No justice for Philando Castile

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-black-men

@hebegebe if I were trying to push a narrative I wouldn’t have gone back and corrected it to 5x so spare me the lecture. It’s clear you and a few others despite facts to the contrary and video evidence, will somehow justify the killings of people of color. I won’t derail this thread any further trying to convince the unconvinced , that some cops are biased and that unarmed black males are killed at disproportionate rate.

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I think it was a tragedy that he was killed, and the fact that he was black likely increased his chances of both getting stopped and getting shot. What I disagree with is this outrage that the verdict was incorrect, or that there is some wave of police violence against minorities.

Regarding the verdict:

  • The trial was held in Ramsey County, which is a very urban and very liberal part of Minneapolis (the county voted D over R by a 2.5 ratio in the last election). If the jury was racist, these were very liberal and progressive racists.
    • The trial took over three weeks to complete, so both the defense and the prosecution had ample time to develop case and present their evidence. There were no accusations that either side was incompetent or threw the case.
  • By media accounts, the initial jury deliberation was a 10-2 vote to acquit. The two black members of the jury reportedly were among those who voted to acquit in the initial voting.
    • Neither of the two members of the jury who initially thought that he was guilty felt strongly enough about the issue to hold out and force a mis-trial. If either of them thought he was guilty, they could have hung the jury like with the DuBose/Tensing case in Cincinnati.
    • None of the people on this thread and the vast majority of media did not sit through the three weeks of presentations and testimony, listen to the the judges instructions or deliberate with a panel of their peers. All they saw was two videos and joined a mob fed by an media-driven outrage machine.
    • Finally, the jury had to make a conclusion "beyond a reasonable doubt". It could very well be that individual jurists were 90 percent sure he was guilty, but had to deliver a not guilty decision because they were not 100 percent sure.

Was the verdict correct? I don’t know. The video evidence is very damning, but a few minutes of video is a very small part of the evidence presented in a three week trial. I trust the jury to the make the correct decision far more than the posters on an internet message board who, for the most part, have only cursory knowledge of the case.

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I don’t automatically trust juries, neither do I automatically trust cops.

It’s possible that something in that 3 weeks of the trial managed to obfuscate more than to clarify. I don’t know, but as an outsider to all these juries who keep making questionable decisions, over and over, all the same way, you have to wonder what is going on and what may be going wrong.

Look at a completely different case - the one in Oregon where those people took over a federal wildlife refuge and were all acquitted. Acquitted of firearms charges, depredation of federal property, etc., things they were clearly guilty of!

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As I said before, all the current data that’s bandied about here is problematic. It’s based ON VOLUNTARY POLICE INFORMATION… which is a highly dubious source of correct information! Even James Comey, back when he was the head of the FBI admitted there is a shortage of truly believable stats.

“The problem is that the federal government bases its count of police killings on data provided voluntarily by police departments, which in the past has “resulted in a significant underestimate of the number of annual arrest-related deaths,” according to a report this month from the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice."
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-police-casualties-idUSKBN1492OO

A study of death certificates – somewhat more reliable although plenty police have lied about a suspect’s death and the victim’s family did not pursue/had money for an autopsy to verify police information – shows that:

" From 2010 until 2014, death certificates identified 2,285 legal-intervention deaths in the U.S., 96 percent of them fatal shootings and 96 percent of them deaths of males. Though white males accounted for the largest number, blacks were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, the study found. And Hispanic men were 1.7 times more likely than whites to be killed by officers."
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-police-casualties-idUSKBN1492OO

This study contradicts the earlier Fryer study @hebegebe likes to throw out. Fryer had no comment.

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@katliamom - If you want to read something that will make your blood boil, read the following articles:

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-crime-rates/

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2014/Chicago-crime-statistics/

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@katliamom

The FBI reporting may be based on voluntary reporting, but the Washington Post database isn’t.

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@roethlisburger – which Washington Post database? The numbers I cited in the Reuters article (one of many that covered the study that showed black men were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by cops than white men) are not from the FBI, but from CDC death certificates.

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@katliamom,

Before throwing out an accusation that Roland Fryer got his data wrong, you might want to read what his report actually said.

But first a bit of background. We can decompose the issue of racial profiling during police stops into two separate steps.

  1. Are police stopping some racial groups disproportionately to the crimes they commit?
  2. Once the police stops someone, are they discriminating in their treatment of the stopped person according to race.

The important part is that Roland’s report only dealt with issue #2. Specifically, after someone is stopped, how are they treated? He made no claims whatsoever regarding issue #1. As to why he didn’t comment, it was probably to refrain himself from saying “Were you too stupid to read what the report was actually about?”

Nobody here is denying that blacks are shot more often, least of all Roland. As Roland himself is black, I am quite sure he is aware that blacks are shot more often.

What Roland found was that during police stops, while blacks are treated to non-lethal force more often, they are treated with lethal force less often. This was not at all the outcome he was expecting, but as an ethical and highly regarded economist, he wasn’t going to pull punches with the final report.

And for all your claims about the data being wrong due to it being falsified, consider that falsified data would show exactly the opposite of what you predicted. It is far easier for police to falsify a report about pushing a suspect into a wall or the ground, or pointing a weapon, than to falsify a report about a gunshot. Gunshots leave incontrovertible evidence including a wound, a bullet fragment that can be tied to the police officer’s gun, and possibly a dead body. Kind of hard to ignore, don’t you think?

In other words, a pattern of falsification would show a lower rate of non-lethal force and a higher rate of lethal force.

Now I will be the first to admit that this is one study and that other studies may show a different pattern. But as I explained earlier, using data is far better than using anecdotes which lead to all sorts of incorrect conclusions.

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Where did I say Fryer’s “wrong”??? Please don’t put words in my mouth.

Although it’s also true that Fryer’s conclusion was contradicted by the death certificate study, so you should take that into consideration if you’re discussing studies.

My personal belief is that this is a field with HIGHLY DUBIOUS DATA all around. That’s what I said, and that’s what I stand by.

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It’s not contradicted because that difference could be fully explained by issue #1–the rate at which police are stopping different groups. If group A commits X times as many crimes as group B, I would certainly hope that the police are stopping group A more often than group B by a factor of X.

If the stop rate is different for groups A and B, but the treatment is fair afterwards, you would expect exactly what the death certificate study shows.

The part that is missing is data showing whether stops are performed proportional to the number of crimes committed. The Stanford dataset should provide insight on that.

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“It’s not contradicted because that difference could be fully explained by issue #1–the rate at which police are stopping different groups. If group A commits X times as many crimes as group B, I would certainly hope that the police are stopping group A more often than group B by a factor of X.”

Now who’s guilty of “mental gymnastics” ? :wink:

BTW, there are experts who disagree with you, and find the death certificate study DOES contradict Fryer. Like I said, this is all interpretive, subjective and highly flawed. Certainly wouldn’t hold up in a science lab! So I’ll stick with what I’ve seen with my own eyes, and heard from those who live the reality.

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My anecdotal experience as a white male is that minority (mostly AA) males are treated differently than I am in their interaction with police and the justice system.

I believe that difference can only be chalked up to perception of those in authority based on racial issues

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There is no mental gymnastics here, because it is simple mathematics. Here is the decomposition of issues #1 and #2.

Rate of police kills = Rate of stops * kills/stop

It is important that everyone understands that this mathematical relationship always holds. And it holds regardless of where your opinion on whether racial discrimination exists in policing or not. It is inviolate. We can further decompose issue #1 and #2 to add a racial bias adjustment which is subject to judgment.

Rate of stops = Crime Rate * DrivingWhileBlack
Kills/Stop = LegitimateShooting * TriggerFinger

So if we expand everything, we get:

Rate of police kills = CrimeRate * DrivingWhileBlack * LegitimateShooting * TriggerFinger

Let’s normalize everything to 1.0 for white americans, and just use a relative multiplier for blacks. That means we can drop out the LegitimateShooting since that should be the same for all racial groups. Simplifying, and grouping we get:

Relative rate of police kills = Relative crime rate * (DrivingWhileBlack * TriggerFinger)

In other words, if the relative rate of police kills is greater than the relative crime rate, the product of DrivingWhileBlack * TriggerFinger must be > 1 (indicating discrimination). If the product=1, there is no discrimination. And if <1, there is actually leniency.

We have estimates for the relative rate that police shoot blacks relative to whites (~2.4x for all blacks as a whole from the Guardian data). But we also have estimates for various crime rates. As I explained earlier, I chose murder because it is impossible to fake and difficult to ignore. The relative murder rate for blacks is 3.5x that of whites. So plugging in:

2.4 = 3.5 * ( DrivingWhileBlack * TriggerFinger )

In this case, the product of (DrivingWhileBlack * TriggerFinger) is about 0.7. Roland only measured ‘TriggerFinger’ and found it to be about 0.8, suggesting DrivingWhileBlack is close to unity.

Suppose that Roland is wrong as you suggest, and that TriggerFinger is actually 1.5. That means DrivingWhileBlack is considerably less than 1.0, which sounds wrong to me (I am hoping for 1.0).

So at the end of the day, regardless of which expert has an opinion, the mathematical expression still has to work. Feel free to plug in with your own estimates of racial crime rates and police homicide rates. Let me know how that works out.

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It’s not the math I’m questioning - it’s the source of the numbers. If they’ve been massaged by the police department and/or the justice system, they’re hardly reflective of the reality. As illustrated by the articles zinhead shared.

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CNN reports that the family of Philando Castile accepted a settlement of $3M from the city.

This was a wise move by the city. They would almost certainly have lost the civil case, where the burden of proof is much lower, and where a jury verdict could have been much higher.

And while this is not justice, it is compensation, and it allows the family closure quickly rather than have to relive the situation during another lengthy court proceeding.

It seems to me that it is these expensive settlements that will actually force change in the cities to better regulate out of control police officers, rather than relying upon the the criminal cases.

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Was listening to NPR yesterday and they aired a segment about children who witness violence/trauma in particular when police shootings are involved and they aired a audio piece of Castile’s daughter andDiamond in the patrol car after the shooting. The young girl can be heard crying for her mom to keep her handcuffs on because she doesn’t want her shot too. It’s utterly heartbreaking to hear. That poor child will have to live with that for the rest of her life…

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@tonymom you should see the video of her child trying to comfort her, it was awful.



No, these settlements won’t change anything , see Chicago and especially Baltimore. They’ve paid out millions and yet you have the laquan McDonald case and the freddy gray case.

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I wonder if Diamond and her daughter will receive any of that settlement? Since they weren’t married, they probably don’t have a legal claim and yet they were two who were most hurt by his killing.

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From the Minneapolis paper:
http://www.startribune.com/philando-castile-family-reaches-3m-settlement-in-death/430840813/

“Bennett said Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, is not part of the settlement announced Monday.”

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She was treated like a criminal. Diamond and her child were endangered by the reckless officer. I hope she sues as well.