Ferguson Part Deux - No charges to be filed!

[catahoula]

<p>Civil right violations are whatever the courts say on a given day, but broken window and stop & frisk targets those in high crime areas. Minorities tend to a majority in the same, so concluding they’re being targeted because of their race isn’t very rigorous thinking.</p>

[greenwitch]

<p>

But Mr. de Blasio did not hesitate to restate his determination to change the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics, saying he wished to “protect the dignity and rights of young men of color.”

</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/nyregion/bill-de-blasio-inauguration.html?_r=1”>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/nyregion/bill-de-blasio-inauguration.html?_r=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Mayor de Blasio said this at his inauguration. The police have been mad at him since then, perhaps longer. He is the first liberal mayor of NYC in a long, long time. A few scandals were leaked to the press, most likely by the NOPD, in an attempt to hamstring him (who else would know about his speeding caravan?). The police are not amused and do not like to have their power thwarted. </p>

<p>Here’s part of a statement from Baltimore’s FOP:</p>

<p>

Sadly, the bloodshed will most likely continue until those in positions of power realize that the unequivocal support of law enforcement is required to preserve our nation.

</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.fop3.org”>http://www.fop3.org</a></p>

<p>“unequivocal support”? Who deserves this? Our government? Our police? Our churches? No, no and no. There is no person or organization that is above the law or above questioning. </p>

[emilybee]

<p>I don’t have any obligation to be respectful of the police. Their behavior towards the mayor is childish and uncalled for. </p>

<p>Broken Windows has been around for a long time and Bratton is one if it’s chief proponents. He was a bad pick for the job. </p>

[zoosermom]

<p>Speaking of bias. </p>

<p>The police rhetoric is borne of fear. The mayor’s rhetoric is borne of hate and ignorance.</p>

[emilybee]

<p>“The police rhetoric is borne of fear. The mayor’s rhetoric is borne of hate and ignorance.”</p>

<p>Nonsense. </p>

[catahoula]

<p>

No, that is not what I am saying. I don’t believe a study done about stops on the NJ turnpike means anything.

Well, it does if the underlying issue is disparate treatment by the police. Maybe my memory is faulty but I’m pretty sure that the genesis of the racial profiling thing was police stop in NJ. There’ve been a few vague recollections posted about the results of a study that the Justice Department instructed NJ to conduct, but I thought I’d google it again and refresh all our memories.</p>

<p>The NYT btw, typically not one to ■■■■■-foot with ambivalence around this kind of issue, is oddly lacking in conclusions on this one:

Two years ago, when the Justice Department forced New Jersey officials to adopt new policies to discourage racial profiling by state troopers, it also told the state to study the driving habits of black and white motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike.</p>

<p>The task was complicated, but the reason for it was simple: numerous studies have shown that police officers in New Jersey and elsewhere stop black and Hispanic drivers for speeding more often than they stop whites. What is less certain is why – how much of that disparity is because of racial profiling and how much, if any, is attributable to differences in driving behavior, which have never been adequately documented.</p>

<p>But rather than clarifying the issue, the study created its own muddle. Justice Department officials say they have such serious questions about the methods used to gather the data that they have asked New Jersey’s attorney general not to release the findings. It is not clear whether they will be made public.

Hmm… other than the ‘complicated’, ‘muddled’, etc., just the facts so far.

The study involved photographing tens of thousands of drivers on the turnpike last spring while clocking speed with a radar gun. It found that black drivers sped much more than other drivers, according to three people who have reviewed the unreleased report. The racial gap was far wider than officials had expected and, in the politically charged controversies over profiling, the data could be used by defenders of the state police to argue that one reason black drivers are stopped more often than whites is that they are more likely to speed.

</p>

<p>

While the new report has only been officially circulated at the Justice Department and among top officials in the state attorney general’s office, word of its results are being whispered about in state police barracks and have cheered those who argue that racial profiling has been exaggerated by lawyers and journalists.</p>

<p>‘‘People who are being stopped are being stopped because of the way they’re operating their vehicles, not because of their race,’’ said David Jones, vice president of the New Jersey State Troopers Fraternal Association, who has not seen the report.

A little more editorial comment, mainly about the negative consequences if the study’s validity is accepted.

When New Jersey officials prepared to release the report in January, Mark Posner, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s special litigation section, asked the state attorney general’s office to withhold it. Mr. Posner wrote that he feared that the report’s results may have been skewed by factors like glare on windshields, weather and camera placements on roadsides.

And there’s the default back to the Justice Department. Boilerplate rebuttal of the results.</p>

<p>There may very well be several peer reviewed studies that support your position as to the racial discrimination police subject minorities to - and I’d appreciate you sharing them - but one last bit in that NYT article suggested there might not be any:

In North Carolina, for example, a professor hired in 2000 by the National Institute of Justice to study whether there are identifiable differences in driving behavior based on race, assigned teams of students to travel roads at the speed limit, record the race of drivers who passed them and use stopwatches to time the drivers’ speed. Though the study has not yet been released, civil rights groups have dismissed its methods as ‘‘loony science’’ and called Matthew T. Zingraff, the lead researcher from North Carolina State University, a racist and a police apologist. Mr. Zingraff has said he was merely trying to find new data to quantify racial profiling.

<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/nyregion/study-suggests-racial-gap-in-speeding-in-new-jersey.html”>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/nyregion/study-suggests-racial-gap-in-speeding-in-new-jersey.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[collegealum314]

<p>

Broken Windows has been around for a long time and Bratton is one if it’s chief proponents. He was a bad pick for the job.

</p>

<p>I don’t know what exactly the police policies are in NYC. I don’t live there.</p>

<p>However, under Bratton’s watch it appears that homicide rates went down by more than 50%, including in the African-American community. I should acknowledge that there is some discussion on whether there is some other factor driving this as some other cities experienced this (although the national rate went down only about 10%) One person suggested the removal of lead in old building drove this, but I don’t know how that effect would work in a 10 year span.<br>
With that said, are you sure that Bratton’s policies didn’t drive this decrease? If you acknowledge he has something to do with it, do you know which policies did help and which didn’t? And are you willing to accept a doubling of homicide victims in the African American community by going back to the old way of doing things? </p>

[zoosermom]

<p>"“The police rhetoric is borne of fear. The mayor’s rhetoric is borne of hate and ignorance.”</p>

<p>Nonsense."</p>

<p>Really emily? Two dead and two injured cops? They saw it coming. Try again. You have descended into the realm of the ridiculous.</p>

[catahoula]

<p>And the victim in all this turns out to be… ta da… Al Sharpton.

“We are now under intense threat from those who are misguided — from those who are trying to blame everyone from civil rights leaders to the mayor rather than deal with an ugly spirit that all of us need to fight,” he said.

Man’s incorrigible.</p>

[sally305]

<p>You know what, catahoula? Your (and others’) obsession with Al Sharpton makes it abundantly clear that you care more about the political “points” you think you can score on these cases than you do about the fact that actual lives have been lost–including those of the police officers you purport to care about. There is a clear pattern to the posts of some people here, including those who seemingly have no connection at all to college-related subjects–it really says a lot.</p>

[marie1234]

<p>Well, it’s kind of hard to avoid him since he does seem to find his way to the center of most of these cases for unknown reasons. And, a day after two cops are shot he’s playing his death threat tape as if to say look, me too. Pathetic
Also, I went back and read post 1380 and see nothing particularly controversial or objectively false there, either. Tatin seems to be saying it’s a bad idea to resist arrest which it is, of course. The cops are not supposed to go away and come back later when the suspect is on a better mood but they may start not coming at all and even more people will get hurt and who could blame them, really. </p>

[catahoula]

<p>Sharpton and his like are so central to the subject, I’m surprised you find it odd that he’s issuing denials of responsibility, sally.</p>

<p>Whatever patterns you might be seeing here, the one you won’t see is a particular poster forgetting to provide documentation for a claim of fact. </p>

<p>No worries.</p>

[sally305]

<p>No, marie. It’s not hard to avoid him any more than it is to avoid other public figures with an opinion on current subjects. Maybe you should try harder?</p>

[marie1234]

<p>Well, I do like to know what’s going on. Ignoring it is not the answer to anything. I don’t know why I would that and then I would not be informed since somehow he became relevant, which is just nuts…</p>

[sally305]

<p>

Sharpton and his like are so central to the subject, I’m surprised you find it odd that he’s issuing denials of responsibility, sally.

</p>

<p>You too are missing the point. Al Sharpton is not a party to either the killings of unarmed black people by cops, the failure of grand juries to indict said cops, or the killings of two officers this weekend by an unhinged person who also shot his ex-girlfriend.</p>

[sally305]

<p>marie, if you like to “know what’s going on,” and you dislike the opinions of a particular public figure, why do you not tune him out? Most of us do that with sources we distrust or whose perspectives we disagree with. It’s really not that difficult!</p>

[marie1234]

<p>Seeing some of your previous posts on this thread I believe that you do exactly that. But, I prefer reality.</p>

[sally305]

<p>So to you, Al Sharpton = reality. OK, got it!</p>

[marie1234]

<p>What does that mean? Of course, he’s real and some real leaders are giving him a real seat at the real table these days. And, some real angry people are getting angrier because of his rhetoric and now two NYPD cops are real dead and all cops are in greater danger and no I’m not blaming him for that exactly but I see no benefit in pretending he’s not reality because I don’t particularly care for him personally, either.</p>

[sally305]

<p>We know you don’t care for him personally. But he is not responsible for the two cops being shot.</p>

<p>And how come “all cops are in greater danger” just because of yesterday, and not because of Eric Frein in PA or the wackos in Las Vegas or any of the other authority-hating people set on some kind of vengeance?</p>