One very hard lesson I learned over the past couple of years is that when one is invested in a narrative one becomes willingly blind to information that contradicts it. Even worse is that people who are of above average intelligence, will often fall into this trap. The overriding reasons being that since they know they are smart their narrative could not possibly be wrong. If anything
those people who hold a differing view are the ones who are "not so bright". And of course there is the aversion to labels such as racist, sexist, uncle tom, sellout, etc, which can put a rather heavy wet blanket on one's social (and employment) life.
Universities are fast becoming places of indoctrination rather than places of critical thinking and the pursuit of facts. The students who graduate from these places are therefore ill equipped to deal critically with subjects to which they have been indoctrinated to think of in a certain way.
Today's example comes from Stanford.
In an article about a Stanford grad who supports the Black Lives Matter movement we see the effects that this indoctrination has on bright motivated persons:
As Florida and the rest of world watched George Zimmerman walk away scot-free after a jury acquitted him of shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, a still-troubled nation questioned whether race played a role in the teenager’s death.
So far so good. Race (and gender) did in fact have a large role in the death of Trayvon.
But for Samuel Sinyangwe, it was clear. The Stanford University graduate, who was living in San Francisco during that summer of 2013, remembered growing up as a black child in Orlando’s College Park neighborhood.
I put this here because I want the reader to know that the person at the focus of the article is not simply your average person on the street. This is a person who has graduated from a top tier university in the United States. We should expect that such persons would have higher than average analytical skills than your average person. We're talking people with IQ's over 110, with many over 120. These are the very people who should be asking the tough questions.
And like Martin did on that fateful night of Feb. 26, 2012, Sinyangwe would stop by a 7-Eleven on his way home from school to pick up an Arizona sweet tea and a pack of Starburst or Skittles.
“I was not physically in Orlando, but it hit me very hard,” Sinyangwe, 25, says. “I was that kid. I could have been Trayvon. That’s why it hit me so personally and that’s why I realized that needed to be something that took the priority in terms of my focus.”
While the media made the Skittles and Arizona sweet tea a part of the story, it was not relevant to the story any further than Trayvon had one hand in his pocket to hold those items. As the record shows, Zimmerman was far more concerned with the hood on Trayvon's head and that he was walking around "looking at houses".
But what this part shows is that we are dealing with emotive narratives rather than facts. It would have made no difference had Martin simply been out for a walk or had just gotten off a bus. He was attacked and killed for who he was and where his "who" was.
Because he felt such a connection with Martin, Zimmerman’s acquittal also had a second effect on Sinyangwe – it radicalized him and refocused his work as a data scientist on issues of state violence and police violence.
Since Trayvon was not killed by police how did Sinyangwe come to this particular conclusion? While I certainly had major issues with the jury decision given the facts of the case, it was the state that failed to prove it's burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt. That is not state violence. It is very dangerous to declare outcomes we don't approve of as "violence". This is a particularly nasty habit of left leaning groups.
So when Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, was shot and killed by a white police officer and left on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, for four hours in 2014, Sinyangwe knew what he had to do.
You mean wait for the investigation to occur? To perhaps go there and interview witnesses? Get a hold of forensic evidence? Oh no. Sorry. I these would be the actions of high IQ persons who understands the value of impartial investigation. Had he done any of that, he would have discovered that the reason that Brown's body was laying out for so long was due to the crowds of people, some armed and letting of shots, that had surrounded the scene. The ME was actually on scene and unable to get to the body because police feared for their safety.
How is it that years after this information is known do we still have people and publications fronting a proven lie?
Also, we should note that Sinyangwe failed to identify with Brown's trip to the store. I wonder why that is.
As they were working to understand the issues surrounding Brown’s death and the deaths of other African-Americans at the hands of police officers, they discovered something puzzling. The federal government did not have a comprehensive national database of people killed by police. Even more troubling, what the federal government was reporting severely undercounted the number of people killed by police by a margin of 2 to 1, Sinyangwe says.
Did it occur to either one of these fellows to take a look at the FBI crime statistics?
In the two years since Brown's death, Sinyangwe and a group of activists created Campaign Zero, a platform that presents comprehensive policy solutions in the hopes of getting the number of people killed by officers to zero. Before any policy solutions, though, they had to know where they stood. Using data, they tried to find the elusive answer to the question: How many people have police killed and why? [my underlines]
Per underlined portion: In what fantasy world do these people live in where they think that in a country which has the highest murder rates of any industrialized countries (perhaps excepting Russia, I haven't checked) would not have even a single person killed by police? In what fantasy world do they live in where police are not shot at, stabbed, etc.? Do these people actually believe that a police officer should allow him or herself to be shot just so the perp can't be shot?
The FBI reported that law enforcement officers across the country had justifiably killed 426 people in 2012. In the same year, D. Brian Burghart discovered that wasn't true.
Using public records, online articles and crowdsourcing, Burghart found that in 2013, 1,271 people were killed during interactions with police. In 2014, that number increased to 1,295, and by 2015, it was 1,299. From 2008 to 2014, the average number of people killed by police was around 419 people per year, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. Why the discrepancy?
Burghart says he found through his work that the data collected by the FBI was only coming from a fraction of police departments across the country. The Wall Street Journal says it found in a 2014 investigation that "among 105 of the largest police departments in the country, about 45 percent of killings by officers went unreported to the [FBI] between 2007 and 2012. Currently, reporting is optional and records from nearly every agency in three large states, Florida, New York and Illinois, aren't in the FBI's data."
This is important, but not for the reasons Burghart or the Orlando Weekly thinks. If the actual numbers of those killed by police is much higher than 412 or 426 then it means that the level of criminal activity is being
underreported by the state. If anything the state is giving a
false impression of safety. If data from places like NY and Illinois are missing, particularly with the huge spikes in shootings in Chicago that we've seen this year so far, one should wonder just how much criminal activity that involves firearms has really been going on.
The end result: Mapping Police Violence, a website that breaks down the data into visualizations any reader can understand.
The group found that out of the 1,152 people killed by police officers in 2015, 336 of those people were black. African-Americans made up about 30 percent of the number of people killed, despite being 13.2 percent of the U.S. population.
Ahh the other sleight of hand used by those on the left:
Blacks are 13% of the population and therefore should be 13% of every and anything else, except basketball, football and Hip-Hop.
The crime statistics show however that black people commit certain offenses, particularly assaults (with and without firearms) at 7x the rate of the white population and way out of proportion of their US population. Furthermore since it is black males who are usually on the giving and receiving end of said violence we have to realize that it is really
less than 6% of the US population that is responsible for huge numbers of homicides and shootings. This is
not in dispute. It is known by the FBI and any and all law enforcement communities. But these facts do not make an appearance and those pushing these 13% arguments hope that the readers will not notice them. If the reader does notice these facts then the facts are deemed racist as is the person who points them out. The perfect circle of indoctrination.
The FDLE typically has a 98 to 99 percent participation rate among the state's law enforcement agencies. In 2015, FDLE reported 56 people had been justifiably killed by an officer, according to a supplemental homicide report. In the same WSJ investigation, the publication found Florida had not participated in the FBI's national tally since 1996.
Orlando Police Chief John Mina says from 2010 to 2015, 11 people have been involved in fatal officer-involved shootings and three people have died while in OPD custody. All 14 are men, and out of those, 10 are black and four are white.
Say John Mina, what percentage of those committing crimes in Orlando are black and how many of them are white?
Here's the City Data report on
crime in Orlando.
Here is a link to the demographic info where we find black people are 70% of the population which "coincidentally" reflects the "death by police" demographics.
Sinyangwe says he spoke with OPD officials about their use-of-force policy and recommended changes, specifically in regard to the policy that authorizes officers to hog-tie people, also known as the four-point restraint, and another policy that allows officers to shoot at moving vehicles.
Sinyangwe should have been hung up on, escorted out the building or never given an appointment in the first place.
Mapping Police Violence found the homicide rate for black people by police in Orlando was almost double the amount than for all races in 2014. New York and Florida have similar size populations, but three times as many people are killed by police in the Sunshine State than in New York.
Again with the relevant questions: What is the overall crime rate of black people in Orlando relative to other races? In particular what are the rates of crime by black suspects in which those suspects had weapons? Second question: Since we see that in places like NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, etc., as the temps rise the murder rates soar. If shootings are more likely to happen in 'warm/hot weather, which Florida has in spades, wouldn't that be a better predictor of levels of violence in Florida relative to NY?
"We pay our tax dollars to the police to protect and serve us," Sinyangwe says. "It's their job to do that. So they should take personal responsibility in upholding and performing their job with the level of quality that is in line with what the citizenry demands."
Actually courts have ruled that police are in fact not for our "service" or "protection".
Almost 121 years ago, journalist and advocate Ida B. Wells published The Red Record, a 100-page pamphlet that includes statistics on three years of American lynchings.
Awwww shit. They broke out with thy lynchings! New low.
From the end of the Civil War in the 19th century to the 1950s, thousands of African-Americans, mostly men, were lynched in Southern states, according to a recent report from the Equal Justice Initiative.
Not to minimize the very real terrorism that lynching represented, but we should realize that the number of black people who kill each other over dumb shit
far exceeds the total number of persons lynched in the US. As an aside, I find it highly ironic that many of the people who would use this lynching argument have no problems with automatically believing a woman who claims she was raped or other claims of sexual assault. Many of those same persons will disregard jury findings of innocence. Talk about lynch mobs!
A Pew Research Center poll from last year said 59 percent of Americans now believe changes are needed to give African-Americans equal rights, up from the 46 percent of Americans who responded to a Pew poll in 2014.
Did this Pew poll follow up with a question as to what specific rights black people do not have that are enjoyed by the rest of the population?
Matthew Nichter, a historical sociologist who works as a professor at Rollins College, says Mapping Police Violence, the work of Ida B. Wells, and data collection by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's research department during the Civil Rights Movement all represent an effort to prove to critics that black people aren't exaggerating when they talk about institutional violence, and that the deaths of Brown, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner weren't just caused by officers who were "bad apples."
Lets get a few things out of the way:
Michael Brown robbed a store and assaulted the manager in the process. This he admitted to his friend. He then assaulted a police officer allegedly because he didn't care for the way he was spoken to. Eyewitnesses say that Brown rushed the officer when he was shot. How is that even a case of "bad apples"?
Sandra Bland should
not have been stopped by the state trooper. The trooper clearly arrested Bland because he didn't care for her honest reply to his asinine question. However; Bland
killed herself. Furthermore she killed herself after her family
did NOTHING to help her get out of jail (all she asked for was $500). Bland and Bland alone is responsible for her death so how is that "bad apples"?
Eric Garner is the only listed case where we can discuss "bad apples". We can also discuss NYS cigarette tax enforcement and the ban on selling loosies as a way to "protect the children".
If you look at surveys of people, white versus black, white folks tend to perceive police as the guys who come get your cat out of a tree," he says. "I think that's why data is so critical. There's widespread obliviousness on the part of the white majority because we still live in such a segregated society. The experience we have in the suburbs is different than police presence in urban black areas."
Does Matthew Nichter have any idea why white folks in suburbs generally see police as those who "come get your cat out of a tree" rather than "Oh shit! Po-po!"? I'll give him a clue. In largely white communities there is very little violent crime. Police literally have nothing to do all day except drive around, hand out traffic tickets and look at porn on their phones. There are white communities where there haven't been murders in 40 years. When murders do happen in these communities it is often either a domestic dispute that went deadly or an outsider committing a home invasion.
By contrast is many black communities there are on the street murders happening every day. You're lucky if there is a 24 hour period where someone isn't shot. This doesn't include things like theft and "simple" assaults. Just shootings. Hence it is the very actions of the people
inhabiting black communities that are the cause of the differences in perceptions of police.
And this is what I mean about narrative. All the people noted in the article had invested in a narrative. You have a lynching avenue where there is no lynching. There is the segregation as explanation that fails to hold up under the lightest scrutiny. There is wholesale dismissal of relevant facts in the case of Brown and Bland. There is the total non admission of the sky high murder rates that precipitate police involvement in black communities. In this fantasy world, where police shoot nobody, these facts and observations simply do not exist. Too many "bright" people buy into this and it is literally getting people killed.
