She probably is a keeper. One thing I think everyone misses is that the biggest disparity is in the REPORTING on police shootings. Yes, some races are a bigger portion of shootings by police than they are of the national population. But 40%-50% of police shootings are of white people and ~0% of those are widely reported on, which is an even bigger disparity. And it has a perverse effect to show to minority citizens people that look like them being shot and hiding the fact that the majority race gets shot regularly - it has the effect of making them feel particularly at risk, which terrorizes them. And I empathize with their reaction to that, I can see how it would be freaky and scary, and make you walk around on edge. We owe it to those people to show the correct proportions of skin colors relative to how often they get shot - that balance of data - so they can be outraged and scared in a fair measure, and not one that causes them undue suffering.
Who has even heard of Edward Bronstein of Pasadena? It was a horrible, horrible situation that happened to him and there was virtually zero reporting. Show people his reality, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P31slglqZ1E Warning, it's an awful thing to watch, a horror story. But stories like his and Tony Timpa's provide balance to the horror story, so some people can sleep at night rather than feel hunted.
I mean black women in America walk around legitimately scared of being shot by police - and I say legitimately both in the sense that they are actually, truly scared, and that their fear is legitimate because of what they are shown by the media.
But black women are shot by police at 1/8 the rate per capita that white men are. They can certainly fear for the men in their families and those they know, but they have much less reason to fear the police might shoot them than many white men have.
I couldn't help but notice that the black woman who was interviewing the "trans-Korean" man recently, and who was outraged at his trans-racial thinking was a good example. She felt that with him being white at birth he couldn't understand her oppression and emphsized to him that "how I interact with police... could result in me dying". I was stunned and felt for her, because not only is she a black woman, she was referring to her life in the UK - where approximately six men and approximately zero women are killed by police per year.
That’s absolutely correct and the shitty thing is that the media has to know how their misleading/false reporting ends up impacting the country and don’t care. Part of it is undoubtedly ratings/money based but much of it is ideologically based. The media should do some hard self examination at this point and know that their words have driven a movement that is leading to many more dead folks, especially ‘black and brown’ lives. I’m thankful that there are growing numbers of black and brown people who are moving away from the white liberal worldview. Math isn’t racist for example, it’s incredibly racist to say that they can’t learn math in ways that other people are capable of. Hidden Figures anyone? And those black women did that in a truly racist sad era of our country’s history.
The problem is that, on a national level, journalists aren't going out and looking for these stories. The stories come to them because they are the ones which go viral on social media. And they haven't yet caught on to the reality that what they're reporting on is a technology-driven social media phenomenon rather than an actual surge in racist police activity.
You are mostly right... I do think it existed before social media tho. Journalists aren't doing the big picture story like you say, but I also think they are happy to get the eyeballs from the most salacious interpretation. If they present the counter narrative effectively, they don't have as big a story each time.
Mr. Kriegman uses Roland Fryer's study as an example of lethal force across racial groups; I question his integrity because Fryer's study was incorrect!
“Roland Fryer is wrong: There is racial bias in shootings by police”
"Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States."
In short, given that Fryer’s study upended unwarranted assumptions held by many people about the biased application of lethal force, it’s not surprising that the study precipitated a torrent of criticism. Much of that criticism seems to be motivated, at least in part, by the political and social agendas of the critics.
That said, there are important limitations that Fryer himself notes in his original study.
The study remains, to this day, the gold standard for police bias. It was, and is, a very strong study.
All academic publications warrant some skepticism. As an MD, I see woke politics invading the nation's top medical journals. Yet each report. each study, should be judged on its merits and in context. As tenured Harvard faculty, anything Fryer publishes is "from Harvard". We have a sad state of affairs and thank goodness for people like Kriegman and Fryer. Yet we who believe them should remain open to new information, even new arguments
When you are logged in at home attempting to emotionally terrorize Black Americans with horseshit propaganda about how the cops will kill them, do you wear an actual Klan robe or do you just wear like shorts and a t-shirt?
You are citing somebody’s blog against a study that was peer reviewed and published in a formal scientific journal (???). Btw Roland Fryer was also a Harvard professor.
Always grade down the credibility of any study, peer reviewed or not, that supports the ideological/political bias of that institution... either because it is likely known propaganda, or otherwise the study authors and the peers that reviewed it are afflicted with blind political confirmation bias.
Freyer reported that he undertook the study with the expectation that it would confirm his bias, and yet it did the opposite. Those are always the more difficult outcomes and thus increase the credibility of the research as the study author would need a more rigorous set of arguments required to change his bias.
You people seem to think the provenance of an article, or the 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑠 of the author, determine its truth-value. Your deference to 𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑚 𝑎𝑑 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑚 indicates you have little faith in your own ability to understand the arguments being made.
You criticism is rejected. Peer review has increasingly been shown to be an inadequate quality control for research papers and has contributed (or at least not slowed) to the reproducibility crisis. Vox can get a thing right. It's happened to Daily Beast, and even Buzzfeed!
The blog post was a well written article and it added to the discussion imo. I am no expert at statistics so I’m not going to be in a position to settle anything.
I know in my heart there is racial bias in policing. addressing that means properly understanding it. I googled the name of that article and there’s a heck of a lot of discussion and papers on the subject.
"You know in your heart"? LOL. Now there is a scientific datapoint!
I have a friend who is a social justice activist with two adopted black children (he is Jewish and white) from a family member that lost custody because of meth addiction. He claims our white college town is racist with racist cops. I asked him to give me examples. He always tried to deflect from that... so I kept on him at one point.
He said "It is the way that people look at me and my kids when I am out walking with them."
Yeah, he knows in his heart that people are racist. Talk about confirmation bias!
Okay, poor choice of words on my part. I have seen it play out live in person. I’m not saying its endemic, I’m not saying its systemic, I’m saying that it exists and that it is nontrivial. And yes this is anecdotal.
Let me quote from the blog post "Properly interpreted, the actual result from Fryer’s analysis is that the racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shootings. This is an unsurprising finding, and proves neither a lack of bias nor a lack of systematic discrimination.". In real life, victimization surveys have not shown any bias in the criminal justice system.
The FBI uniform victimization surveys confirm the results of the compilation of police records. Their figures are uncannily close. This shows that neither one of them is likely to be biased or influenced by "systemic racism", as is breezily claimed by many writers. That is also shown by the fact that most of the crime reports and victimization reports are blacks reporting about black criminals and whites reporting about white criminals.
I’ve actually crunched the FBI data and came to the same conclusion as the author in a different way. If you simply look at the number of arrests for violent crimes and figure the likelihood that there may be some sort of violent confrontation involved. When adjusted for that the incidents of shootings were about the same proportion for blacks and whites. The group that was being shot disproportionately were of Hawaiian/Pacific Islander descent. By my calculations they should be protesting.
I’d hazard I did a lot more research on this topic than you did and I did do it on MY couch. Haven’t lived at home since I was 18 which was many decades ago and probably haven’t played a video game in that time either.
I’ve had plenty of experience with Just Me on this site and they are pretty much full of crap every time they post. You might look into who you’re defending as you seem new here.
You seem like a typical leftist, project, project, project.
I also closely examined the Federal crime stats, Gregg, and came to the same conclusion you did.
When I first started sucking spread sheets and turgid reports off the Federal web sites I was positive cops were murdering more black people than white people.
I admire anyone who has the guts to research and come to the opposite conclusion they started with. You are so right about confirmation bias. I know I’m regularly guilty of it.
I think if you consume media today it’s about 90% confirmation bias and 10% facts.
I looked at the same numbers as you did back in the Summer of Floyd and came to the same results. The federal numbers aren’t perfect, but they are better than any other numbers we have.
We both seem to have each other 180 degrees off. I am so not left. I think you might be tracking responses and comments inaccurately.
Oops... my bad... you were responding to Just Me. Sorry.
I have read and crunched the data so many times and starting so long ago that I refuse to do it again because I know what I know. What I know is that the systemic racism claim of the law enforcement is a political construct of the left that has no real basis in actual fact. When properly controlled for all the material criteria, at worst we can claim that police actions are equal between blacks and whites.
And I keep asking that question... if cops are generally so racist, why are not Asians showing up in the data as being unfairly targeted and shot?
Yep. Pretty easy to debunk BLM’s entire argument. I find “Just Me” just annoying for the reason stated. But there’s some history of comments on articles here that you may not have seen.
Just Me is a troll. Usually everyone makes a point of ignoring him altogether, since Substack does not have a mute feature. I'm disappointed to see so many people getting sucked in today. Engaging with him in any way is completely pointless.
Wait, you think the fact that it comes from Harvard is impressive? It’s become a cesspool of wokespeech. Plus you quoted a blog. No peer review, nothing. Literally anyone can write a blog and put in it any lie/misrepresentation they want.
So if this blogger wants to actually publish his “study” let him do it. Meanwhile stop wasting our time with your bs like you normally do.
Damn, you're a broken record dude. Let's make it simple: you argue that a blog post, itself citing nothing concrete, invalidates a peer-reviewed study authored by an academic. That is a profoundly weak argument regardless of what one thinks about the current nature of peer review.
If that means you are going to stop commenting (since I guess you’ll be sleeping) then why would I wake you up? I only want to hear from people making intelligent comments.
Harvard has egregiously mistreated Roland Fryer, who is considered to be the greatest economist of his generation. They have targeted him for the same reasons Zac Kriegman is being targeted. Fryer is brilliant. His studies on crime and education are top notch.
What is flawed is the attached article you provided: it claims there is systemic racism in policing bc they treat blacks differently, specifically they go after them more aggressively than whites. As an example, it states that blacks are pulled over disproportionately to whites. The reason for this is due to blacks behavior in cars (no tags, no license, speeding, taillight out etc.....) to which the police are REACTING. It is black peoples behavior that drives (no pun intended) the police encounters, not the other way around.
Roland fryer and Zac Kriegman are a gift to this nation and they are being unjustly attacked and punished. It is tragic.
According to FBI statistics 51% of all murders are committed by blacks. About 12% of the population is made up by blacks and the vast majority of murders are committed by male blacks or 6% of the population. Is it any wonder that there is higher per capita of black shot by cops?
It is almost too easy to debunk the BLM myth. I think the much more interesting question is why blacks are disproportionately involved in crime as you see in the statistics. I think there are societal ills including but not limited to racism that are causing that. Wouldn’t the more fruitful conversation start there? You could solve the supposed racist cop problem and save 18 people vs 10,000 being shot by non cops. Where would be the more fruitful place to focus?
In so many topics today the facts get lost in the narrative. The narrative gets debunked by people smart enough to figure it out. Yet the leftists love to cling to the narrative rather than have an honest conversation about what is really causing the issue. Just lots of emotional sound bites.
"I think there are societal ills including but not limited to racism that are causing that. Wouldn’t the more fruitful conversation start there? You could solve the supposed racist cop problem and save 18 people vs 10,000 being shot by non cops. Where would be the more fruitful place to focus?"
Absolutely yes, Gregg. The same problem exists with people who blame guns for murder and suicide because the majority of each are carried out with a gun instead of a tire iron or Drano. Guns may be the tool they chose, but it's not WHY they decided to kill themselves or others.
Addressing why people choose to shoot each other, and why such a disproportionate number of them are black (murder) or white (suicide), would save far more lives than all the "ban the gunz!!!" nonsense that passes for intelligent thought.
Same with what you and others found about shootings by police: honest numbers brings honest results, but people don't like those results. Too bad for them, we're going to tell them anyway.
I don't mean to insult you but I question your analytical skills. Do the math. If 6% of the population is committing 51% of the murders, don't you think that 6% is going to have a higher profile in the criminal world and therefore open to being shot?
You exhibit the very ideological bias that is responsible for a good deal of the problem we find ourselves in. First, Mr Kriegman cites several sources and data sets to support his conclusions, not just Fryer's. Second, according to Glenn Loury, Fryer was incredulous of the results- enough so that he repeated the study-
I do not have the time or expertise to review academic reports or large data sets to adjudicate the disagreement between Fryer and critics. But I find the variety of sources provided by Mr. Kriegman, and the Loury article, compelling. Many espouse the same conclusions, e.g. Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter and Loury. I have not seen a data driven compelling argument that refutes them.
BLM the organization has brought additional controversy on itself, purchasing a $6M home in Ca; and supporting the disruption of "prescribed nuclear family structure requirement". Black lives matter- absolutely. BLM is harmful to pursuit of actual social justice.
Thanks for the reference. I looked it over, though (it's very short and not particularly technical), and didn't find it very sensible. The author shows a definite bias in lines like "One could point out that the drug laws police enforce were passed with racially discriminatory intent..." if only because he doesn't feel the need to substantiate them.
Michael, technically they say Fryer was using the wrong model, thereby invalidating his results!
“Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings. The theory that is supposed to be informing Fryer's choice of methods is therefore not applicable to this case. He seems somewhat aware of this issue. In his interview with the New York Times, he attributes his ‘surprising’ finding to an issue of “costs, legal and psychological” that happen following a shooting. In what is perhaps a case of cognitive dissonance, he seems to not have reflected on whether the question of cost renders his choice of methods invalid.”
It's worth noting that his study went through a drastically more rigorous review process than the typical peer review for a journal because he anticipated how much criticism he would encounter. Many of the top researchers in the field reviewed it before it was even published.
Of course, it's entirely predictable that people will make bogus criticisms of a study that upends their unwarranted assumptions.
Don't be fooled by those criticisms. You must read his study and their criticisms carefully to figure out which is right. I've done that for myself and I recommend you do it too.
Mr. Kriegman, your article is framed around Black Lives Matter. It is dependent upon a singular report: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, which was not peer-reviewed. If Mr. Fryer's conclusions are incorrect, your article falls apart. You’re conflating the killing of armed black people with unarmed black people killed by the police; the killing of unarmed black people begot BLM. You spend more time denigrating BLM than the organization that fired you.
Here are some criticisms of Mr. Fryer's paper:
This is not the only misleading study cited as evidence against racially biased policing. Another prominent paper examines recorded detainments — arrests and stops — comparing force rates against racial groups of stopped civilians, adjusting for circumstances. It reported some racial bias in sub-lethal force, but no bias in lethal force. This study, too, suffers from an important limitation, albeit a more subtle one than that in the PNAS paper. By analyzing police detainments alone, this study commits what statisticians term “post-treatment selection.” Put differently, it fails to account for racial bias in detainment, potentially severely understating discrimination in the use of force, since force is often used in detainments that would never have occurred had civilians been white. A new study addressing this source of error shows this approach can mask substantial amounts of discriminatory police violence, potentially leading to underestimates even when analysts seek only to quantify discrimination occurring after the detainment decision.
“Simpson’s Paradox is a statistical phenomenon where an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations. For instance, two variables may be positively associated in a population, but be independent or even negatively associated in all subpopulations.”
In conclusion, there is a profusion of statistical studies showing that black people are treated differently; you have only one study that indicates otherwise. Therefore, it is only reasonable to surmise that Mr. Fryer was incorrect, and your conclusion is erroneous!
I realize that "Just me" is a troll, and not interested in a serious conversation, but for anyone who is interested in understanding the problems with the arguments raised above, I invite you to read my original post to Thomson Reuters internal collaboration forum (the one which led to my termination) where I address all these arguments and more. https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods
You say in your linked post that there have been no properly controlled studies with contrary findings. Does that still hold true?
It seems a moderate amount of criticism postulates counterintuitive effects of police bias. I recognized Uri Simonsohn's name. He speculates that police are likely to stop low-risk Blacks more often, diminishing the apparent rate of shootings. Seems a bit of a stretch and something hard to prove or disprove. He also criticizes Fryer's data as noisy. I'm no statistician and he's one of those that identified p-hacking, so I'd be loathe to doubt him. Thoughts?
Below is my discussion of this question from that post.
-------------------------------------------
Fryer himself has discussed this limitation in his original paper and subsequently:
“I totally agree that deciding who to stop in a police stop is highly problematic and there certainly may be racial bias in that decision. So let’s think about the officer-involved shootings in which there’s a robbery in progress or a violent crime. Those are less likely to be plagued by selection bias in the decision of who to harass or stop. Analyzing only those cases yields similar results.”
In other words, if you are concerned that police bias in initiating encounters with suspects were driving Fryer’s finding that there wasn’t bias in police shootings, then you can look just at encounters where police exercised no judgement or discretion in their choice of whether to initiate an encounter. For example, if police are called to a location to respond to a violent crime or robbery that is in progress, then they do not have an opportunity to exercise discretion (and therefore bias) as to whether they engage a suspect at all. But, when you look at only those cases where police do not have an opportunity to introduce bias into the encounter rates, the findings do not change: the data still do not show bias in police shootings.
It’s also worth mentioning that even if police were introducing bias in the encounter rates by stopping more non-threatening black subjects, and thereby decreasing the proportion of encounters that are at high risk of leading to a shooting, you would expect Fryer’s econometric analysis to control for that, at least to the extent that the 290 variables that his team coded were capable of distinguishing between non-threatening subjects and threatening ones, and thus isolating the impact of race.
This is not the only misleading study cited as evidence against racially biased policing. Another prominent paper examines recorded detainments — arrests and stops — comparing force rates against racial groups of stopped civilians, adjusting for circumstances. It reported some racial bias in sub-lethal force, but no bias in lethal force. This study, too, suffers from an important limitation, albeit a more subtle one than that in the PNAS paper. By analyzing police detainments alone, this study commits what statisticians term “post-treatment selection.” Put differently, it fails to account for racial bias in detainment, potentially severely understating discrimination in the use of force, since force is often used in detainments that would never have occurred had civilians been white. A new study addressing this source of error shows this approach can mask substantial amounts of discriminatory police violence, potentially leading to underestimates even when analysts seek only to quantify discrimination occurring after the detainment decision.
“Simpson’s Paradox is a statistical phenomenon where an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations. For instance, two variables may be positively associated in a population, but be independent or even negatively associated in all subpopulations.”
They say that, and it may even be true, but one can't tell whether it's true from this reference. So your saying that Fryer is somehow known to be "incorrect" and that quoting him casts doubt on the integrity of the Kriegman is not supported.
I think there might be some residual of a time when a cop shooting a black person was not likely to stir the pot very much.
The cost benefit analysis was very different. So the question to me becomes how much of a residual really? I don’t know. My sense is not a whole lot, but I also don’t believe there’s none. Quantifying that is really important to devising the best ways of addressing it.
Well if I understand correctly, a lot of drug laws were passed in exactly that spirit in this country. I don’t know what it really does to the outcome of this debate but it’s not a ridiculous observation to make.
I didn't say it was ridiculous, or even that it was untrue. I said it showed a bias on the part of the author that he stated this without support. Even with support it's not clear how relevant it is to the argument. This is supposed to be academic research, not polemics.
Steven, you continue to bestow stupid opinions like this upon me; I think it is reasonable to conclude that you don’t have the intellectual ability to do otherwise! So please excuse me if I don’t always reply to you. From time to time, when I have nothing else to do, I will consider responding to your stupid opinions.
Seriously? Do you want to detail the flaws in his study? What sources are you using to reach your conclusion since you state that “there is plenty of evidence.” Citations please!
If you know such a place, don't give away the secret. You might as well line up the refugee intellectuals who've been lucky enough to find their way there and shoot them as to make public the name and location of their sanctuary.
“Oh please there are very few actual cases of cancellation. Bari just puts all of them on her Substack.”
and I will continue to remind everyone that this works the exact same way as my plan to end graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty because you really only have to kill a few guys before everyone else gets the message.
You’re right. There are few actual cases of cancellation, because people in “the land of the free” have very quickly learned to look over their shoulder and shut up. I’m one of them.
This is true. My college freshman son admits that he writes what the professors want to read so he will get a good grade. Young conservatives are not vocal and not prone to protest like their liberal counterparts. This intolerance by the progressive side is creating a segregation that we have worked over that last decades to eliminate. The quiet conservatives or moderates despise the "obnoxious progressives" on campus, and they naturally segregate themselves.
You are absolutely right. I can’t believe that in the ‘80s, in a communist country, I was telling myself that I need to think of my family (parents, siblings) and shut up for their sake, and in the 2020s I have to tell myself the same thing (kids this time), and wait until I retire. The deep irony is that today there’s more freedom of speech in the former communist country I came from.
Isn't that amazing? I spent time in communist countries in the 70's and as you say the parallels are eerie and very troubling. Part of me is fascinated at a sociological level to watch this unraveling of our values, catalyzed by a very small minority (as is always the case), while part of me is deeply pained for my country and for what it means for the rest of the world if our freedoms continue to evaporate.
I vividly remember the day the Berlin wall fell in 1989. It took less than a generation to begin building a "wall" of our own. I blame the universities. What did Shakespeare say about lawyers?
Everybody hates lawyers til.they need one. Part of the chilling thing to me about this article is that Thomas Rueters controls a lot of legal information.
Sea Sentry. In today's US society, it is dangerous to speak up. Everyone needs to make decisions based on their finances and family. I pray that those that can do stand up. But I completely understand and those that do not.
Andy, I hope I'm sensing sarcasm here. It will be an uphill battle, but if veritas (truth) does not prevail, we are doomed as a society. Sadly, there will be casualties. James Damore was one of them. Mr. Kriegman was another. Both bright professionals. And to some extent, Chris Hedges was also a victim. As Keats wrote, ""Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
It’s a shame that we have to be like this but in this 21st century it’s seems as though MSM and SM have the edge here even if it’s to keep spinning the lies over and over again it doesn’t matter how many times you tell that the reporting or the numbers don’t add they continuously keep telling the same lie again and again until everybody believes it’s the truth you only had to see President Trump’s term in office to realize how deep the rot goes
And Goebbels knew if he wanted to capture the German people he had to capture the airwaves he set up the best propaganda machine for its time if you note the similarities today it’s worse for us they have capture the airwaves thru Legacy media and SM and like the Nazis they are controlling us we are starting to hate each other this current administration hates conservatives voters maga voters etc. We have 21/2 years till 2024 I hope we can all last till then because a war against the people of the US will be a disaster it won’t come from outside it will come from inside the signs are there Dennis yesterday they subpoenaed 5 Republicans for 1/6 it’s already started they even captured our mobile conversation even that is not private anymore
There are even some parts of this story that back that up. For instance, it strikes me as naive that the author made genuine efforts to engage with HR and D&I and then escalated the issue to senior management rather than taking the multiple hints that he shouldn’t question the narrative. On the other hand, the author also knew ahead of time that he was taking a risk.
Probably the best example of this was the observation that “no one in Diversity and Inclusion condemned any of the public attacks on me”. The public attacks on the author are part and parcel of the entire purpose of D&I and most people already know this, which is why they take the hints and don’t actually get themselves fired.
He knew what he was doing and the risks, and the pressure against him, no doubt. But it used to be that the people who went into journalism were the types who dreamed of the chance to speak truth to power. Now they are the power and hate truth.
How far does that go, though? There were a lot of people in Nazi Germany who kept their mouths shut, too. And I'm sure some of them could live with themselves.
I have found myself almost unbearable to live with, all the shutting up I have done. I work at a pricey 4-year liberal arts college, but that might change soon.
I work in higher ed as well, so I feel you. I moved from a private liberal arts college on the west coast to a public institution in a Red State, and still it's a dance. Admittedly, I ask myself 'Is this my hill?' And I'm very careful how I say things that I know go against the orthodoxy.
Moving to other institutions doesn't necessarily solve the problem because all but a very small few are like this. And the few that are not singular bastions of progressive thought are liberal arts colleges (e.g., University of Austin), which means that unless you study liberal arts, they don't have programs in your field.
Sure, but if you got your shop smashed up on Kristallnacht, you should probably have a better strategy in mind than trying to report the crime to the Gestapo.
Tell that to the business owners whose businesses were burnt down in the riots. The Democrat Mayor of Seattle turned downtown Seattle over to the Marxists. NAZI - National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Note the word Socialist in the definition.
Every time there is a mass shooting like Sandy Hook or Columbine High School there is an outcry from the left to confiscate guns from law abiding citizens. In the majority of these shooting these victims are white and the nuts who shoot them are white. There is no doubt that these shootings are tragic and horrible.
However every week in the inner cities far more black people are murdered by black armed thugs than are these mass shootings. Yet I don’t hear outrage from the Democrats, who claim to be the party defending women and minorities,. To be fair you don’t hear it from the Republicans either. In fact the only thing you hear about these outrageous murders from either party is the sound of crickets chirping.
The point I am making is you never hear from the minority support party any outrage about the slaughter in black communities but you sure do hear it when there is a mass shooting in the white community.
Isn’t that one of the definitions of racism, outrage about white deaths but silent about black deaths?
Years ago after Sandy Hook Diane Feinstein called for the confiscation of all guns. Of course she meant confiscation of law abiding citizens guns. Not one person in the media or from the right asked Diane how she proposed to get the guns out of the hands of the gangs that have been terrorizing black communities for decades.
According to FBI statistics, in 2020 at least 9,713 blacks were murdered. In the past 30years tens of thousands of blacks were murdered in the inner city. Where is the outrage? Isn’t it racist to ignore these murders? Where is BLM, Antifa and the woke people when they are needed the most. More importantly, where are the Democrats who claim to be the party of the minorities? They control the House and the Senate. Why aren’t they screaming to stop these murders. Where is Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Oh, wait a minute! They make their livings off the misery of black people.
If the felons were only shooting other felons, I'd say let them have at it. But these felons don't have particularly good aim. Look at the number of innocent black children who are killed in Chicago every year as a result of felons shooting other felons.
My "if I were king" thought has always been a system where criminals are isolated in a society composed solely of criminals. If they want to proceed to kill each other, they are welcome to do so. But there would be no innocents around to suffer the consequences.
No doubt a LOT of people think this, but there plenty of collateral victims that were not gangsters. For example, the recent gang shoot out in Sacramento did kill three gangsters, but also killed three innocent bystanders.
Indeed. And we could also reduce the illegal transit at the border by shooting a number of them and then leaving their bodies to rot in the sun with signs, in various languages of course, that indicates this is what awaits them if they come in.
The border patrol crack is BS. Border patrol, the national guard and local law enforcement risk their lives on a daily basis for those heeding Biden's call.
Just like they did for Trump. I suspect they liked working for Trump more. And they wouldn't let anyone die out there. Ever. The only BS is Unwoke's comment. Sorry, Lynne.
If the they you are referring to who worked for Trump is the border patrol, national guard and law enforcement the comparison is apples and oranges. The numbers coming over under Biden are swamping the BP, NG, and LE. That was not the case under the former president. Not to mention the drugs and humans being trafficked. And the BP, NG and LEs are risking their lives daily. They are cannon fodder to the current administration. As are we all.
My comment has nothing to do with how better Trump's border patrol was than the present iteration. It probably was. My comment was on the stupidity of Unwoke's remarks about leaving the bodies of migrants to rot in the sun as a message to others. Not even Trump's Border Patrol would let that happen.
I hate that argument even if there is no one else that would be canceled. That is like saying its ok to be a murderer but not a serial killer. Why does it matter how many are affected rather than if its right or wrong? This is just a way to side step the actual issue.
"you really only have to kill a few guys before everyone else gets the message."
I know how you suffer when I agree with you, and for that I'm truly sorry, but I find myself doing so again. Kill a thousand kulaks and the rest will run for the hills.
This is how Texas managed to close all its abortion clinics with its bounty-hunter law: the THREAT of financial ruin from civil suits made clinic owners shut down rather than risk bankruptcy. The threat was enough; not a single lawsuit was filed. Providers would have been found not guilty if it went through the system, but it's hard to celebrate when the lawyers took your house and pension in court and legal fees.
Sort of like Asset forfeiture laws, eh? Sure, you may eventually get your money/property back, but you have to prove yourself innocent, as opposed to government proving you guilty. Why do we Americans tolerate this? Because most people think it only happens to guilty people, so they don't care.
The citizen residents of Texas can change their abortion laws if they want to. Democracy = Majority of votes rules.
First, I don't believe in asset forfeiture laws. I think they're a taking without due process, which violates at least two part of the Constitution.
Second, if the citizen residents of Texas want to change their abortion laws, they need to do it Constitutionally. The bounty-hunter abortion ban is a screaming violation of the United States Constitution, and that SCOTUS refused to hear the case because "gee, it's not the state enforcing it, it's private citizens filing private lawsuits" is dereliction of its duty. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, the Texas ban is an extortion racket, plain and simple, and an unconstitutional taking.
I did not mean to imply that you supported asset forfeiture laws. My point was that they are another "shitty way to run a country".
As for Texas voters, they can vote to change politicians, or vote to change the law, including their constitution. I don't live in Texas (have visited countless times), but I suspect the politicians of Texas who enacted the abortion "extortion" laws believe they are supported by a majority of the voters.
We agree that it's a shitty way to run a country! Huzzah, sweet agreement.
I also agree that Texas enacted the abortion ban fair and square, based on a vote of the legislature and signature of the governor. They knew this law violated the U.S. Constitution, but gambled that SCOTUS, with its sympathy toward overturning Roe, would not interfere. They were correct, and the resulting extortion racket from fears of bounty-hunter bankruptcy closed the clinics without a single lawsuit filed.
Well-played politically, but a steaming pile Constitutionally, for which I blame not Texas, but the Supremes. We appoint them to ensure states follow the rules set out by the Constitution, and they failed miserably at holding Texas to account.
Whatever your position may be on Abortion, it's simply not in the constitution any more than net neutrality. The SCOTUS made it up out of whole cloth. And now they may say "nevermind". Scotus has reversed itself before and will again.
And congress and states pass laws all the time that they know damn well are not constitutional. Sometimes the court bails them out (Obama care mandate comes to mind).
And even if congress were to pass a national abortion law, it should be found unconstitutional. Doesn't mean it will. Commerce clause is already unrecognizable. Look at cannabis laws, for example.
In terms of the things that you can be sued out of business for, being sued for jamming scissors into a babies head is the least egregious example of ambulance-chasing litigiousness I can think of.
Given your general position on the government regulating businesses, and given the current level of totalizing government control over every single thing a business does, your assertion that *this* represents a profoundly shitty example is legitimately retarded.
Well, you're the expert on retarded, so I guess you would know best.
My "general position on the government regulating businesses" would appear to be lighter than yours, since you applaud Texas's decision to regulate clinics out of business and appear to applaud overturning Roe so states can dive into the business of bans and draconian regulations. Are you a regulating commie at heart?
I don’t applaud it I just think it’s retarded to say that allowing lawsuits against a business that is intentionally causing death is egregious overreach. Especially when you are one of the psychotic ding dongs who wants the government to tightly regulate and monitor mist.
Regulating murder is literally one of like four things the government should do.
Should you be forced to accommodate people with disabilities as currently mandated by the government? You think so. Okay so even if abortion isn’t murder, it clearly is worse than the absence of a $70,000 ramp.
If you think it’s fine for the government to deputize lawsuits based on the absence of expensive ramps, then you are at the very least being retarded by insisting it’s wrong to allow lawsuits based on abortion, whatever you think it is that is short of murder.
Especially since the Summer of Love, one of the strictest taboos has been to not bring up facts or science to the party of "In this house, we believe in science".
I've long been sympathetic to the anti-police violence movement, well before BLM was an organization. I've marched for Trayvon Martin and half a dozen others. I think reform of the police, prisons, and criminal justice system are important and well-warranted. However, the simple fact is that there is no genocide of young black men. They are not being "hunted". It's not "open season". These tragic events are not rare enough, but they are rare. Police violence is also not something that only, or even extremely disproportionately something that effects black people.
Bringing up any of these facts was considered tantamount to "justifying white supremacy / genocide". These are really important conversations to have, but we need to be able to refer to the actual facts.
Edit: I encourage everyone to read the post that got Kriegman fired. Also, I'd be very curious how many people who viewed his post on the Hub clicked through to the links you provided. Was there a negative correlation between the number of links clicked through and negative engagement with his post? This seems like data that could be made available through discovery.
While I totally understand frustration at the "whitewashing" (if you'll pardon the ironic use of that term) of victims of police violence, even criminals deserve and are entitled to due process. I understand that you haven't suggested otherwise, but I do worry about the bipartisan tendency to focus on people's character rather than the rights to which they are entitled under the law, and under the principles of a Liberal (classically), democratic society.
I agree, but that doesn't address the "rights entitled under the law" that you mention of all the young mostly black people who have been murdered because of BLM and the Ferguson effect. Victims rights seem to die when they do, while perpetrators are lionized and given every excuse for their actions.
Oh, I absolutely believe that we should be having more of a conversation about the Ferguson effect. It's totally "incorrect" (and true) that police protect our rights as well as infringe upon them. Decreasing police presence empowers violent people and criminals which infringes upon the rights of other people to do all sorts of things.
It's ironic that the side which has traditionally taken the stance "Government intervention enhances liberty" (which I'm not unsympathetic to in all cases), totally fails to consider that argument in this particular case.
Are you referring to the "honest conversation about race"" that we're invited to have but which is immediately shut down when certain inconvenient facts are raised?
Yes I am indeed referring to the "honest conversation about race" that involves being spoken to like I am both a child and a nazi while being reminded that "white silence is violence" and also "your words are violence".
I appreciate your efforts and sincerity. My problem is that expressed passions (marches) about apparent wrongs has produced not solutions but worse wrongs, e.g. the Ferguson Effect. I believe little thought generally given to the fact that policing and incarceration are the terminal steps in a community’s efforts to protect its innocents. To demand, at that point, that the ills of the individual criminals or the ills of the society be solved by police or courts is, in my mind, unproductive.
As a society we have tried beatings, solitary confinement, hard labor, work training, psychiatry, drugs, half-way houses, and much else, and recidivism is rife. That leads me to believe that the problem resides within the criminal, and that humane incarceration, mass or otherwise, remains the sole decent method to protect the innocent.
As to solutions applicable prior to arrest and imprisonment, looking to schooling that doesn't result in the illiterate and inumerate seems to me to be a good starting point.
None of what I say should be taken as tolerance for misconduct by any individual in the law enforcement community. In fact, I believe that stricter standards should apply to those given those powers.
Obviously, the problem isn’t that they somehow “deserved” what happened to them because they weren’t saints, but the media is painting a false narrative by omission. I remember my shock to read a NYT article stating that “George Floyd didn’t die because of drugs”. I believe that, but I was like, wait a minute, the NYT never mentioned St. George was on drugs! With the MSM, you have to read in between the lines to get a glimmer of truth - exactly like the communist official propaganda.
Chauvin was convicted for cutting off Floyd's airflow. However there was no pettichiae and the hyloid bone was intact. Evidence of either are traditionally used to establish choking or strangulation- i.e. cutting off one's air flow.
Chauvin had to be convicted. He was the blood sacrifice. Had the jury found him not guilty, they as well as their community and others around the country would have been literally destroyed. And of course, BLM would have grifted enough more money to buy another 10 multi million dollar homes.
While I agree that Trayvon Martin and George Floyd were not the best of people, neither one of them deserved to die for what they were killed for, especially in case of Trayvon who was killed by a vigilante who later proved to be a bad person too.
So a guy that got killed while trying to kill another shouldn’t have been killed. Got it.
And st Floyd killed himself. That fentanyl and meth wasn’t shoved down his throat by someone else. Guy never learned since he ODed on the same combo in the previous months - more than once.
If you had, you'd know that it was Trayvon who did the attacking, and that Zimmerman shot in self-defense. I'm not saying that Zimmerman is a good person. But the facts are not what you suggest.
You might remember that Zimmerman was acquitted because the prosecutor insisted on charging him with murder, on political orders. If they would have tried him for manslaughter the verdict might have been different, but they had to tie the ideological line.
I used to post regularly about police misconduct on my Facebook page. It's an issue that affects people of all races and even people's pets (police regularly shoot dogs without justification). But my Leftist friends complained that I wasn't focusing exclusively on black victims of police. So I just stopped posting about it at all.
I recall seeing you mention this before. I've had similar experiences. The other thing that I noticed was that if I neglected to post about someone, I'd get piled on for some reason or another. There was a shooting half a mile from my house which got national attention. I saw the video. It was immediately clear that the victim had a knife and was lunging towards a cop. I didn't post about this because it seems...messy. Apparently I was incorrect. Stuff like that made me not want to engage at all anymore, so left all social media.
It's disheartening. I really wish people understood how many people are being cut out of these conversations. I also wish that people weren't so cavalier about cutting people out from the conversation.
I am not on social media but the large company that I work for donated $1,000,000 to BLM at the height of their violent protests while they were occurring just blocks away from our corporate offices. We do not have a corporate forum on which to post as Zac had with his Hub, but I know that, even if we did, I would be reticent to address the grievous injustice to the shareholders and policy holders. I feel certain it would be quickly scrubbed; however, I am bothered by my own reluctance to speak up should such a forum exist. Those who pay their high-priced premiums are the ones who actually made that donation - and that is simply wrong.
Hi Lisa, I just read a book that you might find it interesting. It is about who, if anyone, is looking out for shareholders, and how performative goodness of companies can make governments overlook their actual not-so-good activities - to employees and others. It's called Woke, Inc by Vivek Ramaswamy.
Thanks, Sharon, for reminding me of that book. I have been wanting to read it after listening to him in a few interviews and being very impressed by his thoughts.
My husband's company gave BLM a big donation too in 2020. I told him {as a joke, obvs} to ask the CFO to get their money back and give it to actual black victims of violent crime... or scholarships, whatever but just not WTF ever they are spending it on now. Jeez.
You make an interesting point. You know who has been totally silenced? Black women who have been abused by some of the men who later get shot by police. I'm sure their stories and feelings are complicated and nuanced, if they had any platform to tell them.
We even have an up and coming black politician in my town who had multiple allegations of sexual assault and intimidation. It was heartbreaking to see those women and girls get dog piled. Just wait, I say, the first women to report Cosby, Weinstein, etc got told to sit down and shut up too.
"neglected to post about someone" - reminds me of something I read in an HBR "management tip of the day" recently: "Sometimes your efforts to be inclusive and call out injustice will backfire, accidentally causing harm to others. Perhaps you use language that some find offensive or problematic, you neglect to name all of the groups that are suffering the injustice, or you make some other misstep you don’t recognize until someone brings it to your intention. What should you do?" Yes. God forbid you "neglect to name ALL of the groups..." (except of course you can only name the officially-sanctioned oppressed/victimized groups...)
>you neglect to name all of the groups that are suffering the injustice,
This reminds me of an HR mass-email that I recently learned about which cited "queer people" as being disproportionately impacted by abortion bans. I'm positive there's a template for "groups to pay attention to" that's copy and pasted into every "we care about this issue" statement.
I think focusing entirely on race with regard to police brutality is a smoke screen. If we acknowledge that this happens to people of all races, then we have to acknowledge that the root problem has more to do with creeping Totalitarianism than with race. Likewise, the defund movement ensures that nothing will change. Want to know what would help? Limiting qualified immunity and ending the drug war.
Yes! Completely agree. Asset forfeiture is a travesty. My husband was a criminal justice major in college, until a guest speaker came in to talk about asset forfeiture. That made him decide not to be a cop.
What boggles my mind most is that civil asset forfeiture is blatantly unConstitutional. It seizes property on mere suspicion of wrongdoing, and even if they are not ultimately charged with a crime, the victim of it has to *prove* their innocence in order to get their own property back.
You are totally on point. Also, more than 1 thing can be true at a time. There are some problematic cops, I've worked with them and they scared the hell out of me, but they are a small percent. They need to be dealt with appropriately. Likewise, the last time I looked, cops were the #4 or 5 cause of death to black men and other black men were #1 or 2. So there's work to be done by or in that community. My black friends have no problem with me saying that, my more liberal white friends, 2 years ago- forget it.
And anyone who tries to disarm a cop is begging for a Darwin Award. Comply, then complain later if necessary.
I think unconscious bias is inevitable when a disproportional amount of crime--particularly violent crime--is committed by a very recognizable demographic. When cops know that black men are more likely to attempt to assault or kill them, how can they not be instinctively more wary about that threat?
But we've seen the results of what happens when cops decide to simply not put themselves in that position to begin with--when they actively AVOID policing black neighborhoods, as happened in Baltimore, and as has happened in other cities since 2020: an increase in the number black victims harmed by other black people.
Instead of wanting to defund the police, black communities want a larger police presence. The people clambering to defund the police are limousine liberals, elitists who do not live in the black neighborhoods that are war zones.
At one time, I would have said that the best solution would be to have black cops policing black neighborhoods. But now that Leftists are calling black conservatives "White Supremacists," it's obvious that Leftist leaders are only interested in the extent to which the issue can be used to serve their own purposes.
You are correct. When I worked in an ultra wealthy area I got so sick of hearing "my taxes pay your salary" and I felt bad towards the community. I know of a few officers who have been badly hurt because the criminal was black and they hesitated to act for fear of repercussions. To your point below, my experience is black officers are sometimes harder on black criminals and feel ok to do 'real talk' within the community. I have a far left friend who insists they are just brainwashed into being self hating. I pointed out it's a lot of "white privilege" to assume you know why a black person you haven't met does something. It's just not something we can talk about.
I find it ironic that the Left *promotes* being self-hating if you're white, but assumes that all non-whites who don't agree with them are "self-hating." Seems more like "self-hating" means "doesn't agree with the Leftist agenda."
You're right, we are not allowed to talk about it openly. If the wrong person hears, Cancellation will ensue.
I agree. I think black people are being ginned up to hate cops and confrontations are inevitable. Who benefits from this? The people who maintain their political power by wearing scarves and kneeling in the halls of Congress. The people in the DE& I offices. The MSM. . . .
To your last point, I kinda lost Kriegman when he deduced that whites are 70% more likely to be shot if they are armed. I don't really know where he pulled that from. Where he pulled his primary statistical conclusions for this article were not readily apparent. That being said, I already have come to a similar conclusion as him. This was the article that primarily did it for me: https://www.city-journal.org/reflections-on-race-riots-and-police?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Organic_Social
How are we supposed to learn from each other and improve if we can't discuss data? All of our conclusions don't need to be the same, but if we all work together really seeking a truth answer, I believe we can find better outcomes. You are brave. Jordan Peterson is often asked why he's so brave at speaking out, even when it's unpopular. He then says it's because the alternative is so much worse if you really think about it. We can't be silent. Clearly you care.
They are cowardly and feckless and have allowed this moral manic to roll along unimpeded.
There need to start being reputational costs for those at the apex of the corporations.
The midwit HR and DEI hysterics will do what they do, but it is leadership is responsible for imposing order and they have totally abrogated their responsibility.
Not only are they cowardly and feckless but they've funneled millions to BLM - apparently so BLM leaders can remediate housing "discrimination" by buying mansions in white neighborhoods. So much for "shareholder democracy."
C-Suite leadership is generally in their late 50s/early 60s, and they don't want to rock the boat in the last few years before their pension options vest. They just want to pump the stock price as high as they can to maximize their payout before they ride off into the sunset.
Plus, companies want to be able to say they're doing something socially responsible, and hanging a few BLM signs around the office is much cheaper than increasing everyone's benefits, or sourcing goods in democratic countries instead of 3rd world sweatshops.
So, the C-Suite has misaligned incentives, which the DEI midwits are taking full advantage of. On the bright side, Disney getting publicly spanked by Republicans might recalibrate the risk/reward calculus within the C-Suite, when it comes to whether or not letting the DEI team effectively run the company is such a good idea after all.
That's the thing; they won't really suffer, because by the time the chickens come home to roost, they're retired with a golden pension. Until then, they're just weathervanes following whichever way the wind is blowing strongest.
I'm not sure if that's cowardice, selfishness, laziness, or some combination thereof.
You were very badly treated and I hope you are reinstated and are able to pursue a whopping lawsuit for damages.
Let's be clear, your article was parallel to in late 1930s Germany, printing an article in the Volkischer Beobachter (the Nazi Party's national newspaper) using data and historical analysis to argue that the Nazi animus toward Jews was misplaced and not supported by facts or logic. An act of courage, truly "speaking truth to power," but bound to produce a crushing response.
And I absolutely mean that comparison with Nazi Germany to be as inflammatory as it sounds.
Um, it's actually the opposite. It's the Leftists who are constantly claiming that whites are privileged who don't believe Jews have a right to their country.
Comparing woke cancel culture racism to Nazi Germany racism. It is inflammatory and an exaggeration at this time, but extend the trend of the last 10 years out another 5 years and it starts to look like Germany ca. 1934. Some ethnicities effectively barred from some jobs and professions, book burnings to purify the culture, etc.
Dont just complain to the government bureaucracy which will no doubt blow you off after taking years to “investigate”. Hire a lawyer and sue under the federal civil rights act. Sue the company and every person individually in HR. If people are personally held accountable, they might change their behavior.
Thirty years ago, when I came to the US, one the very first things that I had to learn about adapting to American corporate environments was to leave all politics at the door. I had worked in a communist country where any deviation from the ideological line imposed every day in the work place (and everywhere else) could cost you much more than your job, so I was reluctant to temporarily relinquish my newly acquired right to argue about politics for eight hours a day.
After George Floyd’s death, my American corporate workplace became much worse than my communist former job. Back then, we had the company management and the Communist Party local secretary enforcing the rules, and secret police informants snooping on us, but nobody really believed the ideology and you could always crack jokes among friends.
Today in America it’s not just the corporate management that would fire you instantly if you disagree with the new American ruling ideology; you also have to deal with the army of zombies that you used to think of as your colleagues, just waiting to tear you apart and eat you alive.
Dictatorship was bad, but the woke zombie apocalypse is much worse.
So much worse. It's part of the reason I don't participate in social media and have pretty much disappeared from the community landscape. I bet I'm not the only new ghost in this era.
Agreed, I had to leave social media, during covid couldn't deal with the virtual signaling, we had to stay at home, but ok to leave to protest for BLM. One former co-worker blocked me for something that I said about Latin American politics ( I am from there BTW), open conversations only with a few people (just like we had during the military dictatorship)
Thanks for posting here. I completely buy the causal link going straight from the false accusation of racially-motivated police killings to tens of thousands of excess black murder victims. It's beyond tragic, and there's no way that there shouldn't be some kind of accountability for it.
He promoted his views on an internal bulletin board, running afoul of an odious ideology that had infected the workplace. Then, after a prolonged fight against censorship, he was summarily fired.
This kind of thing is happening all over the country; a youth culture of intolerance and reverse racism has taken over campuses and corporate boardrooms to such an extent that it can hardly be said that we have freedom of speech.
"Speech" has always been a fraught thing in the workplace, however. These louts with their "tolerance for me, not for thee" are the ones who should be fired. Sadly, in the real world, it's the one who squawks the loudest who gets canned, while the mob just snickers and continues playing their games with people's lives.
I know it's easier to say than to do, but my advice would be to sue Thomson Reuters for several million dollars of lost potential income, defamation, and probably a few other things your lawyers can think up. We need to make it so expensive to do this to people that corporations back down. To just go away quietly, shaking in impotent rage, is to give them victory.
This was beautifully written Zac, thanks for sharing. I hope that the individual sacrifices being made by people with a conscience will eventually coalesce into a counterwave of change against the disturbing degradations our institutions are undergoing.
Zac, most of us like to think that we would have sided with the Resistance in Nazi-controlled countries, would have run stations on the Underground Railroad if we lived in the U.S. in the 1800s, and would have refused to cooperate with the KGB in ratting out our neighbors. You and Cynthia are among the few people who can honestly believe that you would have been on the right side. History shows that few people actually do the right thing when push comes to shove. Congratulations on being able to look at yourselves in the mirror.
One of our grandsons just turned down a scholarship to a prestigious American university. In explaining why, among other things, he wrote: “…colleges are no longer the beacon of science and rationality that they once were. Physical diversity is championed by colleges while diversity of thought is not even a consideration, often vilified. Truth can only come through dialogue. Discussion involves disagreement. No truth can come from an institution where those in it are scared to speak their mind if their political view is not "correct". What once were the centers of thought of the western world are now egotistical echo chambers of the delusional.”
His words are true not only for universities, but for news organizations, much of government and many businesses. While many virtue-pat themselves on the back, they are responsible for poverty, mental health problems and, as you write, even the death of those they purport to care about.
You and your wife will never know whose backbone your actions encouraged to do the right thing themselves . I hope you find organizations (that do exist) to help you sue; sadly, that is the way to get attention. Drop after drop, as more and more people speak up and hazard the consequences, we can cut away this rot in our society. God bless.
Susan, How refreshing to hear of young people with such personal integrity! With grandchildren of my own, I am always thankful to hear of those who have the moral character to stand against the "popular perspectives" in pursuit of Truth and Integrity and to be examples for those young people who will soon follow them.
It's so insane to me that people buy into this nonsense without researching on their own. I've known BLM numbers were a lie from the very beginning. However, I have also looked up the average IQ quotient of the citizenry, and I am not surprised that people just believe what they hear that day. It's kind of terrifying. Also, I hope you win and BIG.
Thank you for doing the right thing. You are right about the increase in killing of minority Americans; it is unconscionable that we are looking the other way. All Americans are entitled to equal protection and this breaks my heart. You are a hero for taking a stand and doing the right thing. God bless you.
Maybe Bari and associates need a Statistics prof at their fledgling school. It sounds as though you have the knowledge, courage, and honesty to qualify. At any rate, another day, another division; you have better things to do than babysitting a clownshow.
I analyzed and debunked the claims about police killings of blacks (and about how racist Americans are) made by Isabel Wilkeson in her blockbuster book "Caste." My findings were courageously and thoughtfully published by Free Black Thought on their substack:
Praying you land on your feet, with a big smile on your face, in a new career opportunity where intelligence is valued and bravery is rewarded.
P.S. Your wife sounds like a keeper!
She probably is a keeper. One thing I think everyone misses is that the biggest disparity is in the REPORTING on police shootings. Yes, some races are a bigger portion of shootings by police than they are of the national population. But 40%-50% of police shootings are of white people and ~0% of those are widely reported on, which is an even bigger disparity. And it has a perverse effect to show to minority citizens people that look like them being shot and hiding the fact that the majority race gets shot regularly - it has the effect of making them feel particularly at risk, which terrorizes them. And I empathize with their reaction to that, I can see how it would be freaky and scary, and make you walk around on edge. We owe it to those people to show the correct proportions of skin colors relative to how often they get shot - that balance of data - so they can be outraged and scared in a fair measure, and not one that causes them undue suffering.
Who has even heard of Edward Bronstein of Pasadena? It was a horrible, horrible situation that happened to him and there was virtually zero reporting. Show people his reality, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P31slglqZ1E Warning, it's an awful thing to watch, a horror story. But stories like his and Tony Timpa's provide balance to the horror story, so some people can sleep at night rather than feel hunted.
I mean black women in America walk around legitimately scared of being shot by police - and I say legitimately both in the sense that they are actually, truly scared, and that their fear is legitimate because of what they are shown by the media.
But black women are shot by police at 1/8 the rate per capita that white men are. They can certainly fear for the men in their families and those they know, but they have much less reason to fear the police might shoot them than many white men have.
I couldn't help but notice that the black woman who was interviewing the "trans-Korean" man recently, and who was outraged at his trans-racial thinking was a good example. She felt that with him being white at birth he couldn't understand her oppression and emphsized to him that "how I interact with police... could result in me dying". I was stunned and felt for her, because not only is she a black woman, she was referring to her life in the UK - where approximately six men and approximately zero women are killed by police per year.
Google Sarah Everard
That’s absolutely correct and the shitty thing is that the media has to know how their misleading/false reporting ends up impacting the country and don’t care. Part of it is undoubtedly ratings/money based but much of it is ideologically based. The media should do some hard self examination at this point and know that their words have driven a movement that is leading to many more dead folks, especially ‘black and brown’ lives. I’m thankful that there are growing numbers of black and brown people who are moving away from the white liberal worldview. Math isn’t racist for example, it’s incredibly racist to say that they can’t learn math in ways that other people are capable of. Hidden Figures anyone? And those black women did that in a truly racist sad era of our country’s history.
The problem is that, on a national level, journalists aren't going out and looking for these stories. The stories come to them because they are the ones which go viral on social media. And they haven't yet caught on to the reality that what they're reporting on is a technology-driven social media phenomenon rather than an actual surge in racist police activity.
You are mostly right... I do think it existed before social media tho. Journalists aren't doing the big picture story like you say, but I also think they are happy to get the eyeballs from the most salacious interpretation. If they present the counter narrative effectively, they don't have as big a story each time.
facts are meaningless made up white suppression . bwahaha
Please God and don’t fight with Cynthia over this it’s not worth it in life all you have his your wife and your family🇺🇸🇺🇸
Mr. Kriegman uses Roland Fryer's study as an example of lethal force across racial groups; I question his integrity because Fryer's study was incorrect!
“Roland Fryer is wrong: There is racial bias in shootings by police”
"Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States."
https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-police
I addressed the criticisms of Fryer's study in detail in my original post to Thomson Reuters internal message forums. You can find a copy here: https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods.
In short, given that Fryer’s study upended unwarranted assumptions held by many people about the biased application of lethal force, it’s not surprising that the study precipitated a torrent of criticism. Much of that criticism seems to be motivated, at least in part, by the political and social agendas of the critics.
That said, there are important limitations that Fryer himself notes in his original study.
The study remains, to this day, the gold standard for police bias. It was, and is, a very strong study.
Any "study" from Harvard today should be treated with the utmost suspicion of being a left-wing propaganda piece. Fryer has much more credibility.
All academic publications warrant some skepticism. As an MD, I see woke politics invading the nation's top medical journals. Yet each report. each study, should be judged on its merits and in context. As tenured Harvard faculty, anything Fryer publishes is "from Harvard". We have a sad state of affairs and thank goodness for people like Kriegman and Fryer. Yet we who believe them should remain open to new information, even new arguments
When you are logged in at home attempting to emotionally terrorize Black Americans with horseshit propaganda about how the cops will kill them, do you wear an actual Klan robe or do you just wear like shorts and a t-shirt?
You are citing somebody’s blog against a study that was peer reviewed and published in a formal scientific journal (???). Btw Roland Fryer was also a Harvard professor.
Well let's put it this way.
Always grade down the credibility of any study, peer reviewed or not, that supports the ideological/political bias of that institution... either because it is likely known propaganda, or otherwise the study authors and the peers that reviewed it are afflicted with blind political confirmation bias.
Freyer reported that he undertook the study with the expectation that it would confirm his bias, and yet it did the opposite. Those are always the more difficult outcomes and thus increase the credibility of the research as the study author would need a more rigorous set of arguments required to change his bias.
A tenured Harvard Professor
By the way "peer review" is no longer a credible standard. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/11/29/13770988/peer-review-bias-authors
I HOPE that's a joke because Vox is NEVER a credible standard.
It is if the article linked is credible.
You people seem to think the provenance of an article, or the 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑠 of the author, determine its truth-value. Your deference to 𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑚 𝑎𝑑 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑚 indicates you have little faith in your own ability to understand the arguments being made.
You criticism is rejected. Peer review has increasingly been shown to be an inadequate quality control for research papers and has contributed (or at least not slowed) to the reproducibility crisis. Vox can get a thing right. It's happened to Daily Beast, and even Buzzfeed!
Neither is VOX.
Yeah I know he is or was.
The blog post was a well written article and it added to the discussion imo. I am no expert at statistics so I’m not going to be in a position to settle anything.
I know in my heart there is racial bias in policing. addressing that means properly understanding it. I googled the name of that article and there’s a heck of a lot of discussion and papers on the subject.
"You know in your heart"? LOL. Now there is a scientific datapoint!
I have a friend who is a social justice activist with two adopted black children (he is Jewish and white) from a family member that lost custody because of meth addiction. He claims our white college town is racist with racist cops. I asked him to give me examples. He always tried to deflect from that... so I kept on him at one point.
He said "It is the way that people look at me and my kids when I am out walking with them."
Yeah, he knows in his heart that people are racist. Talk about confirmation bias!
Okay, poor choice of words on my part. I have seen it play out live in person. I’m not saying its endemic, I’m not saying its systemic, I’m saying that it exists and that it is nontrivial. And yes this is anecdotal.
Let me quote from the blog post "Properly interpreted, the actual result from Fryer’s analysis is that the racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shootings. This is an unsurprising finding, and proves neither a lack of bias nor a lack of systematic discrimination.". In real life, victimization surveys have not shown any bias in the criminal justice system.
The FBI uniform victimization surveys confirm the results of the compilation of police records. Their figures are uncannily close. This shows that neither one of them is likely to be biased or influenced by "systemic racism", as is breezily claimed by many writers. That is also shown by the fact that most of the crime reports and victimization reports are blacks reporting about black criminals and whites reporting about white criminals.
Age, are you addressing me?
You really need to change your handle to “Just Wrong” I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a comment from you that is factually correct.
I was thinking “Just Mao”
And yet all you can do is personal insults and nothing posted that backs you claim.
Next time get off your mom's couch, put down the game controller and write something meaningful. If you are capable. Which I am guessing you are not.
I’ve actually crunched the FBI data and came to the same conclusion as the author in a different way. If you simply look at the number of arrests for violent crimes and figure the likelihood that there may be some sort of violent confrontation involved. When adjusted for that the incidents of shootings were about the same proportion for blacks and whites. The group that was being shot disproportionately were of Hawaiian/Pacific Islander descent. By my calculations they should be protesting.
I’d hazard I did a lot more research on this topic than you did and I did do it on MY couch. Haven’t lived at home since I was 18 which was many decades ago and probably haven’t played a video game in that time either.
I’ve had plenty of experience with Just Me on this site and they are pretty much full of crap every time they post. You might look into who you’re defending as you seem new here.
You seem like a typical leftist, project, project, project.
I also closely examined the Federal crime stats, Gregg, and came to the same conclusion you did.
When I first started sucking spread sheets and turgid reports off the Federal web sites I was positive cops were murdering more black people than white people.
Confirmation bias can be a world wide bitch.
I admire anyone who has the guts to research and come to the opposite conclusion they started with. You are so right about confirmation bias. I know I’m regularly guilty of it.
I think if you consume media today it’s about 90% confirmation bias and 10% facts.
I looked at the same numbers as you did back in the Summer of Floyd and came to the same results. The federal numbers aren’t perfect, but they are better than any other numbers we have.
We both seem to have each other 180 degrees off. I am so not left. I think you might be tracking responses and comments inaccurately.
Oops... my bad... you were responding to Just Me. Sorry.
I have read and crunched the data so many times and starting so long ago that I refuse to do it again because I know what I know. What I know is that the systemic racism claim of the law enforcement is a political construct of the left that has no real basis in actual fact. When properly controlled for all the material criteria, at worst we can claim that police actions are equal between blacks and whites.
And I keep asking that question... if cops are generally so racist, why are not Asians showing up in the data as being unfairly targeted and shot?
Yep. Pretty easy to debunk BLM’s entire argument. I find “Just Me” just annoying for the reason stated. But there’s some history of comments on articles here that you may not have seen.
Thank you. Great reply
Just Me is a troll. Usually everyone makes a point of ignoring him altogether, since Substack does not have a mute feature. I'm disappointed to see so many people getting sucked in today. Engaging with him in any way is completely pointless.
I use Just Me as a straw man for leftist argument. Fits the bill perfectly. Points out the absurd ways they try to defend their many causes.
Gregg, I quote and cite Harvard, and you think Harvard is wrong?
Harvard thinks the ocean is going to be in my living room ten years ago.
OMG Kevin!!! You mean Harvard stole the secret to time travel from MIT 😮
I am flabbergasted.
More coffee! I need a Kleenex. 😂😂😂
Stop it. I hate coffee in my nose! 🤣
Wake me up when you have something intelligent to say!
wake up and post something that makes sense . is your computer or phone interpreting your snores and typing these responses
Wait, you think the fact that it comes from Harvard is impressive? It’s become a cesspool of wokespeech. Plus you quoted a blog. No peer review, nothing. Literally anyone can write a blog and put in it any lie/misrepresentation they want.
So if this blogger wants to actually publish his “study” let him do it. Meanwhile stop wasting our time with your bs like you normally do.
Wake me up when you have something intelligent to say!
Damn, you're a broken record dude. Let's make it simple: you argue that a blog post, itself citing nothing concrete, invalidates a peer-reviewed study authored by an academic. That is a profoundly weak argument regardless of what one thinks about the current nature of peer review.
If that means you are going to stop commenting (since I guess you’ll be sleeping) then why would I wake you up? I only want to hear from people making intelligent comments.
Harvard is more wrong than you can fucking imagine.
Wake me up when you have something intelligent to say!
That you can't see the intelligence in that statement, well that reflects on you, dear.
Harvard is often wrong, and seriously woke.
Harvard has egregiously mistreated Roland Fryer, who is considered to be the greatest economist of his generation. They have targeted him for the same reasons Zac Kriegman is being targeted. Fryer is brilliant. His studies on crime and education are top notch.
What is flawed is the attached article you provided: it claims there is systemic racism in policing bc they treat blacks differently, specifically they go after them more aggressively than whites. As an example, it states that blacks are pulled over disproportionately to whites. The reason for this is due to blacks behavior in cars (no tags, no license, speeding, taillight out etc.....) to which the police are REACTING. It is black peoples behavior that drives (no pun intended) the police encounters, not the other way around.
Roland fryer and Zac Kriegman are a gift to this nation and they are being unjustly attacked and punished. It is tragic.
slgeorge, I know this may come as a surprise to you, but your opinion isn’t important to me! Just as much as I’m sure, my opinion is important to you!
can i pay you to leave ?
?
According to FBI statistics 51% of all murders are committed by blacks. About 12% of the population is made up by blacks and the vast majority of murders are committed by male blacks or 6% of the population. Is it any wonder that there is higher per capita of black shot by cops?
It is almost too easy to debunk the BLM myth. I think the much more interesting question is why blacks are disproportionately involved in crime as you see in the statistics. I think there are societal ills including but not limited to racism that are causing that. Wouldn’t the more fruitful conversation start there? You could solve the supposed racist cop problem and save 18 people vs 10,000 being shot by non cops. Where would be the more fruitful place to focus?
In so many topics today the facts get lost in the narrative. The narrative gets debunked by people smart enough to figure it out. Yet the leftists love to cling to the narrative rather than have an honest conversation about what is really causing the issue. Just lots of emotional sound bites.
"I think there are societal ills including but not limited to racism that are causing that. Wouldn’t the more fruitful conversation start there? You could solve the supposed racist cop problem and save 18 people vs 10,000 being shot by non cops. Where would be the more fruitful place to focus?"
Absolutely yes, Gregg. The same problem exists with people who blame guns for murder and suicide because the majority of each are carried out with a gun instead of a tire iron or Drano. Guns may be the tool they chose, but it's not WHY they decided to kill themselves or others.
Addressing why people choose to shoot each other, and why such a disproportionate number of them are black (murder) or white (suicide), would save far more lives than all the "ban the gunz!!!" nonsense that passes for intelligent thought.
Same with what you and others found about shootings by police: honest numbers brings honest results, but people don't like those results. Too bad for them, we're going to tell them anyway.
I too hate the “ban the guns” talk. Bumper sticker slogans like that solve nothing.
Lonesome, you’re whataboutism is not relevant!
With your head in the sand, please inhale deeply!
Instead of a platitude, how about a point-by-point rebuttal of my post?
Lonesome, I’ll assume your statistics are correct. Now show me statistically why cops shoot more Blacks!
I don't mean to insult you but I question your analytical skills. Do the math. If 6% of the population is committing 51% of the murders, don't you think that 6% is going to have a higher profile in the criminal world and therefore open to being shot?
You exhibit the very ideological bias that is responsible for a good deal of the problem we find ourselves in. First, Mr Kriegman cites several sources and data sets to support his conclusions, not just Fryer's. Second, according to Glenn Loury, Fryer was incredulous of the results- enough so that he repeated the study-
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-roland-fryer?s=r .
I do not have the time or expertise to review academic reports or large data sets to adjudicate the disagreement between Fryer and critics. But I find the variety of sources provided by Mr. Kriegman, and the Loury article, compelling. Many espouse the same conclusions, e.g. Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter and Loury. I have not seen a data driven compelling argument that refutes them.
BLM the organization has brought additional controversy on itself, purchasing a $6M home in Ca; and supporting the disruption of "prescribed nuclear family structure requirement". Black lives matter- absolutely. BLM is harmful to pursuit of actual social justice.
Excellent commentary Charles Carter
Thanks for the reference. I looked it over, though (it's very short and not particularly technical), and didn't find it very sensible. The author shows a definite bias in lines like "One could point out that the drug laws police enforce were passed with racially discriminatory intent..." if only because he doesn't feel the need to substantiate them.
Michael, technically they say Fryer was using the wrong model, thereby invalidating his results!
“Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings. The theory that is supposed to be informing Fryer's choice of methods is therefore not applicable to this case. He seems somewhat aware of this issue. In his interview with the New York Times, he attributes his ‘surprising’ finding to an issue of “costs, legal and psychological” that happen following a shooting. In what is perhaps a case of cognitive dissonance, he seems to not have reflected on whether the question of cost renders his choice of methods invalid.”
He wasn't using the wrong model. I discuss the criticisms of Fryer in more in my original post (the one that led to my termination): https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods.
It's worth noting that his study went through a drastically more rigorous review process than the typical peer review for a journal because he anticipated how much criticism he would encounter. Many of the top researchers in the field reviewed it before it was even published.
Of course, it's entirely predictable that people will make bogus criticisms of a study that upends their unwarranted assumptions.
Don't be fooled by those criticisms. You must read his study and their criticisms carefully to figure out which is right. I've done that for myself and I recommend you do it too.
Mr. Kriegman, your article is framed around Black Lives Matter. It is dependent upon a singular report: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, which was not peer-reviewed. If Mr. Fryer's conclusions are incorrect, your article falls apart. You’re conflating the killing of armed black people with unarmed black people killed by the police; the killing of unarmed black people begot BLM. You spend more time denigrating BLM than the organization that fired you.
Here are some criticisms of Mr. Fryer's paper:
This is not the only misleading study cited as evidence against racially biased policing. Another prominent paper examines recorded detainments — arrests and stops — comparing force rates against racial groups of stopped civilians, adjusting for circumstances. It reported some racial bias in sub-lethal force, but no bias in lethal force. This study, too, suffers from an important limitation, albeit a more subtle one than that in the PNAS paper. By analyzing police detainments alone, this study commits what statisticians term “post-treatment selection.” Put differently, it fails to account for racial bias in detainment, potentially severely understating discrimination in the use of force, since force is often used in detainments that would never have occurred had civilians been white. A new study addressing this source of error shows this approach can mask substantial amounts of discriminatory police violence, potentially leading to underestimates even when analysts seek only to quantify discrimination occurring after the detainment decision.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/science-blogger/claims-that-policing-not-racially-biased-rest-on-flawed-science/
“Simpson’s Paradox is a statistical phenomenon where an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations. For instance, two variables may be positively associated in a population, but be independent or even negatively associated in all subpopulations.”
https://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/ecology/pdfs/Ross_et_al_2018_resolution.pdf
“The Lancet: More than half of police killings in USA are unreported and Black Americans are most likely to experience fatal police violence”
https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/lancet-more-half-police-killings-usa-are-unreported-and-black-americans-are-most-likely
In conclusion, there is a profusion of statistical studies showing that black people are treated differently; you have only one study that indicates otherwise. Therefore, it is only reasonable to surmise that Mr. Fryer was incorrect, and your conclusion is erroneous!
I realize that "Just me" is a troll, and not interested in a serious conversation, but for anyone who is interested in understanding the problems with the arguments raised above, I invite you to read my original post to Thomson Reuters internal collaboration forum (the one which led to my termination) where I address all these arguments and more. https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods
You say in your linked post that there have been no properly controlled studies with contrary findings. Does that still hold true?
It seems a moderate amount of criticism postulates counterintuitive effects of police bias. I recognized Uri Simonsohn's name. He speculates that police are likely to stop low-risk Blacks more often, diminishing the apparent rate of shootings. Seems a bit of a stretch and something hard to prove or disprove. He also criticizes Fryer's data as noisy. I'm no statistician and he's one of those that identified p-hacking, so I'd be loathe to doubt him. Thoughts?
As far as I am aware, there have still been no properly controlled studies with contrary findings regarding police bias.
Also to this point of yours: "He speculates that police are likely to stop low-risk Blacks more often, diminishing the apparent rate of shootings."
I actually address this in my original post to Thomson Reuters' internal forums (which got me fired): https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods
Below is my discussion of this question from that post.
-------------------------------------------
Fryer himself has discussed this limitation in his original paper and subsequently:
“I totally agree that deciding who to stop in a police stop is highly problematic and there certainly may be racial bias in that decision. So let’s think about the officer-involved shootings in which there’s a robbery in progress or a violent crime. Those are less likely to be plagued by selection bias in the decision of who to harass or stop. Analyzing only those cases yields similar results.”
In other words, if you are concerned that police bias in initiating encounters with suspects were driving Fryer’s finding that there wasn’t bias in police shootings, then you can look just at encounters where police exercised no judgement or discretion in their choice of whether to initiate an encounter. For example, if police are called to a location to respond to a violent crime or robbery that is in progress, then they do not have an opportunity to exercise discretion (and therefore bias) as to whether they engage a suspect at all. But, when you look at only those cases where police do not have an opportunity to introduce bias into the encounter rates, the findings do not change: the data still do not show bias in police shootings.
It’s also worth mentioning that even if police were introducing bias in the encounter rates by stopping more non-threatening black subjects, and thereby decreasing the proportion of encounters that are at high risk of leading to a shooting, you would expect Fryer’s econometric analysis to control for that, at least to the extent that the 290 variables that his team coded were capable of distinguishing between non-threatening subjects and threatening ones, and thus isolating the impact of race.
Here are some criticisms of Mr. Fryer's paper:
This is not the only misleading study cited as evidence against racially biased policing. Another prominent paper examines recorded detainments — arrests and stops — comparing force rates against racial groups of stopped civilians, adjusting for circumstances. It reported some racial bias in sub-lethal force, but no bias in lethal force. This study, too, suffers from an important limitation, albeit a more subtle one than that in the PNAS paper. By analyzing police detainments alone, this study commits what statisticians term “post-treatment selection.” Put differently, it fails to account for racial bias in detainment, potentially severely understating discrimination in the use of force, since force is often used in detainments that would never have occurred had civilians been white. A new study addressing this source of error shows this approach can mask substantial amounts of discriminatory police violence, potentially leading to underestimates even when analysts seek only to quantify discrimination occurring after the detainment decision.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/science-blogger/claims-that-policing-not-racially-biased-rest-on-flawed-science/
“Simpson’s Paradox is a statistical phenomenon where an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations. For instance, two variables may be positively associated in a population, but be independent or even negatively associated in all subpopulations.”
https://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/ecology/pdfs/Ross_et_al_2018_resolution.pdf
“The Lancet: More than half of police killings in USA are unreported and Black Americans are most likely to experience fatal police violence”
https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/lancet-more-half-police-killings-usa-are-unreported-and-black-americans-are-most-likely
They say that, and it may even be true, but one can't tell whether it's true from this reference. So your saying that Fryer is somehow known to be "incorrect" and that quoting him casts doubt on the integrity of the Kriegman is not supported.
It feels to me reading this ^, that there is some sense there.
I think there might be some residual of a time when a cop shooting a black person was not likely to stir the pot very much.
The cost benefit analysis was very different. So the question to me becomes how much of a residual really? I don’t know. My sense is not a whole lot, but I also don’t believe there’s none. Quantifying that is really important to devising the best ways of addressing it.
Tell me what’s the benefit of killing a black man in your cost-benefit analysis!
Well if I understand correctly, a lot of drug laws were passed in exactly that spirit in this country. I don’t know what it really does to the outcome of this debate but it’s not a ridiculous observation to make.
I didn't say it was ridiculous, or even that it was untrue. I said it showed a bias on the part of the author that he stated this without support. Even with support it's not clear how relevant it is to the argument. This is supposed to be academic research, not polemics.
Did you really use Harvard as a source? Harvard has, in the past decade, lost all credibility IMO.
Steven, you continue to bestow stupid opinions like this upon me; I think it is reasonable to conclude that you don’t have the intellectual ability to do otherwise! So please excuse me if I don’t always reply to you. From time to time, when I have nothing else to do, I will consider responding to your stupid opinions.
I note you don't express ANY of those methodological flaws.
HR got your tongue? Dare you sign your name?
Seriously? Do you want to detail the flaws in his study? What sources are you using to reach your conclusion since you state that “there is plenty of evidence.” Citations please!
Lhfry, are you addressing me? If so, where did I say there is plenty of evidence?
Thanks for this link.
It just gets more complicated…
B Civil, my pleasure; I wonder how many people took this article at face value?
You hit the nail on the head Penny. Circling the Harvard wagons. Integrity be damned!
Roland Fryer was railroaded out of his position. If he toed the leftist line there’d be protests at Harvard for firing him.
Penny, do people really reply to your rubbish?
Golfer, I see you popped your head out of the rabbit hole today; I hope your attempt at being witty makes you feel better.
Ad hominem again.
I see you are back trolling.
i see you pooped your head out of your a$$ today ,go run along your check is in the mailbox JM
ttertat being twitty jm
Wake me up when you have something intelligent to say!
If you know such a place, don't give away the secret. You might as well line up the refugee intellectuals who've been lucky enough to find their way there and shoot them as to make public the name and location of their sanctuary.
They will continue to say
“Oh please there are very few actual cases of cancellation. Bari just puts all of them on her Substack.”
and I will continue to remind everyone that this works the exact same way as my plan to end graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty because you really only have to kill a few guys before everyone else gets the message.
You’re right. There are few actual cases of cancellation, because people in “the land of the free” have very quickly learned to look over their shoulder and shut up. I’m one of them.
Almost everyone I know is Andy. Especially the young college age citizens.
This is true. My college freshman son admits that he writes what the professors want to read so he will get a good grade. Young conservatives are not vocal and not prone to protest like their liberal counterparts. This intolerance by the progressive side is creating a segregation that we have worked over that last decades to eliminate. The quiet conservatives or moderates despise the "obnoxious progressives" on campus, and they naturally segregate themselves.
Given the current environment, and apologies for my bluntness, we need more Zacs and fewer Andys. Of course, Andy could become a Zac. We all can.
You are absolutely right. I can’t believe that in the ‘80s, in a communist country, I was telling myself that I need to think of my family (parents, siblings) and shut up for their sake, and in the 2020s I have to tell myself the same thing (kids this time), and wait until I retire. The deep irony is that today there’s more freedom of speech in the former communist country I came from.
Isn't that amazing? I spent time in communist countries in the 70's and as you say the parallels are eerie and very troubling. Part of me is fascinated at a sociological level to watch this unraveling of our values, catalyzed by a very small minority (as is always the case), while part of me is deeply pained for my country and for what it means for the rest of the world if our freedoms continue to evaporate.
I vividly remember the day the Berlin wall fell in 1989. It took less than a generation to begin building a "wall" of our own. I blame the universities. What did Shakespeare say about lawyers?
Blame the HR departments and the leadership who don’t have spines.
Everybody hates lawyers til.they need one. Part of the chilling thing to me about this article is that Thomas Rueters controls a lot of legal information.
If you wait until you retire, then absolutely no one will listen. Except maybe Cynthia.
Same
Sea Sentry. In today's US society, it is dangerous to speak up. Everyone needs to make decisions based on their finances and family. I pray that those that can do stand up. But I completely understand and those that do not.
Are they Andy or just me?
Andy, I hope I'm sensing sarcasm here. It will be an uphill battle, but if veritas (truth) does not prevail, we are doomed as a society. Sadly, there will be casualties. James Damore was one of them. Mr. Kriegman was another. Both bright professionals. And to some extent, Chris Hedges was also a victim. As Keats wrote, ""Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
It’s a shame that we have to be like this but in this 21st century it’s seems as though MSM and SM have the edge here even if it’s to keep spinning the lies over and over again it doesn’t matter how many times you tell that the reporting or the numbers don’t add they continuously keep telling the same lie again and again until everybody believes it’s the truth you only had to see President Trump’s term in office to realize how deep the rot goes
It's as if the ghost of Goebbels has been adopted by much of the regressive crowd, Michele.
And Goebbels knew if he wanted to capture the German people he had to capture the airwaves he set up the best propaganda machine for its time if you note the similarities today it’s worse for us they have capture the airwaves thru Legacy media and SM and like the Nazis they are controlling us we are starting to hate each other this current administration hates conservatives voters maga voters etc. We have 21/2 years till 2024 I hope we can all last till then because a war against the people of the US will be a disaster it won’t come from outside it will come from inside the signs are there Dennis yesterday they subpoenaed 5 Republicans for 1/6 it’s already started they even captured our mobile conversation even that is not private anymore
There are even some parts of this story that back that up. For instance, it strikes me as naive that the author made genuine efforts to engage with HR and D&I and then escalated the issue to senior management rather than taking the multiple hints that he shouldn’t question the narrative. On the other hand, the author also knew ahead of time that he was taking a risk.
Probably the best example of this was the observation that “no one in Diversity and Inclusion condemned any of the public attacks on me”. The public attacks on the author are part and parcel of the entire purpose of D&I and most people already know this, which is why they take the hints and don’t actually get themselves fired.
He knew what he was doing and the risks, and the pressure against him, no doubt. But it used to be that the people who went into journalism were the types who dreamed of the chance to speak truth to power. Now they are the power and hate truth.
How far does that go, though? There were a lot of people in Nazi Germany who kept their mouths shut, too. And I'm sure some of them could live with themselves.
I have found myself almost unbearable to live with, all the shutting up I have done. I work at a pricey 4-year liberal arts college, but that might change soon.
I work in higher ed as well, so I feel you. I moved from a private liberal arts college on the west coast to a public institution in a Red State, and still it's a dance. Admittedly, I ask myself 'Is this my hill?' And I'm very careful how I say things that I know go against the orthodoxy.
Then you may need to find other institutions that promote diversity of thought, Scuba Cat.
Moving to other institutions doesn't necessarily solve the problem because all but a very small few are like this. And the few that are not singular bastions of progressive thought are liberal arts colleges (e.g., University of Austin), which means that unless you study liberal arts, they don't have programs in your field.
I do, however, admire your ability to look for such places.
I work in higher ed too. I wish there was a support group for folks in this industry who do not toe the progressive line. It's a stifling environment.
Sure, but if you got your shop smashed up on Kristallnacht, you should probably have a better strategy in mind than trying to report the crime to the Gestapo.
This is America not Nazi Germany!
Tell that to the business owners whose businesses were burnt down in the riots. The Democrat Mayor of Seattle turned downtown Seattle over to the Marxists. NAZI - National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Note the word Socialist in the definition.
tell that to Kenosha, WI.
Fair enough.
Or, Philippe, the author is a person for whom truth is more important than a mob spouting their evil thoughts.
I have in my long life found that cash is always trumped by integrity and truth.
Too many of us have forgotten that when we cheer the latest popular cause.
Every time there is a mass shooting like Sandy Hook or Columbine High School there is an outcry from the left to confiscate guns from law abiding citizens. In the majority of these shooting these victims are white and the nuts who shoot them are white. There is no doubt that these shootings are tragic and horrible.
However every week in the inner cities far more black people are murdered by black armed thugs than are these mass shootings. Yet I don’t hear outrage from the Democrats, who claim to be the party defending women and minorities,. To be fair you don’t hear it from the Republicans either. In fact the only thing you hear about these outrageous murders from either party is the sound of crickets chirping.
The point I am making is you never hear from the minority support party any outrage about the slaughter in black communities but you sure do hear it when there is a mass shooting in the white community.
Isn’t that one of the definitions of racism, outrage about white deaths but silent about black deaths?
Years ago after Sandy Hook Diane Feinstein called for the confiscation of all guns. Of course she meant confiscation of law abiding citizens guns. Not one person in the media or from the right asked Diane how she proposed to get the guns out of the hands of the gangs that have been terrorizing black communities for decades.
According to FBI statistics, in 2020 at least 9,713 blacks were murdered. In the past 30years tens of thousands of blacks were murdered in the inner city. Where is the outrage? Isn’t it racist to ignore these murders? Where is BLM, Antifa and the woke people when they are needed the most. More importantly, where are the Democrats who claim to be the party of the minorities? They control the House and the Senate. Why aren’t they screaming to stop these murders. Where is Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Oh, wait a minute! They make their livings off the misery of black people.
These are felons shooting other felons, by and large. Other than the collateral damage, I fail to see the downside
If the felons were only shooting other felons, I'd say let them have at it. But these felons don't have particularly good aim. Look at the number of innocent black children who are killed in Chicago every year as a result of felons shooting other felons.
My "if I were king" thought has always been a system where criminals are isolated in a society composed solely of criminals. If they want to proceed to kill each other, they are welcome to do so. But there would be no innocents around to suffer the consequences.
The collateral damage is heart breaking. These thugs also kill innocent men, women, children and babies. They are sociopaths.
No doubt a LOT of people think this, but there plenty of collateral victims that were not gangsters. For example, the recent gang shoot out in Sacramento did kill three gangsters, but also killed three innocent bystanders.
Indeed. And we could also reduce the illegal transit at the border by shooting a number of them and then leaving their bodies to rot in the sun with signs, in various languages of course, that indicates this is what awaits them if they come in.
At least Kevin attempts to make his point using his odd brand of humour (sometimes it works..)
You, Ms. Unwoke, on the other hand, sound serious.
Maybe Border Patrol work is for you - but even they might find you a bit too extreme.
The border patrol crack is BS. Border patrol, the national guard and local law enforcement risk their lives on a daily basis for those heeding Biden's call.
Just like they did for Trump. I suspect they liked working for Trump more. And they wouldn't let anyone die out there. Ever. The only BS is Unwoke's comment. Sorry, Lynne.
If the they you are referring to who worked for Trump is the border patrol, national guard and law enforcement the comparison is apples and oranges. The numbers coming over under Biden are swamping the BP, NG, and LE. That was not the case under the former president. Not to mention the drugs and humans being trafficked. And the BP, NG and LEs are risking their lives daily. They are cannon fodder to the current administration. As are we all.
My comment has nothing to do with how better Trump's border patrol was than the present iteration. It probably was. My comment was on the stupidity of Unwoke's remarks about leaving the bodies of migrants to rot in the sun as a message to others. Not even Trump's Border Patrol would let that happen.
You and Joey. So civil.
I know. Just like you're leaving bodies decomposing in
in the desert. Civil.
Works for me... "passive/aggressive deterrence".
Trolling? Maybe? Back under your rock.
I hate that argument even if there is no one else that would be canceled. That is like saying its ok to be a murderer but not a serial killer. Why does it matter how many are affected rather than if its right or wrong? This is just a way to side step the actual issue.
Took me a minute to digest the comment, love the analogy!!!
"you really only have to kill a few guys before everyone else gets the message."
I know how you suffer when I agree with you, and for that I'm truly sorry, but I find myself doing so again. Kill a thousand kulaks and the rest will run for the hills.
This is how Texas managed to close all its abortion clinics with its bounty-hunter law: the THREAT of financial ruin from civil suits made clinic owners shut down rather than risk bankruptcy. The threat was enough; not a single lawsuit was filed. Providers would have been found not guilty if it went through the system, but it's hard to celebrate when the lawyers took your house and pension in court and legal fees.
What a profoundly shitty way to run a country.
Sort of like Asset forfeiture laws, eh? Sure, you may eventually get your money/property back, but you have to prove yourself innocent, as opposed to government proving you guilty. Why do we Americans tolerate this? Because most people think it only happens to guilty people, so they don't care.
The citizen residents of Texas can change their abortion laws if they want to. Democracy = Majority of votes rules.
First, I don't believe in asset forfeiture laws. I think they're a taking without due process, which violates at least two part of the Constitution.
Second, if the citizen residents of Texas want to change their abortion laws, they need to do it Constitutionally. The bounty-hunter abortion ban is a screaming violation of the United States Constitution, and that SCOTUS refused to hear the case because "gee, it's not the state enforcing it, it's private citizens filing private lawsuits" is dereliction of its duty. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, the Texas ban is an extortion racket, plain and simple, and an unconstitutional taking.
I did not mean to imply that you supported asset forfeiture laws. My point was that they are another "shitty way to run a country".
As for Texas voters, they can vote to change politicians, or vote to change the law, including their constitution. I don't live in Texas (have visited countless times), but I suspect the politicians of Texas who enacted the abortion "extortion" laws believe they are supported by a majority of the voters.
We agree that it's a shitty way to run a country! Huzzah, sweet agreement.
I also agree that Texas enacted the abortion ban fair and square, based on a vote of the legislature and signature of the governor. They knew this law violated the U.S. Constitution, but gambled that SCOTUS, with its sympathy toward overturning Roe, would not interfere. They were correct, and the resulting extortion racket from fears of bounty-hunter bankruptcy closed the clinics without a single lawsuit filed.
Well-played politically, but a steaming pile Constitutionally, for which I blame not Texas, but the Supremes. We appoint them to ensure states follow the rules set out by the Constitution, and they failed miserably at holding Texas to account.
Whatever your position may be on Abortion, it's simply not in the constitution any more than net neutrality. The SCOTUS made it up out of whole cloth. And now they may say "nevermind". Scotus has reversed itself before and will again.
And congress and states pass laws all the time that they know damn well are not constitutional. Sometimes the court bails them out (Obama care mandate comes to mind).
And even if congress were to pass a national abortion law, it should be found unconstitutional. Doesn't mean it will. Commerce clause is already unrecognizable. Look at cannabis laws, for example.
In terms of the things that you can be sued out of business for, being sued for jamming scissors into a babies head is the least egregious example of ambulance-chasing litigiousness I can think of.
Given your general position on the government regulating businesses, and given the current level of totalizing government control over every single thing a business does, your assertion that *this* represents a profoundly shitty example is legitimately retarded.
Well, you're the expert on retarded, so I guess you would know best.
My "general position on the government regulating businesses" would appear to be lighter than yours, since you applaud Texas's decision to regulate clinics out of business and appear to applaud overturning Roe so states can dive into the business of bans and draconian regulations. Are you a regulating commie at heart?
I don’t applaud it I just think it’s retarded to say that allowing lawsuits against a business that is intentionally causing death is egregious overreach. Especially when you are one of the psychotic ding dongs who wants the government to tightly regulate and monitor mist.
Regulating murder is literally one of like four things the government should do.
"Tightly regulate mist"? WTF are you talking about?
And abortion ain't murder.
Should you be forced to accommodate people with disabilities as currently mandated by the government? You think so. Okay so even if abortion isn’t murder, it clearly is worse than the absence of a $70,000 ramp.
If you think it’s fine for the government to deputize lawsuits based on the absence of expensive ramps, then you are at the very least being retarded by insisting it’s wrong to allow lawsuits based on abortion, whatever you think it is that is short of murder.
Especially since the Summer of Love, one of the strictest taboos has been to not bring up facts or science to the party of "In this house, we believe in science".
I've long been sympathetic to the anti-police violence movement, well before BLM was an organization. I've marched for Trayvon Martin and half a dozen others. I think reform of the police, prisons, and criminal justice system are important and well-warranted. However, the simple fact is that there is no genocide of young black men. They are not being "hunted". It's not "open season". These tragic events are not rare enough, but they are rare. Police violence is also not something that only, or even extremely disproportionately something that effects black people.
Bringing up any of these facts was considered tantamount to "justifying white supremacy / genocide". These are really important conversations to have, but we need to be able to refer to the actual facts.
Edit: I encourage everyone to read the post that got Kriegman fired. Also, I'd be very curious how many people who viewed his post on the Hub clicked through to the links you provided. Was there a negative correlation between the number of links clicked through and negative engagement with his post? This seems like data that could be made available through discovery.
https://kriegman.substack.com/p/post-leading-to-termination-blm-falsehoods?s=r
Trayvon was a thug so thuggish his moms in Miami shipped him up to pop in Orlando. He was no saint.
The gentle giant of Ferguson was a criminal thug not an aspiring college student.
St Floyd was a criminal drug addict who had invaded a pregnant woman’s house and held a gun to her belly.
Seems all the saints in the leftist pantheon are criminals.
While I totally understand frustration at the "whitewashing" (if you'll pardon the ironic use of that term) of victims of police violence, even criminals deserve and are entitled to due process. I understand that you haven't suggested otherwise, but I do worry about the bipartisan tendency to focus on people's character rather than the rights to which they are entitled under the law, and under the principles of a Liberal (classically), democratic society.
I agree, but that doesn't address the "rights entitled under the law" that you mention of all the young mostly black people who have been murdered because of BLM and the Ferguson effect. Victims rights seem to die when they do, while perpetrators are lionized and given every excuse for their actions.
Oh, I absolutely believe that we should be having more of a conversation about the Ferguson effect. It's totally "incorrect" (and true) that police protect our rights as well as infringe upon them. Decreasing police presence empowers violent people and criminals which infringes upon the rights of other people to do all sorts of things.
It's ironic that the side which has traditionally taken the stance "Government intervention enhances liberty" (which I'm not unsympathetic to in all cases), totally fails to consider that argument in this particular case.
Are you referring to the "honest conversation about race"" that we're invited to have but which is immediately shut down when certain inconvenient facts are raised?
Yes I am indeed referring to the "honest conversation about race" that involves being spoken to like I am both a child and a nazi while being reminded that "white silence is violence" and also "your words are violence".
I appreciate your efforts and sincerity. My problem is that expressed passions (marches) about apparent wrongs has produced not solutions but worse wrongs, e.g. the Ferguson Effect. I believe little thought generally given to the fact that policing and incarceration are the terminal steps in a community’s efforts to protect its innocents. To demand, at that point, that the ills of the individual criminals or the ills of the society be solved by police or courts is, in my mind, unproductive.
As a society we have tried beatings, solitary confinement, hard labor, work training, psychiatry, drugs, half-way houses, and much else, and recidivism is rife. That leads me to believe that the problem resides within the criminal, and that humane incarceration, mass or otherwise, remains the sole decent method to protect the innocent.
As to solutions applicable prior to arrest and imprisonment, looking to schooling that doesn't result in the illiterate and inumerate seems to me to be a good starting point.
None of what I say should be taken as tolerance for misconduct by any individual in the law enforcement community. In fact, I believe that stricter standards should apply to those given those powers.
Obviously, the problem isn’t that they somehow “deserved” what happened to them because they weren’t saints, but the media is painting a false narrative by omission. I remember my shock to read a NYT article stating that “George Floyd didn’t die because of drugs”. I believe that, but I was like, wait a minute, the NYT never mentioned St. George was on drugs! With the MSM, you have to read in between the lines to get a glimmer of truth - exactly like the communist official propaganda.
Chauvin was convicted for cutting off Floyd's airflow. However there was no pettichiae and the hyloid bone was intact. Evidence of either are traditionally used to establish choking or strangulation- i.e. cutting off one's air flow.
Chauvin had to be convicted. He was the blood sacrifice. Had the jury found him not guilty, they as well as their community and others around the country would have been literally destroyed. And of course, BLM would have grifted enough more money to buy another 10 multi million dollar homes.
Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. What a radical idea.
It's certainly an idea that the Left has decided to reject.
ask any Title IX tribunal on a college campus
I see your point but Title IX is not criminal in nature.
Bob...could be the divide when you state "character rather than the rights". once that person gives respect to faulty character, rights lost.
While I agree that Trayvon Martin and George Floyd were not the best of people, neither one of them deserved to die for what they were killed for, especially in case of Trayvon who was killed by a vigilante who later proved to be a bad person too.
So a guy that got killed while trying to kill another shouldn’t have been killed. Got it.
And st Floyd killed himself. That fentanyl and meth wasn’t shoved down his throat by someone else. Guy never learned since he ODed on the same combo in the previous months - more than once.
I'm guessing that you didn't actually pay attention to the trial.
I did. Very close one.
If you had, you'd know that it was Trayvon who did the attacking, and that Zimmerman shot in self-defense. I'm not saying that Zimmerman is a good person. But the facts are not what you suggest.
And these "facts" are based on Zimmerman's words. Martin was dead at the time of the trial, there were only two of them at the moment.
The bottom line is that there is a big difference between glorifying Floyd and Martin and simply acknowledging that they were not justly killed.
You might remember that Zimmerman was acquitted because the prosecutor insisted on charging him with murder, on political orders. If they would have tried him for manslaughter the verdict might have been different, but they had to tie the ideological line.
facts have no place in fantasy land
Who else would sociopaths have in their Pantheon?
I mean.... Ares and Zeus were almost certainly sociopaths and are literally in the Pantheon.
There ya go...
I used to post regularly about police misconduct on my Facebook page. It's an issue that affects people of all races and even people's pets (police regularly shoot dogs without justification). But my Leftist friends complained that I wasn't focusing exclusively on black victims of police. So I just stopped posting about it at all.
I recall seeing you mention this before. I've had similar experiences. The other thing that I noticed was that if I neglected to post about someone, I'd get piled on for some reason or another. There was a shooting half a mile from my house which got national attention. I saw the video. It was immediately clear that the victim had a knife and was lunging towards a cop. I didn't post about this because it seems...messy. Apparently I was incorrect. Stuff like that made me not want to engage at all anymore, so left all social media.
It's disheartening. I really wish people understood how many people are being cut out of these conversations. I also wish that people weren't so cavalier about cutting people out from the conversation.
I am not on social media but the large company that I work for donated $1,000,000 to BLM at the height of their violent protests while they were occurring just blocks away from our corporate offices. We do not have a corporate forum on which to post as Zac had with his Hub, but I know that, even if we did, I would be reticent to address the grievous injustice to the shareholders and policy holders. I feel certain it would be quickly scrubbed; however, I am bothered by my own reluctance to speak up should such a forum exist. Those who pay their high-priced premiums are the ones who actually made that donation - and that is simply wrong.
Hi Lisa, I just read a book that you might find it interesting. It is about who, if anyone, is looking out for shareholders, and how performative goodness of companies can make governments overlook their actual not-so-good activities - to employees and others. It's called Woke, Inc by Vivek Ramaswamy.
Excellent book very worth while reading
It is a marvelous book. I hope they succeed with their new unWoke venture.
Thanks, Sharon, for reminding me of that book. I have been wanting to read it after listening to him in a few interviews and being very impressed by his thoughts.
Shareholders? pffft...what is important are the stakeholders
I know because Joe Biden said so
So did Bill Gates! Excellent point!
My husband's company gave BLM a big donation too in 2020. I told him {as a joke, obvs} to ask the CFO to get their money back and give it to actual black victims of violent crime... or scholarships, whatever but just not WTF ever they are spending it on now. Jeez.
You make an interesting point. You know who has been totally silenced? Black women who have been abused by some of the men who later get shot by police. I'm sure their stories and feelings are complicated and nuanced, if they had any platform to tell them.
We even have an up and coming black politician in my town who had multiple allegations of sexual assault and intimidation. It was heartbreaking to see those women and girls get dog piled. Just wait, I say, the first women to report Cosby, Weinstein, etc got told to sit down and shut up too.
"neglected to post about someone" - reminds me of something I read in an HBR "management tip of the day" recently: "Sometimes your efforts to be inclusive and call out injustice will backfire, accidentally causing harm to others. Perhaps you use language that some find offensive or problematic, you neglect to name all of the groups that are suffering the injustice, or you make some other misstep you don’t recognize until someone brings it to your intention. What should you do?" Yes. God forbid you "neglect to name ALL of the groups..." (except of course you can only name the officially-sanctioned oppressed/victimized groups...)
>you neglect to name all of the groups that are suffering the injustice,
This reminds me of an HR mass-email that I recently learned about which cited "queer people" as being disproportionately impacted by abortion bans. I'm positive there's a template for "groups to pay attention to" that's copy and pasted into every "we care about this issue" statement.
Wait, what? People who have sex that CANNOT result in pregnancy are disproportionately impacted by abortion bans? They don't even hear themselves....
I think focusing entirely on race with regard to police brutality is a smoke screen. If we acknowledge that this happens to people of all races, then we have to acknowledge that the root problem has more to do with creeping Totalitarianism than with race. Likewise, the defund movement ensures that nothing will change. Want to know what would help? Limiting qualified immunity and ending the drug war.
Also getting rid of asset forfeiture, which motivates law enforcement to "find" (i.e., plant) drugs.
Yes! Completely agree. Asset forfeiture is a travesty. My husband was a criminal justice major in college, until a guest speaker came in to talk about asset forfeiture. That made him decide not to be a cop.
What boggles my mind most is that civil asset forfeiture is blatantly unConstitutional. It seizes property on mere suspicion of wrongdoing, and even if they are not ultimately charged with a crime, the victim of it has to *prove* their innocence in order to get their own property back.
Some people never get it back, even if they are never charged. It's unconscionable.
Threaten bodily harm to one of your leftist friends and what's the first thing they'll say?
Call a cop!!!! Oh wait, they'll screech it in a high and frightened voice.
Which is just what they wanted.
You are totally on point. Also, more than 1 thing can be true at a time. There are some problematic cops, I've worked with them and they scared the hell out of me, but they are a small percent. They need to be dealt with appropriately. Likewise, the last time I looked, cops were the #4 or 5 cause of death to black men and other black men were #1 or 2. So there's work to be done by or in that community. My black friends have no problem with me saying that, my more liberal white friends, 2 years ago- forget it.
And anyone who tries to disarm a cop is begging for a Darwin Award. Comply, then complain later if necessary.
I think unconscious bias is inevitable when a disproportional amount of crime--particularly violent crime--is committed by a very recognizable demographic. When cops know that black men are more likely to attempt to assault or kill them, how can they not be instinctively more wary about that threat?
But we've seen the results of what happens when cops decide to simply not put themselves in that position to begin with--when they actively AVOID policing black neighborhoods, as happened in Baltimore, and as has happened in other cities since 2020: an increase in the number black victims harmed by other black people.
Instead of wanting to defund the police, black communities want a larger police presence. The people clambering to defund the police are limousine liberals, elitists who do not live in the black neighborhoods that are war zones.
At one time, I would have said that the best solution would be to have black cops policing black neighborhoods. But now that Leftists are calling black conservatives "White Supremacists," it's obvious that Leftist leaders are only interested in the extent to which the issue can be used to serve their own purposes.
You are correct. When I worked in an ultra wealthy area I got so sick of hearing "my taxes pay your salary" and I felt bad towards the community. I know of a few officers who have been badly hurt because the criminal was black and they hesitated to act for fear of repercussions. To your point below, my experience is black officers are sometimes harder on black criminals and feel ok to do 'real talk' within the community. I have a far left friend who insists they are just brainwashed into being self hating. I pointed out it's a lot of "white privilege" to assume you know why a black person you haven't met does something. It's just not something we can talk about.
I find it ironic that the Left *promotes* being self-hating if you're white, but assumes that all non-whites who don't agree with them are "self-hating." Seems more like "self-hating" means "doesn't agree with the Leftist agenda."
You're right, we are not allowed to talk about it openly. If the wrong person hears, Cancellation will ensue.
I agree. I think black people are being ginned up to hate cops and confrontations are inevitable. Who benefits from this? The people who maintain their political power by wearing scarves and kneeling in the halls of Congress. The people in the DE& I offices. The MSM. . . .
Trayvon wasn't killed by police.
Correct. He's still a part of that conversation though, and happens to be the first person that I marched for.
To your last point, I kinda lost Kriegman when he deduced that whites are 70% more likely to be shot if they are armed. I don't really know where he pulled that from. Where he pulled his primary statistical conclusions for this article were not readily apparent. That being said, I already have come to a similar conclusion as him. This was the article that primarily did it for me: https://www.city-journal.org/reflections-on-race-riots-and-police?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Organic_Social
How are we supposed to learn from each other and improve if we can't discuss data? All of our conclusions don't need to be the same, but if we all work together really seeking a truth answer, I believe we can find better outcomes. You are brave. Jordan Peterson is often asked why he's so brave at speaking out, even when it's unpopular. He then says it's because the alternative is so much worse if you really think about it. We can't be silent. Clearly you care.
Libby...good points
The problem is the C-suite leadership.
They are cowardly and feckless and have allowed this moral manic to roll along unimpeded.
There need to start being reputational costs for those at the apex of the corporations.
The midwit HR and DEI hysterics will do what they do, but it is leadership is responsible for imposing order and they have totally abrogated their responsibility.
Not only are they cowardly and feckless but they've funneled millions to BLM - apparently so BLM leaders can remediate housing "discrimination" by buying mansions in white neighborhoods. So much for "shareholder democracy."
C-Suite leadership is generally in their late 50s/early 60s, and they don't want to rock the boat in the last few years before their pension options vest. They just want to pump the stock price as high as they can to maximize their payout before they ride off into the sunset.
Plus, companies want to be able to say they're doing something socially responsible, and hanging a few BLM signs around the office is much cheaper than increasing everyone's benefits, or sourcing goods in democratic countries instead of 3rd world sweatshops.
So, the C-Suite has misaligned incentives, which the DEI midwits are taking full advantage of. On the bright side, Disney getting publicly spanked by Republicans might recalibrate the risk/reward calculus within the C-Suite, when it comes to whether or not letting the DEI team effectively run the company is such a good idea after all.
They and we all will suffer the consequences of their cowardice.
That's the thing; they won't really suffer, because by the time the chickens come home to roost, they're retired with a golden pension. Until then, they're just weathervanes following whichever way the wind is blowing strongest.
I'm not sure if that's cowardice, selfishness, laziness, or some combination thereof.
Evander with 5 goals in 5 games, but Oilers on the ropes. What gives?
Smith let in some softies. The zebras tried to take us out in game 6 but we powered through.
Well, you made it to round two. "Battle of Alberta" (or something like that).
Totally agree. The tone is set at the top.
You were very badly treated and I hope you are reinstated and are able to pursue a whopping lawsuit for damages.
Let's be clear, your article was parallel to in late 1930s Germany, printing an article in the Volkischer Beobachter (the Nazi Party's national newspaper) using data and historical analysis to argue that the Nazi animus toward Jews was misplaced and not supported by facts or logic. An act of courage, truly "speaking truth to power," but bound to produce a crushing response.
And I absolutely mean that comparison with Nazi Germany to be as inflammatory as it sounds.
In which way did you mean ‘inflammatory’? Antisemitically or just plain old riled up?
It's funny that both are true: the people shouting down "white priveledge" don't believe Jews have a right to their country either...
Um, it's actually the opposite. It's the Leftists who are constantly claiming that whites are privileged who don't believe Jews have a right to their country.
well.. it's because they believe vis a vis the palestinians, Jews are white.
Comparing woke cancel culture racism to Nazi Germany racism. It is inflammatory and an exaggeration at this time, but extend the trend of the last 10 years out another 5 years and it starts to look like Germany ca. 1934. Some ethnicities effectively barred from some jobs and professions, book burnings to purify the culture, etc.
If the progressives could machine-gun conservatives and get away with it, I am certain they would.
Dont just complain to the government bureaucracy which will no doubt blow you off after taking years to “investigate”. Hire a lawyer and sue under the federal civil rights act. Sue the company and every person individually in HR. If people are personally held accountable, they might change their behavior.
Thirty years ago, when I came to the US, one the very first things that I had to learn about adapting to American corporate environments was to leave all politics at the door. I had worked in a communist country where any deviation from the ideological line imposed every day in the work place (and everywhere else) could cost you much more than your job, so I was reluctant to temporarily relinquish my newly acquired right to argue about politics for eight hours a day.
After George Floyd’s death, my American corporate workplace became much worse than my communist former job. Back then, we had the company management and the Communist Party local secretary enforcing the rules, and secret police informants snooping on us, but nobody really believed the ideology and you could always crack jokes among friends.
Today in America it’s not just the corporate management that would fire you instantly if you disagree with the new American ruling ideology; you also have to deal with the army of zombies that you used to think of as your colleagues, just waiting to tear you apart and eat you alive.
Dictatorship was bad, but the woke zombie apocalypse is much worse.
So much worse. It's part of the reason I don't participate in social media and have pretty much disappeared from the community landscape. I bet I'm not the only new ghost in this era.
Agreed, I had to leave social media, during covid couldn't deal with the virtual signaling, we had to stay at home, but ok to leave to protest for BLM. One former co-worker blocked me for something that I said about Latin American politics ( I am from there BTW), open conversations only with a few people (just like we had during the military dictatorship)
Thanks for posting here. I completely buy the causal link going straight from the false accusation of racially-motivated police killings to tens of thousands of excess black murder victims. It's beyond tragic, and there's no way that there shouldn't be some kind of accountability for it.
He promoted his views on an internal bulletin board, running afoul of an odious ideology that had infected the workplace. Then, after a prolonged fight against censorship, he was summarily fired.
This kind of thing is happening all over the country; a youth culture of intolerance and reverse racism has taken over campuses and corporate boardrooms to such an extent that it can hardly be said that we have freedom of speech.
"Speech" has always been a fraught thing in the workplace, however. These louts with their "tolerance for me, not for thee" are the ones who should be fired. Sadly, in the real world, it's the one who squawks the loudest who gets canned, while the mob just snickers and continues playing their games with people's lives.
I know it's easier to say than to do, but my advice would be to sue Thomson Reuters for several million dollars of lost potential income, defamation, and probably a few other things your lawyers can think up. We need to make it so expensive to do this to people that corporations back down. To just go away quietly, shaking in impotent rage, is to give them victory.
Agree. Make it too expensive for them to keep doing this.
This was beautifully written Zac, thanks for sharing. I hope that the individual sacrifices being made by people with a conscience will eventually coalesce into a counterwave of change against the disturbing degradations our institutions are undergoing.
Zac, most of us like to think that we would have sided with the Resistance in Nazi-controlled countries, would have run stations on the Underground Railroad if we lived in the U.S. in the 1800s, and would have refused to cooperate with the KGB in ratting out our neighbors. You and Cynthia are among the few people who can honestly believe that you would have been on the right side. History shows that few people actually do the right thing when push comes to shove. Congratulations on being able to look at yourselves in the mirror.
One of our grandsons just turned down a scholarship to a prestigious American university. In explaining why, among other things, he wrote: “…colleges are no longer the beacon of science and rationality that they once were. Physical diversity is championed by colleges while diversity of thought is not even a consideration, often vilified. Truth can only come through dialogue. Discussion involves disagreement. No truth can come from an institution where those in it are scared to speak their mind if their political view is not "correct". What once were the centers of thought of the western world are now egotistical echo chambers of the delusional.”
His words are true not only for universities, but for news organizations, much of government and many businesses. While many virtue-pat themselves on the back, they are responsible for poverty, mental health problems and, as you write, even the death of those they purport to care about.
You and your wife will never know whose backbone your actions encouraged to do the right thing themselves . I hope you find organizations (that do exist) to help you sue; sadly, that is the way to get attention. Drop after drop, as more and more people speak up and hazard the consequences, we can cut away this rot in our society. God bless.
Wow, good for your grandson!
We are very proud of him.
Heartbreaking that we've come to this.
Susan, How refreshing to hear of young people with such personal integrity! With grandchildren of my own, I am always thankful to hear of those who have the moral character to stand against the "popular perspectives" in pursuit of Truth and Integrity and to be examples for those young people who will soon follow them.
You can be very proud of your grandson he is going to go far in life this crap can’t last forever
It's so insane to me that people buy into this nonsense without researching on their own. I've known BLM numbers were a lie from the very beginning. However, I have also looked up the average IQ quotient of the citizenry, and I am not surprised that people just believe what they hear that day. It's kind of terrifying. Also, I hope you win and BIG.
Wasn't it George Carlin who said "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that"
Beat me to it. I just quoted this to some folks the other day.
Thank you for doing the right thing. You are right about the increase in killing of minority Americans; it is unconscionable that we are looking the other way. All Americans are entitled to equal protection and this breaks my heart. You are a hero for taking a stand and doing the right thing. God bless you.
Maybe Bari and associates need a Statistics prof at their fledgling school. It sounds as though you have the knowledge, courage, and honesty to qualify. At any rate, another day, another division; you have better things to do than babysitting a clownshow.
I analyzed and debunked the claims about police killings of blacks (and about how racist Americans are) made by Isabel Wilkeson in her blockbuster book "Caste." My findings were courageously and thoughtfully published by Free Black Thought on their substack:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/what-the-data-show-about-police-killings
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/racist-voters-and-rising-hate-groups
What Zac Kriegman had to endure is chilling. Fortunately, I am retired and so don't have to worry about a similar price being exacted.
Free Black Thought tweeted the above links to the author and to the publisher. Both have chosen to ignore the analysis.
Nice work.