able to put it to a down payment of a house. The finding of the investigation; the officer involved was guilty of assaulting him among other things such as not telling the truth as to what happened but since he was about to retire in a month they decided they would not be taking action towards the officer. My brother is a loser who probably mouthed him off and had it coming but this officer is also a loser for losing his cool in a professional setting costing me as a tax payer money. Was he actually punished? No. So the next officer as long as he is close to retirement thinks he can get off free. In a just society you get punished. I would be royally screwed if one week before my retirement I hit an elderly patient who got out of hand. So we don't have equal laws for people and police.

Yeah, so it turns out that unwavering support for unions doesn’t always go as planned.

Unions are a tool - a means for labor to organize and exercise power to see to the best interests of its members.

Ideally that functions as a way for labor to negotiate with management for humane working conditions, etc, and for worker solidarity.

Any tool can be abused.

Plus police unions really do seem like a special case. In part because the profession of policing is one big special case, because they themselves are part of our system of law.

Which really all should go without saying - I would hazard a guess that you already know most of what I am telling you :).

We do know. They tell us, you're just not listening.

https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...

Here's a cop who tried to report on corruption within the NYPD. His squadmates got him thrown into an insane asylum. The NYPD, by the way, is larger and more heavily funded than most armies.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/05/04/the-nypd-tapes-insid...

"desperately need police" We used to "desperately need police" to get injured and wounded people to hospitals. The reason why ambulances do it instead is because the doctors noticed that cops would sometimes beat the shit out of patients en route. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/02/12/all-black-ambulanc...

What's wrong with divvy'ing up every responsibility of "the police" and handing those responsibilities off to trained professionals?

Your link does nothing to support your claim. It’s a single anonymous anecdote. That is only good for confirming biases, not for analysis of data. I notice you also didn’t post the rebuttal.

Again. 800,000. It’s impossible not to have issues come up, and even bad departments that come and go. Obviously, they should be dealt with.

And no, the reason you need police is not for hospital rides.

Assuming we are talking about developed nations, the NYPD is not larger and more heavily funded that most armies, and that stat wouldn’t have any relevance anyway.

Your last claim goes from intellectual dishonesty to outright lying. Nowhere does that article say or even imply anything about cops beating or otherwise mistreating patients.

“ A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...

Or just google about the LA Sheriffs department - notorious:

“ For decades, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has struggled to combat secretive cliques of deputies who bonded over aggressive, often violent police work and branded themselves with matching tattoos.

A federal judge called out the problem nearly 30 years ago, accusing deputies of running a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” named the Vikings within the Lynwood station. Others followed with names such as the Regulators, Grim Reapers, Rattlesnakes and the Jump Out Boys.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-...

Yes, everything you just said is in violent agreement with what I said, although I suspect that was not your intention.

The infamous LASD gang were largely hispanic, for what it’s worth.

This meme that cops are secretly white supremacists is completely absurd, and it seems as though everyone perpetuating it did not actually read the reports they reference, because they absolutely do not say that, and honestly it’s a pretty disgusting allegation to cast so broadly. If you’re going to defame a whole group, be damn sure that you’re accurate. And maybe don’t list off examples that consist of white-minority departments with non-white police chiefs and non-white mayors...

The US situation seen from French eyes is quite surprising. Here we have the IGPN, which is "the Police of Police" so when an officer does something wrong there's an inquiry about it. But more importantly, there are sanctions.

The system isn't perfect by any mean but to give you an example of how infrequent Police murders are, our local BLM movement had to find a 4 year old case as their "George Floyd".

How many Palantir contracts does French law enforcement and counterintelligence pay for? Anything in addition to the DGSI contract?

I don't see the point you're trying to make, sorry. My answer was about Police brutality, not privacy.

Predictive policing is associated with selective policing, increasing the rate of police encounters for a set of people. Getting accosted by the police because I live in an area with higher crime is a danger to my well-being, because every encounter with the police carries risk.

We're not speaking of the same thing hence my confusion.

To reduce risks with Police encounters, they have to be accountable. It seems to me that the US Police would benefit from more accountability so I gave the example of the French Police.

I have no idea what they do with predictive policing here, but if they use it I can tell you with confidence that it's not working at all.

It’s actually been demonstrated that more police in high crime areas reduces crime and increases safety. When they pull back, crime goes up. So I don’t know why people say this.

I also don’t know why people think it makes more sense to divert police resources away from where crimes are happening. Not even the linked report agrees with this.

> I also don’t know why people think it makes more sense to divert police resources away from where crimes are happening.

Because so many people who live in those communities consistently continue to say they both fear and distrust the police as the police exist today.

And because people in those communities continually say they need other forms of resources and support from our society - mainly a real path for economic opportunity, but also affordable healthy food (google food deserts), etc - and they understandably are pissed that as a society we’ll police the heck out of poor, mostly black neighborhoods, but not make sustained investments to help those communities the same way that our society does many (not all! mainly the wealthy ones) white neighborhoods.

I don’t think anyone actually wants lawlessness. People want the opposite. They want equality under the law, and for the police to be held legally responsible for when they break it, in one of worst ways possible - by killing.

Great sounding theory, but not how it works.

Great sounding theory, but not how it works. ; )

In other words, one can use phrases like that in response to anything, whether it's true or not ;).

> The system isn't perfect by any mean but to give you an example of how infrequent Police murders are, our local BLM movement had to find a 4 year old case as their "George Floyd".

Thats not same comparison though, people dont' own firearms in france like they do in USA.

Yes it does. Since a country is made by laws and statistics show the end-result of those policies.

Fyi: It's perfectly fine to own a (normal ) fun in France with a license and a psychological test. Just like other places in Europe.

sure you are right but gp comment seem to have implied that it was result of 'police of police' and enquiries.

I was just saying that the variables are different to draw that conculsion.

There is nothing about the mere existence of firearms in the nation that requires them to shoot at point that don't both possess them and make moves to use them on the police.

If someone hasn't yet presented you with a threat of deadly violence you just don't get to use it on them.

You're right about legal firearms, there are much less of them in France. However criminals have no trouble equipping themselves, and Kalashnikov shootings are quite frequent between rival gangs.

It’s no excuse but my understanding is the issue here in the US is sort of the random traffic stop - what if the person the cop stops has a gun?

Thus every interaction with a probably “non-criminal” citizen or whatever carries fear and danger.

Again, no excuse at all. But I do think there’s a relation between racist (and all) police violence, and the overall violence in our society - which firearm ownership is one aspect of.

> Here we have the IGPN, which is "the Police of Police" so when an officer does something wrong there's an inquiry about it. But more importantly, there are sanctions.

The main role of IGPN is diverting legal action, by burying cases into their administrative enquiries and sanctions proposals. Filing a complaint at IGPN is mostly useless, you'd better file them directly in the regular justice system, otherwise it will almost never end up in the regular justice system because IGPN almost never forwards cases.

Administrative sanctions are laughable. Firstly, as I said, they are not mandatory, they are propositions, it is up to the local superior(s) to decide what they do with it. Secondly, half of them are simple warnings and blames, i.e. completely without effect. Thirdly, most of the sanctions proposals come from internal affairs between constables, the complaints filed by regular citizens are buried.

Also, there is the fundamental problem that IGPN is not an independent entity, but part of the police...

> how infrequent Police murders are

Despite people carrying much much less weapons than in the US, our police are more and more trigger happy, and when they shoot, they shoot to kill (and they get away with it, unless it was first-degree murder). They have no problem emptying a magazine in the back of car drivers, and pretend it was a life-saving reaction to an immediate threat. Take similar situations involving Police and Military: with the former, the assailant will end up with 8 9mm bullets in the body, 3 of them being lethal; with the later the assailant will be controlled (which allows for a trial way better than a Police execution), either with one 5.56mm bullet in the leg or more often without any shooting.

And then there are the "non-lethal" weapons (flashballs and tasers) which were supposed to replace gun use, but that Police now use all the time for nothing, in situations where they would never have used a gun before.

Was it last year that they managed to taze a naked (thus unarmed) man to death in a street?

> They have no problem emptying a magazine in the back of car drivers, and pretend it was a life-saving reaction to an immediate threat.

Come on, this would have been the scandal of the decade and I would have heard about it. As long as you're not a yellow vest you don't have much to fear about the French Police ;)

> either with one 5.56mm bullet in the leg

As a civilian target shooter, I can tell you that shooting a leg is almost impossible for a standard shooter, unless you're very close and the target isn't moving (but then why do you need to shoot him ?).

You should never employ a gun with the intent to "just" injure someone. A gun is lethal (even a leg shot can be fatal) most of the time and should be used (or not used) accordingly.

None of these criticisms are objective, quantifiable, or actionable as written.

I think this is the single biggest barrier to police reform.

And moreover this report is about Canada, not the US.

The police in Canada are due plenty of scrutiny for how altruistic their departments might be [1]

> The Ontario government ended police access to a COVID-19 database on July 22 after a court challenge by civil rights groups.

> Information released during that legal process revealed Thunder Bay police had searched the database more than 150 times per day, on average, between April 17 and July 22, according to the CCLA. That amounts to 14,800 searches, or a rate ten times the average number of searches by other police forces across the province.

> Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 reported COVID-19 cases during the time the data was available to police.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-polic...

Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act?

The US is not Canada. Police in Canada need safeguards too, to be sure. It's not even close to the same thing. For every 1 person killed in Canada by police, 100 are killed in America, 10X per capita. People in Canada aren't really scared of the police, certainly not in the way Americans are scared of the police. Police in Canada are part of the community, not paramilitary belligerents.

Nope, the fact that the police was checking the database has nothing to do with the performance of Thunder Bay against COVID 19, their performance is pretty in line with any remote smaller cities across Canada. In fact they tried to know why they were using it so much, and they refuse to answer. It's the lack of accountability that is the problem. May be there was a real reason for them to use it (10x more than any other city???!), but since they refuse to tell people, anyone can guess.

Ok so they have a list of people with COVID. So what?

The accessed names, addresses and medical status. These are all PII and medical information has even higher level of privacy. You want people to use medical services in confidential, it is safer for everyone that if someone suspects that they have an infectious disease that they have the appropriate medical help.

This is why Drs records and the like are very difficult for people to get, even law enforcement.

I get that they shouldn’t have had access to this information. I just can’t for the life of me figure out what harm they could have done with it.

I suspect 150 queries a day is some script, maybe for a dashboard.

Ok, so they flagrantly violated the civil rights of thousands of citizens they've sworn to protect. So what?

No I get they shouldn’t have had access to the data, I’m just at a loss as to what harm they could have done with it. I haven’t heard even so much as a theory truth be told.

What harm is there in your neighbor watching you take a shower?

Absolutely. It would be interesting to know what information was in this database. It doesn't make sense that it was just a list of people. Did it include known connections? Other medical information? Travel history? And why/how was it being used?

> Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act?

The premise here is that the police force needed to search the COVID database 150 times a day to enforce the quarantine act and that when asked why they were searching so frequently they were afraid to tell the federal government that they were using the queries as a tool for enforcing the law.

I am pretty sceptical of that theory.

Of course since they lost their access more than a month ago there have been a handful of new cases.. so it seems like we also have some empirical evidence that undermines this theory.

I'd love to hear a plausible explanation for 150 searches of the COVID-19 database per day in community with just over 100K residents and a police force of around 320 employees for the purposes of genuine police work.

> I'd love to hear a plausible explanation for 150 searches of the COVID-19 database per day in community with just over 100K residents and a police force of around 320 employees for the purposes of genuine police work.

A dashboard that refreshes every 10 minutes.

I’d love to hear a plausible explanation for what malicious thing they could do with that data.

It does not seem very plausible that a small police force built themselves a dashboard that refreshes and then when asked why they were making so many requests by the federal agency didn't explain that they made a dashboard and instead refused to say what they were doing.

A plausible explanation for what they were doing with the data that was malicious was that they were looking up friends and neighbours to gossip about/harass for being COVID-19 positive. It seemed obvious to me that this was the most probable explanation from the start.

Unless we've been living under a rock, I think you, me, and the parent poster are well aware of what kinds of institutional problems police in the United States[1] have. Those institutional problems push the individuals that work for police forces into one of three directions - becoming 'bad cops', closing their eyes in response to observing the behaviour of 'bad cops', or being censured and pushed out of their jobs by bad cops.

When I observe one cop, without warning, throwing a grenade into a peaceful crowd (Not for any particular purpose. Not to make an arrest. Not to move the police line. Not to enforce an order to disperse, because no order to disperse was made. Just cruelty for the sake of cruelty.) and ~20 cops standing around him not doing a single thing about it, I think that the entire group has shown us a lack of good faith. The thrower for assaulting the public, and the rest of them for not doing a damn thing to stop him.

It's possible that there are a few departments that, when their culture is tested like this, will do the right thing. The large metro area departments that have been tested, though, have consistently failed - as have most of their suburbs. (In all fairness, the Bellevue (WA) Police Department for example has (so far) handled the protests reasonably and avoided serious controversy for their past behaviour. Their colleagues across the water in the Seattle PD, though, have demonstrated a complete inability of, as an institution, behaving with any integrity.)

[1] And yes, this thread is about Canada. And yes, Canada has similar institutional problems - despicable Vancouver and Toronto PD behaviour at the G20 protests, decades of blatant and systemic racism against First Nations persons (The Highway of Tears, and the Pickett farm murders is a systemic example of racism-by-inaction, while problematic day-to-day interactions are systemic examples of racism-by-action), excessive use of force (In Vancouver, the Dziekański affair - and the follow-up behaviour of the officers involved), etc, etc.

How about the time officers of the Lethbridge, Alberta, police department stalked a member of the (minority, NDP) political party while on-duty? [1]

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

You can't generalize from one incident to a large group. There are bad apples in every large group.

If you can demonstrate an unusual percentage of bad behavior, compared to other developed nations, that'd be more interesting. Either way we could talk about potential ways to improve the situation.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...

The “bad apples” analogy has been done to death.

When bad behaviour is detected within a police force, they don’t eliminate the “bad apple” they protect them. No other “good apple” speaks up against the behaviour. Thus — in line with the metaphor - the rot affects the whole barrel.

That's clearly one area for improvement.

Which is why you shouldn’t assume people are going to act in good faith. If acting in good faith was universal then we wouldn’t need any form os]f security at all. This is why you have to build systems that assume that there will be bad actors.

Chris Rock's take down of the "bad apples" argument is my all time favorite on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttd4985R0FQ

His comparison of how errors in policing are treated compared to how plane crashes are treated is very apt. I've used this lens to look at many situations since. The lack of impartiality displayed in the face of an "officer involved" incident is glaring.

Police officers and other people in that branch of government never display the kind of serious investigative interest that a plane crash investigator applies. They never approach it with fresh eyes, hoping to uncover and fix root causes.

In IT we talk about "the 5 whys" for trying to get past superficial reasons for an incident. But you can't expect to ever see that kind of approach when everything is quickly hidden behind a "blue wall of silence."

Maybe because plane crashes don't happen as often as "officer involved incidents" unjust and just and are actually a lower hanging fruit in comparison?

And the two aren't investigated by the same body of government NTSB investigates plane crashes in the US (federally created).

In some departments there exists Civilian Review Boards [0] IMO better than an internal investigations department and delegating to a federally created agency. But do they work in reality?

0: Civilian Review Boards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_affairs_(law_enforc....

Do they? (work in reality)? You sound like you want to share information, go ahead.

(And I think you misunderstood something I wrote, but I'm not sure what.

I didn't mean that the same body of government investigate both crashes and police misconduct...

I meant that very often police misconduct is investigated by groups that are adjacent to the police, not impartial.

Even if/when it is a separate group, the 'blue wall of silence' is an effect deterrent to investigation and there doesn't seem to be any interest in counter-acting this.)

> Police officers and other people in that branch of government never display the kind of serious investigative interest that a plane crash investigator applies. They never approach it with fresh eyes, hoping to uncover and fix root causes.

The point I was making is that a federally created agency conducts investigations completely different than state police departments. (Not all state police departments are funded the same and share the same information about investigations especially internal) they aren't a single entity nor should they be.

The comedian takes two very different things and combines them as one and then tells the audience how absurd his creation is as if it is reality.

And to the "blue wall of silence", from the one study I scanned [0]. I think it exists, but not in all departments as the study finds too. And the only way to combat it (just like with civilians in gang ridden communities) is to have more transparency measures (body cams, anonymous reporting systems etc) and obviously more officers/civilians need to come forward with those experiences in their department/jurisdiction.

0: The Measurement of Police Integrity - National Criminal Justice Reference [PDF] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

This standard is not equally applied. For police, “a few bad apples” defends the majority as “good people.” For protestors, ANY property damage is seen as invalidating the whole movement as “violent extremists and lawlessness.”

This despite police having supposedly extensive training on what is lawful and protesters being regular citizens.

Honestly the whole movement is leaderless, aimless, and senseless.

Right off the bat making it a race issue is divisive and misleading - when the statistics show people of color are no more likely than anyone else to be a victim of police violence, when considering the number of police interactions. Blacks and latinos commit more crimes. That's the uncomfortable truth.

Then they have no serious or well thought out plan to improve things - so what do they hope to gain from protesting? Abolish the police is pure nonsense. Awareness of the issue is the best they can hope for.

You didn’t address anything I said, so I’ll refrain from rebutting your statistics.

Per your statement about race; look into that statistic you listed more, there are good explanations. Imagine this chain - the system is rigged in deep ways against a young man of color. He probably grows up in a broken home, a poor neighborhood, with low access to schooling or opportunity. As a result, he is driven to commit crime. So police patrol his neighborhood more, so they learn to associate his kind of people with crime, so he has more police interactions. And then that statistic lands on your news feed.

Do you think the system is more fair for all people regardless of skin color? Or that crime has little relation to poverty? Or that people of color are inherently more likely to commit crime whether by genetics or culture? Then you won’t be able to follow that chain. There are a lot of interacting systems. Not questioning as an attack, just pointing out that the logic makes lots of assumptions.

Consider the problems with our algorithm for determining recidivism rates. The data shows people of color return to crime more when released. So the algorithm assigns them higher jail time before parole, which means more time out of society and among criminals, which leads to more crime when released!

That statistic, “people of color commit more crime” is a self-fulfilling prophecy or recursion of some sort, it’s harmful unless we’re using it to determine a “why” that isn’t just “because of their skin color or culture”.

If that's true, your complaint isn't with them police at all, but with the fact that "the system is rigged in deep ways against a young man of color".

To justify these protests, you would have to make the case that it's police conduct that causes black people to commit so many more crimes.

But even in your post here, you're pointing to sentencing, not policing. (Also worth noting that this doesn't explain differentials in first offense rates at all).

I’m merely talking about one statistic the poster stated. Not protests. I also only brought up sentencing to demonstrate the point that these statistics themselves lead to policies and processes that in turn feed the statistics.

Well I hope you didn't think I was implying that black people are inherently more prone to being criminals from birth. Of course it's dominated by poverty and a lack of good options for young black men especially. The US is actually the developed country where the American dream is most dream-like. Social mobility in the US is behind almost all the other developed nations. This is a real societal problem that needs to be addressed. But all the solutions are "socialist" and deeply unpopular in the US.

However, that there's a good reason for it doesn't change the statistics. Police violence against black people seems to be a non issue by the numbers. Police violence in general is an issue, making it racial is counterproductive. The protest would be better focused on things that are real, like poverty, or poor social mobility. And instead of people just aimlessly letting off steam, it should have leadership and clear goals that can actually be implemented - then maybe there's a chance they could get congress to listen to them. Right now they're accomplishing nothing and this whole movement will fade away without any real change just like the Occupy Wall Street movement.

> Of course it's dominated by poverty and a lack of good options for young black men ...

In the United States poverty in Black communities is a consequence of systemic racism, which continues to this day.

W/the “drug war” examples further below, there’s a direct link between systemic racism and police behavior in black communities. Which admittedly cannot be blamed entirely on the police. But they certainly don’t help.

Look at redlining in the 50s:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

Or the response to the opioid epidemic - prevalent in white communities - as opposed to how they responded to the crack/cocaine epidemic (prevalent in black communities) in the 80s. A medical response for white people - a criminal response for black people.

https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/resources/article/crimina...

Or the sentencing disparities between crack (prevalently used in poorer black communities) vs cocaine use/dealing.

https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-fed...

There’s a great 18-minute video from Bob the Tomato, AKA Phil Vischer, which lays out the sordid history in broad detail. I like this in particular because he’s coming from an evangelical Christian background—a demographic that has 60% racial resentment, the highest in the country.

https://youtu.be/AGUwcs9qJXY

https://religionnews.com/2020/06/09/racial-resentment-varies...

None of these apply today. There is no “systemic racism” in the US no matter how many woke allies are shamed into repeating it.

Larry Elder has a better handle on it than the people who perpetuate this.

https://youtu.be/TA3nInyPuFE

IMHO radio host Larry Elder is not a valid source to back up your claim that systemic racism in the US doesn’t exist.

Let’s be clear. There is systemic racism within law enforcement and our system of justice in the US.

It’s easy to go online and find reputable, fact-based sources verifying this; the Wikipedia article I linked to linked to some.

It’s also easy to find reputable sources online which can help explain what systemic racism is and provide historical context, for those who may be unaware.

Put simply; you are wrong, sir.

“ Institutional racism (also known as systemic racism) is a form of racism that is embedded as normal practice within society or an organization. It can lead to such issues as discrimination in criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power, and education, among other issues.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism

If you watched the video, you’d see he is not the source of my claims or his claims.

You have not provided any examples of systemic racism that exist in the US today. Redlining is systemic racism, but it is illegal everywhere in the US. We are talking about whether it exists, not whether it has ever existed. Obviously there was horrible systemic racism in the past.

I’m aware that there are a lot of (frankly, garbage) articles online that claim this, but the data says otherwise. Again, Larry Elder pretty thoroughly debunks this, but if you have a counter argument, I’d love to hear it.

Police violence towards people of color and many aspects of the justice system (sentencing, etc) are examples of current day systemic racism.

I know you are smart and capable enough to find sources / evidence about those things as it’s been a huge topic of conversation across the nation for the past few months.

Any reputable newspaper. Any reputable university. The Federal Government itself.

Or simply using your eyes and ears and heart and Occam’s razor.

So, if you don’t want to see, acknowledge, or believe it, that’s on you.

I’m not going to play the game where it’s my job to convince the skeptic that the sky is blue when they say “oh but it’s night right now and it sure doesn’t look blue to me.”

If you want to share a link to a reputable source mentioned by Larry Elder I’ll take a quick look but I’m not watching a video.

Also the idea that “the horrible systemic racism in the past” is all gone now, when “the past“ was only 70 years ago (1960), is silly, when you consider how entrenched racism is in America here since day one.

If only the world changed that quickly.

Police violence towards people of color and many aspects of the justice system (sentencing, etc) are examples of current day systemic racism.

No that is not an example of systemic racism. If you look up the data separated by race, you’ll see that it’s also factually not true. It doesn’t matter how many times BLM or other politically or profit motivated entities shout their slogan, that doesn’t make it true.

It’s weird to me that you refuse to watch the video. I’m not able to identify with people who reject new information that may disrupt their worldview. I watch/listen to people I disagree with all the time. I have learned a lot from them.

I’m pointing out that the sky is blue. You are the one ignoring facts. And nobody is arguing that racism doesn’t exist. That isn’t the same thing.

OK. So. There's Jon Burge and the 'Midnight Crew', which tortured people into confessions (eletric shocks on genitals, etc) in Chicago in the '80s? Do you think those people they tortured were mostly white?

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-jon-...

"Scores of African American men have accused Burge, who is white, and detectives working under him of torturing or abusing them during the 1970s and ’80s on the South Side. The scandal has stained the city’s reputation and cost taxpayers well in excess of $100 million in lawsuit settlements, judgments, other compensation to victims and legal fees ... In 2013, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued an unexpected public apology for the damage done by Burge to the city, calling the era a “dark chapter” that needed to be put in the past. In 2015, a reparations settlement with some Burge victims mandated that Chicago Public Schools teach eighth graders and high school sophomores about Burge’s crimes. The curriculum went into effect in 2017."

The Chicago Tribune is not a liberal newspaper; it trends center to center-right.

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

"In 2009, the state legislature passed a bill authorizing creation of the Illinois Torture Inquiry Relief Commission (TIRC) to investigate cases of people "in which police torture might have resulted in wrongful convictions". In some cases, allegedly coerced confessions were the only evidence leading to convictions. Its scope is limited to people tortured by Burge or by other officers under his authority, as made explicit in the law and by an appellate court review in March 2016."

Or the murder of LaQuan McDonald in 2014 and the attempted cover-up?

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

"At the request of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, the United States Department of Justice initiated a civil rights investigation into McDonald's death and the activities of the Chicago Police Department. It released its report in January 2017, describing the police as having a culture of "excessive violence," especially against minority suspects, and of having poor training and supervision. DOJ and city officials signed a consent decree for a plan for improvement to be overseen by the courts. Moreover, three Chicago police officers were tried for allegedly attempting to cover up events related to the shooting and were found not guilty by the Cook County Circuit Court on January 17, 2019"

If nothing else the above shows us there is systemic racism in Chicago's police.

I leave the research for Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Memphis, Missouri, Alabama, etc, to someone else.

Here's a more general article, not specific to Chicago:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-civil-rights-ex...

"There’s powerful data collection that happens in our criminal courts. There have been studies showing that, all factors being equal, judges are rendering longer and harsher sentences for black defendants."

And the study linked to in the quote above:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/320276?seq=1#metadata_i...

Here's another link to the same paper, w/an abstract: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/320276?jou...

Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in Sentencing: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Courts

"This paper examines 77,236 federal offenders sentenced under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and concludes the following. First, after controlling for extensive criminological, demographic, and socioeconomic variables, I found that blacks, males, and offenders with low levels of education and income receive substantially longer sentences. Second, disparities are primarily generated by departures from the guidelines, rather than differential sentencing within the guidelines ... Last, blacks and males are also less likely to get no prison term when that option is available; less likely to receive downward departures; and more likely to receive upward adjustments and, conditioned on having a downward departure, receive smaller reductions than whites and females. "

The author of the paper is an economist at the University of Georgia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mustard_(economist)

Lastly - of course Black Lives Matter is politically motivated. That's the whole point! : )

The 80s was 30-40 years ago. So no, that doesn’t say there is “systemic racism.” We’re going in circles.

I'm going to quote from this article, "Documents Reveal How the Police Kept Daniel Prude’s Death Quiet" at length:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/nyregion/rochester-police...

"The June 4 exchange was contained in a mass of city documents released on Monday that show how the police chief, La’Ron Singletary, and other prominent Rochester officials did everything in their power to keep the troubling videos of the incident out of public view, and to prevent damaging fallout from Mr. Prude’s death.

The dozens of emails, police reports and internal reviews reveal an array of delay tactics — from citing hospital privacy laws to blaming an overworked employee’s backlog in processing videos — used in that mission.

The documents show how the police attempted to frame the narrative in the earliest hours, playing up Mr. Prude’s potential for danger and glossing over the tactics of the officers who pinned him, naked and hooded, to the ground before he stopped breathing.

In a police report on the confrontation, marking a box for “victim type,” an officer on the scene listed Mr. Prude — who the police believed had broken a store window that night — simply as an “individual.” But another officer circled the word in red and scribbled a note.

“Make him a suspect,” it read."

How many whites people get knees on their necks and choked to death on video?

> For protestors, ANY property damage is seen as invalidating the whole movement as “violent extremists and lawlessness.”

This is not a universal opinion, nor is it universal among people who think most cops aren't murderers. When you say the standard isn't equally applied, who is the person or group applying it?

Primarily, the police and the federal government, who both have the power to enforce the law or not based on their biases. The vast majority of police exhibit and act upon this bias, as shown by numerous incidents of sousveillance.

> This is not a universal opinion

Just the narrative pushed by the political party in control of 2.5/3 branches of the US government.

If a large group happens to have enough issues that it's a constant social debate, and that large group happens to be PAID to be in the group (as opposed to doing something without a reward, or being born into a condition), it's a very different kind of expectation one should be talking about.

Furthermore, if that group is one of the only groups of people supposed to enforce what a society codified as its morals and ethics, there's a strong argument to be made to have a much, much lower threshold for the sample sizes needed to view problematic acts as unacceptable.

Trying to compare countries is an interesting remark.. how about this article, which will give a response to your "bad apples" rhethoric?[0]

The article is about Canada, so I guess if we set our gold standard to the US then everywhere in the world is a dreamland. How about if we compare it to the Netherlands or Norway though? Since arguably a lot of Canadian policies, the political compass, and the culture are at the very least in-between the US and those other developed nations.

Finally, striving for improvements in a system as a proportion of how badly everyone does when the enforcement of moral and social norms is pretty rarely negotiable for the majority of a population, seems to me like we're extending the benefit of the doubt to a privileged subset of a population that hasn't proven a satisfying-enough track record to deserve such gratitude.

[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

> There are bad apples in every large group.

Stop that. One, "Letting a demonstration be judged by its most violent participants but not judging a police force by its most violent cops is the language of the oppressor."

two, let's recall a Chris Rock joke you can hear in https://twitter.com/Baldilocks__/status/1266055148788494336 for example.

"Bad apple? That’s a lovely name for murderer. That almost sounds nice. I’ve had a bad apple. It was tart, but it didn’t choke me out. Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. I know being a cop is hard. I know that shit’s dangerous. I know it is, okay? But some jobs can’t have bad apples."

"Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'"

====

And this is not as much a joke as it sounds -- how many times have we found out the murderers have a long list of past complaints? The problem is the system doesn't exclude the "few bad apples" because it's not a few bad apples, it's a systemic problem.

Consistent and repeated acts of violence, following a similar pattern, are reported throughout the country. Even in Canada.

These acts have been dismissed as one off cases. Each and every one. Yet they point to a culture that doesn’t address or even care about these problems.

That shows a lack of good faith.

If you have 649,990 cops, and 10 bad cops. And 0 cops arrest the bad cops for their actions. You actually have 650k bad cops.

But even setting aside the issue of bad cops, the way policing is done in racialized neighbourhoods means that even if you had 0 bad cops the system would still oppress these groups through things like stop-and-frisk and various other means of over policing or "broken-windows" policing.

Good thing that the number of bad cop arrests is not 0 then. I don't get why people have issues with sending law enforcement to the places where there is literally more crime.

Because it creates a positive feedback loop. More police means more incidences of law breaking get detected as crimes, which results in more police enforcement.

Imagine a road network and police with a limited number of speed traps. If you send the speed to the places where there have been more people caught speeding then the fact that the speed traps where in that location will have a higher rate of caught speeders.

Another example is drug enforcement. Black people are searched more often then white people for drugs, which results in them being caught having drugs more often which in turn makes police think that they are more likely to have drugs.

It could also create a negative feedback loop: e.g. breaking up gangs or reducing the likely hood the a crime will go unpunished will lead to less crime in an area.

It could, but it doesn't

Come back to me when they've arrested the cops who killed breonna taylor. Until then, it's as close to 0 as makes no difference.

I'm confused by this comment and the comment being replied to. Are we still talking about Canadian police?

This is a Canadian article, if you would like a good overview of just how much "good faith" you should assume from the management of the largest police force in Canada you can take look at this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-sexual-harassment-hist...

No, the police have not shown us that.

Does Canada have the same issues with policing that the US has?

no, not really i think. It's not perfect with some glaring incidents, but overall I'd say much better. There is an order of magnitude less forces, less guns to go around, less focus on drug use and some of the forces (RCMP OPP) are very large. We had some protests basically shut down large sections of the country earlier in the year and it never got violent like in america.

Yes. Against indigenous and minority groups for certain.

I speak daily with Canadians ( working for a Canadian company from Europe).

And there are struggles between French and English.

Racism... is nowhere near as bad as in the US. I hear issues about the language mostly that are pretty bad though.

Eg. If you speak English you wouldn't get served in a restaurant ( = stories from Canadians from other people they know)

There are more examples, eg. "Being forced to learn Canadian French in school", ...

But I live in Belgium and we learn 3-4 languages in the flemish part, so that might influence my perspective.

And we also have our own issues ...

Even in the Frenchest Quebec-nationalist parts of Canada you have to work pretty hard at being a belligerent jerk to not get served at a restaurant for not speaking French. People tell stories all the time about this sort of stuff, you hear it second and third hand.. you go visit yourself, viola! Folks are just pretty decent and eager to engage in commerce with visitors!

Complaining about being forced to learn French in school is some classic "western alienation" Canadian politics stuff, the Canadian equivalent of Americans being angry about having to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish on the IVR.. one can only sigh at the triviality of these matters..

100% agree. I grew up in Alberta but in the last few years have spent a lot of tourist time in Quebec. Hands down what the average person in Alberta seems to think about Quebec is almost complete nonsense. FWIW I don't speak French (altho my wife and daughter can, but not great). I just spend a lot of money there on skiing and culinary tourism.

That's not to say Quebecois nationalism isn't real -- but frankly it's legitimate. They are effectively a nation.

There are people who are building their political careers out of balkanizing Canada. Some of them in QC, but more and more in western Canada. They profit by telling outright lies ("Quebec using Saudi oil" or such nonsense when in fact Quebec gets the vast majority of its oil from domestic sources, mostly Albertan but some American).

Racism in Canada against our indigenous people, however, is deep and strong and disgusting. Most urban people don't encounter it as strongly because the native population is not dense in most urban areas. But just stroll through message boards, sometime... it's pretty shocking.

And there's a long history of ugly relations between the RCMP (and other police departments) and first nations in this country... Really bad stuff.

We (a subset of the public) have shown the police we also don't act in good faith.

My impression from my conversations with police in Ontario is that predictive policing is a force for good. If it's not the fruit of any poison tree, I'm all for it.

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