I'm not asking that to start a fight over whether these shootings were justified. I'm asking because that word has a specific criminal definition, and news organizations typically have very strict policies on implying criminal guilt (witness the pre-conviction use of "alleged X" even in the most obvious of cases).
As I understand it, most of the names described here as "murdered by police" have not produced murder convictions or even murder charges against police officers.
Without getting into subjective discussions of 'guilt', does TechCrunch have a policy on language in criminal cases? What is it?
If it's impossible to get justice because the killer was wearing uniform what's the value in the judgements of justice system? If so many cases of behaviour that would lead to a conviction, don't, that conviction loses starts to lose some of its meaning. If an officer is so rarely convicted for murder, at what point does it remain meaningful to use the word 'murder' to mean a legal conviction where a police officer is concerned?
Or do we look at the stats and say that police are incapable of committing murder. "There is no murder in paradise" as Stalin is reputed to have said.
(I'm slightly playing devil's advocate here but there is a massive problem)
>Murder is the unlawful killing of another human being without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human being with malice aforethought. This state of mind may, depending upon the jurisdiction, distinguish murder from other forms of unlawful homicide, such as manslaughter.
Murder is both specifically unlawful (which is debatable in this case, even if we don't want it to be), and specifically premeditated (which it almost certainly is not). So I'd say murder is probably not accurate in common law jurisdictions, especially U.S. jurisdictions.
We've seen video of an officer shooting someone and then going back to his squad car and appearing to remove a gun from his bag and plant it on the victim. Carrying around a "burner" gun (in case you might need it) seems premeditated to me, but IANAL.
I mean otherwise we'd call lynching's back in the 1900's "alleged murders" since most of them also didn't have murder convictions nor murder charges.
Though I guess they could use "manslaughter" instead?
That, I guess, was my question. Print journalism applies this rule even when taking moral stances; what's the standard here?
And it's a shame because there definitely is an issue with police aggressiveness and violence and espousing a shoot first ask questions later philosophy for policing.
On the other hand, we have too many people with guns who should not own guns. I'm ambivalent about the second amendment but so long as we have it, strictly test owners yearly and anyone possessing one illegally has to do massive community work and pay prohibitive fines.
Your argument in paragraph 3: only the police should have guns.
Umm ...?
It doesn't sound like, according to the article, the California initiative is to prove racism but rather track, identify, and reduce police initiated violence. Is this the writer's bias?
The author describes three stages in collection, from no data, to third-party collections, and now to government collection.
The given Guardian link shows that blacks are twice as likely as whites to be killed, on a per-capita basis. This is consistent with the hypothesis that there is systemic racism, which previously was mostly conjectural due to lack of data. In the Poppler viewpoint, the racism hypothesis made a testable prediction, which was shown to be true.
Beyond that, the question is about what level of evidence is required before you can say here is proof. Some might say this is evidence which supports multiple hypotheses, others might say it's proof.
Still others might use the term "weak proof" when there some supporting evidence which isn't conclusive. For examples, http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-... says "Horoscope is a weak proof of birthdate: Supreme Court" and https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251 says "When compared to injections without steroids, there is weak proof that epidural steroid injections may result in some improvement in radicular lumbosacral pain in the short term, when assessed between two and six weeks after the injection."
Is "weak proof" a type of proof? (Is "dwarf planet" a type of planet?)
In any case, the author shows why data collection can be useful to test a hypothesis, then describes how the State of California will now be collecting the data, but doesn't make the concrete connection that CA will be collecting that data for that specific purpose.
As to the legislative history of the bill, in the summer of 2015 senators Booker and Boxer proposed the PRIDE bill for better nationwide reporting. Booker writes, at https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-... :
> Almost half a century later, tragic events across the country — in New York, Ferguson, North Charleston and Baltimore — have reminded us how critical trust is to the fabric of our democracy. These incidents have raised the public’s awareness and sparked a long overdue national debate about how police and citizens interact and how they should interact.
and how it's hard to act without good data. This shows that PRIDE is coupled to the question of possible influence of racism in how police deal with people.
That's a proposed bill at the federal level. It's not the state bill. The history of CA AB-71 is at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... . That bill started a few months after PRIDE. The analysis for the bill includes specific references to PRIDE. It sounds very much like the same concerns of Booker are also behind AB-71, which includes knowing if there is a systemic racial bias in police initiated violence.
So while the bill doesn't say it outright, the reason for the bill seems to include gathering the information which can help prove (or disprove) systemic racism.
If the shootings are correlated to, say, the demographics of murderers (which is probably more representative than the population at large), it might actually be evidence of racism against whites -- the number of murders committed per 10,000 people in blacks is about 8 times that of whites, which means if they're dying at only 2.5 times the rate per 10,000 people and the deaths are correlated to the murder rate, the police are killing white people disproportionately often.
I think that a lot of people, such as yourself, are being very dishonest when analyzing the police data because they're analyzing it against total population numbers while ignoring the correlations to crime demographics. Such as the Guardian numbers you cited.
I also think you're being racist. Against white people.
If we look at today's Philippines it's quite clear racism is not a necessary component of aggressive and violent policing.
I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational.
Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic.
The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general.
I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist).
Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?
Actually there is already data, and actually that data states that in fact, black people suffer more violence from part of the police, but LESS killings, is just there is a total bias by the media outlets that basically only show cases of police killings involving black victims and don't report the ones with white people.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... [3] http://www.fatalencounters.org/
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-coun...
> When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.
> Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
> The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest
> The Ferguson unrest (also referred to just as Ferguson) involves protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014
