Why "All Lives Matters" is wrong

[Sommerswerd]

You think Zimmerman thought he was suspicious because he was black and I think it was Martin's behavior. He was walking around in the rain looking at houses and loitering by the mail boxes. That would be enough to get my attention

Except...he wasn't. He was walking home from the convenience store.

Also "loitering" is a legal characterization calculated cast Trayvon as a criminal. Like my use of the term "stalking" to describe Zimmerman, you are either using it in the criminal law sense or in the colloquial sense. I've already clarified that I say Zimmerman was stalking in the colloquial sense, ie watching and following. Since Trayvon wasn't charged or convicted of loitering, using loitering in the criminal sense is similarly inappropriate. However, in the colloquial sense, "loitering" just means hanging out or standing around, which is by no stretch of the imagination "suspicious" such that you should be followed with a gun. Walking in the rain, looking at houses, and standing around by mailboxes are not "suspicious" behavior by any reasonable metric. Those behaviors are about as innocuous as it gets.

Its actually a little surreal to hear you keep trying to shoehorn "suspicious" into "walking in the rain, looking at houses, and standing around by mailboxes"... It just doesn't pass muster. I mean, as I've said numerous times. If you just admit "Look, stranger black guys in my neighborhood makes me uncomfortable, I can't help it, that's how I feel", then it would make your argument more believable/credible... but trying to insist that anyone who is "walking in the rain, looking at houses, and standing around by mailboxes" is engaged in "suspicious behavior" is just... it doesn't even make any sense.

 

[metalhead]

The hoodie makes him suspicious.
But he needed a hood because it was raining!
Oh, then walking in the rain is suspicious.
But people need to get places in the rain!
Well he stopped walking at some point. Not walking is suspicious.
It's not a crime to stand still!
True, but he was looking at things. Surely looking at things is suspicious??

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The hoodie makes him suspicious.
But he needed a hood because it was raining!
Oh, then walking in the rain is suspicious.
But people need to get places in the rain!
Well he stopped walking at some point. Not walking is suspicious.
It's not a crime to stand still!
True, but he was looking at things. Surely looking at things is suspicious??

Only when you're black.

 

[metatron]

Spoiler :

Disclaimer:
People unfamiliar with human interaction shall be advised that the following is a "rant".
The usual rules about picking small loose threads out of rants apply.

[rant]




Terxpahseyton's signature features Jan Böhmermann's "Ich hab Polizei".
The key line of the last stanza roughly translates to: they "have lit up 7 people last year".
The number is correct (for 2014). And he uses it, because it's supposedly bad...mule. Seven is supposed to be a lot.
Let's have a table here.

p for getting killed by the cops (per million)|
asian americans US| ~1
non-hispanic white US|~3
hispanic / latino US|~3
african american US|~7
men US|~7
native american US|~10
non-hispanic white women US|0.41
FRG (at large)|0.08

Points to note:
1) A black person of random gender is roughly as likely to be killed in the US as a man of random ethnicity.
This is significant, because the "conservative" justification for the former is exactly the same as the smarmy liberal justification for the latter.
2) The white supremacy is quite bad at killing hispanics. You know, because the racist President campaigned on building a Great Wall around Philadelphia.
3) I, as a 36 year old man with long hair and a brando style leather jacket that looks like it's been to hell am less likely to be killed by the cops than Amanda Marcotte.
Merely by vritue of living in another country.

So, now would be the point where you field bogus liberal coastal American arguments. Let me preempt them.
We do have minorities. We do have crime. We do have poverty. We do have urban hellscapes with syringes in the playground sandbox. We do have racist police. We do have guns.
Everybody in the developed world does. Well, with the possible exception of Monaco and Singapore.

Actually i can demonstrate to you how racist our cops may probably be and that the idea of them killing people is so foreign to us that we would push the idea of taunting cops on teenagers.
I can do it in a single ad:

Spoiler :

It's a worthless store-brand label. They have fake origin stories. Like 8 of them.

So before you implicitly endorse the propaganda of a group awash in rather dubious elements i suggest you get your story straight.

A few pointers:
#1: You think this is the flag of American racism.
You know, the flag of the Dawes Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, and 8 decades of slavery.
No? Oh right. That's the other one.
But Americans like the other one, don't they? Heritage not Hate, and all that?

#2: Liberal Americans are obsessed with how the head of the EPA used to sue the EPA.
But 3 years ago the story of him torturing a black man to death lasted all of 3 days.

#3: Liberal America has useless pricks boasting about how you will have a new 20$ bill, while misrepresenting other countries.
Yet, i got to use fully gender-equal paper money my entire youth, until someone had the dumb idea to replace it with stupid bridges.
And some inner city girl in the US will still buy her first pack of gum with the face of a slaveholder President.

#4: The US are the only highly developed country where primary and secondary schools for the urban poor look and operate like juvenile detention facilities.
Meanwhile US government is concerned with how white women at elite residential campuses are going to pay for birth control - a burden that most of the Sanders Countries file under "how to adult".

#5: I can't tell you what would happen if we bombed a wedding in some far away country. I can tell you that when we erroneously call for a US air strike in a far away country our parlament goes bananas for a month while the whole thing virtually doesn't make US news.

So here i am. Ignorant as i am. With the suspicion that US political culture has a massive problem with economic class and doesn't value life in general all that much.
You know, all of it.

But sure, denouncing politically unsavvy people who have the temerity to claim "all lives matter" - because that's oh-so-dangerous "code" - will be very helpfull, too.

[/rant]

Ah, finally.

Ok, these are - at a glance - all fine and well.
Like, i have an issue with the two linked posts, cause in one you not merely claim crime stats are skewed, but implicitly dismiss them wholesale.
I'd rather reason that disenfrenchised, poor urban African Americans are bound to have higher crime rates, for the very reasons you alude to in the other post.


I'd say this would not be enough. And there needs to the "uplifting" you dismiss, ending racism wouldn't be enough. Damage done has to be remedied.
If i wanted to argue in bad faith, i'd call you libertarian here.
Now, as an etatist i'm perfectly happy to hear your thoughts about school choice, to hear you about how African Americans themselves know best how to use remedying funds.

This is mostly white people's fault. And enough are still at it today. For the record.
(Let's not go out our way to disagree here. I find free will v determinism boring and divisive. I hope we can settle for "mostly".)
So, of course the statistics are skewed. Are all differences a result of that? I don't think so. I think if you mistreat people, they'll generally and broadly be "not well" and crime comes with that.
It doesn't really matter though, in terms of our disagreement in this thread.
Because... the quotes in the large spoilers - as far as i can tell - all address the same argument, an argument that i am not making here.
Btw: Your math on the 2013 murder statistics is actually in lots of peril (which apparently Funky didn't exploit - good for you), based on two reasonable (and somewhat evident) assumtions: 1. Check the victims table and assume most are killed by a member of their own "race". 2. Assume that there may be biased ressource distribution based on the "race" and privilege of the victim. Murder is an outlier in both regards.
None the less i accept and affirm the broad thrust of your argument (even while you didn't recommend that in a disclaimer), and would basically be willing to do so without evidence at all:
African Americans are in general massively overexposed to investigative pressure. Of course they are. This is particularly true for misdemeanors and low level felonies.

Actually i strongly implied in that post you disliked so much, that i deem said argument rather dubious. And i called The New Jim Crow just that.
So i am afraid, that you seemingly mistook me for Funky, may not necessarily be my fault.
Btw: I appreciate that you may be tired, particularly since, apparently some sort of metaphor about carrots and cute critters was inflicted on you (i skimmed that part, forgive me).

Anyway, let's get to the point.
First, let me make clear that i am making the implicit assumption that you are not some weird form of equal-opportunity super-tough-on-crime advocate; raising the rate of police-caused fatalities of all other groups to the level suffered by African Americans is not the outcome you desire. Right?
This is where my argument comes in: As i said, plenty of the original motivation behind the War on Crime was racist, and a fair chunk of it still is today.
That doesn't necessarily mean that focusing on that is particularly effictive in dealing with the problem.
You may argue that the US has more racism than other countries, you may argue that the US has a particular kind of racism. We could debate that, i wouldn't outright dismiss the claim.
However relative to many otherwise comparable countries, that do have crime, poverty, disadvantaged minorities and biased police, the striking difference is not that police in the US is more biased. It arguably is, somewhat, but arguably not to the extent necessary to suffice as an explanation. Firearms are more available in th US, but when we do certain international comparisons that can't hold as the core factor either.
The striking difference is that is has become normalised in the US that the police is killing pretty much everyone, to varying degree. That is just off the charts relative to otherwise comparable countries.

So, then the question is what do you want to do about it?

Hypothetical #1:
Let's do what BLM, SJWs, whoever... seem to suggest or may suggest to alleviate African American disenfranchisement, crime in many African American communities, said disproportionate investigative pressure etc.
Since these are movements not organisations, let me make some good-faith-suggestions as to what we might be talking about:
1. By various means redirect police efforts, reduce police bias.
How much will that get us? How much will that "~3" in my chart for whites rise and that "~7" for African Americans drop?
2. Some sort of criminal justice reform scaling back sentencing guidelines etc.
Does this change the rates in the short term at all?
3. Some form of reparations in cash - just for the heck of it. Let's spend a trillion on that. Not much. A mere 25k per capita (roughly 4k to pay per white person).
4. Some form of huge subsidised program for workfare, small business founding etc. Being slightly less poor is little good without opportunity. Let's spend another trillion.
5. A fundamental education reform, stripping (racist) municipalities and states of most of their agency in education, and making a huge effort in redeeming an enourmous number of underfunded schools; add adult education efforts. Let's spend yet another trillion, since this is a cause dear to my heart - i consider this a particularly viscious and hideous injustice.
A trillion here and there. Soon enough we're talking about real money.

What would this get us in terms of police-caused fatalities, today or tomorrow or next year, or in five years?
I suspect less than one might initially hope.
Millions of African Americans would still have to catch up on lost opportunities, education, trauma they suffered etc.
If all of the above is done, how well will traumatised black men released from prison really do?
So the above is laudible and any liberal should feel free to pursue any or all of those goals.
But this is a generational plan. In what timeframe will this bring down African American police-caused fatalities to the white level of ~3?
How close are we to getting any of this done, even a fraction of it?
So far you're getting into month-long media quagmires about whether one black teenager or another "reached for the gun" or not. Conservatives seem to be relatively fine with those.
Oh, and a racist guy with bad hair is trying to take millions of African Americans' health insurance away.

Now let's suppose we'd refocus just some part of all that laudible effort to do the following:
Hypothetical #2:
1. Allow cops to police in whatever unequal fashion they currently do (just for arguments sake)
2. Have police conduct change to be somewhat more "European" (somewhat, not all the way), in that they don't shoot dead, well, everybody.
What would we have to do? Some PSAs, funding for retraining police, feel free to throw in some desired equipment, some pay raises, cost of new and different staff.
What would that cost? 20 billion, mostly diverted from other funding? Spread over say 5 years?
What might that get you? Say, 5 times the FRG's rate of fatalities (which is not that low a rate to begin with)? Not the same, not a lot more; A full freaking five times.
That would be 0.4
Suppose the effect of police bias stayed roughly the same. So the African American rate would be twice that.
0.8 - five years from the start.
Is this feasable? It's not easy. But it's possible.
It's so possible you can get those Oregon Standoff cretins on board who got upset in the first place when they discovered that mandatory minimums are a thing (you can sign them up for that too).
This would not be fair.
It'd be the dirty, sad business called pragmatism.

But right now, in the language of that comic, there is no water, no hose and all the houses are on fire. Some more than others.
And the comic's characters are doing....what? wait? For Trump to resign? For an apology? From some teenage Milo fan? From Nixon? From some German socialist on the interwebs?

And, yes i do get that plenty of people intentionally use "all lives matter" as a dogwhistle.
However, many others are just somewhat ignorant.

Anyway.
Here's the list:
http://killedbypolice.net/
It will get longer today.
The count is at 272.
The newest entry with a photo is #268, Alteria Woods, 21, pregnant, deceased march 19th 2017, suspected of absolutely nothing:

Spoiler :

You want to spend a month debating with O'Reilly and Funky whether her boyfriend used her as a shield or not?
I'm sure, they'll gladly indulge you if you ask real nice.
Does it matter if he did? I think not.
This is about a search warrant. Cops were fired upon; they apparently managed to kill the young woman and gain control of the situation without harming the actual suspects.
You may argue they should have been after white people instead.
Will you get that? No.
I'm arguing they should have double backed and gotten a criminal psychologist with a megaphone or something.
You know, like sane people.
Can we get that?
I claim: Yes, we can.

Update:
I got the newspaper in my hands at work recently and it had the state statistics on this on the front page:
In Lower Saxnony (at 7.9 mil) police managed to kill one suspect last year. Somewhere between the 7th and the 8th potentially lethal stab-wound they kinda had the epiphany that the pepper spray wasn't working.
Several injuries were reported. Police slightly injured a suspect accidentally while shooting through a closed door (the subject fired an air gun at them while closing the door).
A reporter was shot in the leg while having weapons demonstrated to him by - apparently - very incompetent cops.
Police fired two warning shots in the state last year and outside of a thousand shots at wounded anymals (i.e. road-not-quite-kill, presumably mostly deer and boars).

Anyway... that's 0.126 per million for what is arguably the Wests most desolate state.
Questions?

PS:
Also update: You're at #681 right now.