A bad police-involved shooting is a bad shooting. Now admittedly police, being armed representatives of the state, have a higher degree of responsibility than an average Joe. But my problem with the dozen or so media requests I get after something like this is perspective and selective outrage. Perhaps 500 or 600 people are killed…
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Very bad. For a lot of reasons. A man is wanted for arrest for unpaid child support. A cop shoots the man while the man is running away and clearly, at that moment, is not a threat. The officer then apparently picks up and moves and drops his Taser closer to the dead body? Oh,…
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So many reports. So little time. [My other two posts on the DOJ reports: 2 & 3.] First the easy one: the DOJ report on Darren Wilson shooting Michael Brown. The press seems more interested in the other DOJ report, the one that reams the whole criminal justice system in Ferguson a new one (more…
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I’ve written before about their foolish and inaccurate claim that the black-to-white racial disparity among those shot by police is 21 to 1. I said, given the group they look at, the number is 9 to 1. But without any slight-of-hand or misleading highlighting of statistical outliers, the actually black-to-white racial disparity, the take-home stat,…
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Here I am on NPR’s “Morning Edition” flapping my mouth about the shooting of Tamir Rice (Cleveland kid killed by police while holding a realistic-looking BB gun): [Moskos] says mayors everywhere walk a tightrope between police and citizen outrage. He says the public needs to get more realistic about how the police work. And police…
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I mention this article by Peter Katel in CQ Researcher (alas, behind a pay wall) because, along with lots of good stuff, there’s a quote I wasn’t expecting coming from my man Norm “a liberal critic of much police strategy” Stamper: A video of the [Tamir Rice] shooting — showing a police car driving up…
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If you want to be outraged, I find the lack of more public protest over the police-involved killing of Akai Gurley odd. I mean, if you’re looking for an honest victim killed by police for no reason at all, why not focus on an honest victim killed for no reason at all (instead of say,…
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A lot of people really believe that cops are out there gunning for blacks. People who know more about police officers find this absurd. Of course black lives do indeed matter. But other things being equal (like committing a violent crime), are cops more likely to shoot and kill blacks because they are black? That’s…
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We don’t know how many people are killed by police. That’s an outrage. But seriously, think about it: police kill more people than America executes. We spend a lot of time and money when it comes to executions. And we don’t even count those killed by police. And this isn’t even a pro- or anti-police…
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I try and fight them lies on both sides. And finally one ace reporter, William Freivogel of St. Louis Public Radio, sets the record straight regarding ProPublica’s lie that that black teens are “21 times” more likely than white teens to be killed by police. This is the first light of day my lengthy bitching…
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