- The BLM movement is, while poorly framed and easily co-opted by other people, about genuine problems with policing in the United States. Problems that are backed up with verifiable facts rather than scummy used car salesmen and the Inventor of Email™.
- The BLM movement, while the source of many large large scale protests (several of which turned into riots and outstayed their welcome) never, at any point, even pretended to stage a coup or murder a member of the Capitol Police.
A couple cops were killed by blm rioters. Sure they weren't capital police but they were still police. ACAB was all over Facebook and Twitter which at a minimum raised the temperature and hatred towards cops.
Except it happened at a BLM protest. And in this day and age, evidently having someone commit some violent act at an event is enough to blame scores (and more) of other people at that event, and organizations associated with it. And then de-platform them, and de-monetize them, .... and generally de-humanize them. (Like the protest at the Capitol)
Also, he was a member of the New Black Panther Party:
> NBPP head Quanell X said after the shooting that Johnson had been a member of the NBPP's Houston chapter for about six months, several years before.
> Following the shooting, a national NBPP leader distanced the group from Johnson, saying that he "was not a member of" the party.
But of course, any organization with ties to him would want to cut those ties and disavow him, making themselves look clean. Do you think BLM or other organizations would want ties to such people exposed?
It's also easy to look at the summer's riots and forget that it was a mixture of peaceful protestors and violent antagonists. Until we have some convictions with evidence in court, we can't say BLM'ers killed cops.
and to your 2nd point, I don't think it was ppl saying ACAB that raised the temperature and hatred towards cops. It was the cops killing innocent black people.
It can be both. Police racism is a real problem. But saying ACAB ("All Cops Are Bastards") is both untrue and hardly improves the situation. That said, I don't believe the majority of the BLM movement is that extreme.
Some of the black people who were shot by cops were in all likelihood not innocent. Look at Jacob Blake for example. He came at the cops with a knife. Blake did survive though.
Just because one event raises the temperature doesn't mean another event also doesn't. Saying ACAB and defund the police seems like it would also raise the temperature.
I looked at the Jacob Blake video. You said 'He came at the cops with a knife.' If the video is accurate, then that is untrue. There was no provocation by Jacob Blake with a knife or any other weapon shown in that video. He was shot in the back multiple times while getting in to his car, and there was no knife in his hand when the trigger was pulled. It's possible that he may have possessed a knife or that there was a knife in his car, but there was no imminent danger to the police officer when the officer fired 7 times point blank.
That you can speak this untruth so casually is discomforting. You appear to believe the lies that are being spouted by someone who is attempting to defame Jacob Blake, without ever having evaluated the original video. If you had seen the video, you never would have made the claim that "he came at the cops with a knife." Who was this person that lied to you in this way? It would be useful to name and shame this individual or group.
Please watch the video, reassess your claim, and cast your doubts upon these people who told you this untruthful story.
Jacob Blake, himself, admitted he had a knife (prior to the video that is circulating) when he was fighting with cops. He did literally came at cops with a knife.
Shortly after that he went into the car where there was another knife. He already showed he was willing to do violence towards cops with a knife prior to the video so when he went for a second one they shot him.
I never meant to imply he was shot when he was coming at the cops with a knife. It is not clear based on the video if he was coming towards the cops right when he is shot. He was moving around in the car and may have made moves towards the cops, but I cannot tell based on the video.
To suggest there was no imminent danger is non-sense. Jacob Blake just struggled with cops while holding a knife.
Of course if you look at more than just a couple second video you would know this.
According to The Washington Post, 19 unarmed black men were killed by police in the entirety of 2019. Black people are disproportionately killed by police for their population, but almost exactly in proportion to the rate of violent crime broken down by race.
Obviously every "unjustified" death, especially deaths by the police (who are trained and held to higher expectations given their position) is a tragedy. The riots and protests led to far more deaths, far more injuries, and far more damage (including causing the second wave as cases were decreasing) than seems at all justified even considering these tragic police shootings.
In other words, while police brutality is a genuine problem, the response was completely disproportionate, misinformed, and morally wrong.
What are the verifiable facts again? Do you have alternative statistics because they're actually on the FBI website and contradict everything you're saying. The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election via amplification of convenient (and unfortunate/terrible) imagery to turn out voters. I hate to be stone cold but that's my understanding of what unfolded. We witnessed something similar in 2015.
I should add a caveat around "the BLM movement is about." One of its problems (like many progressive movements) is everyone has a different idea what it is about, and the mainstream media does not help with that in the slightest.
So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true. There are no statistics to worry about for that one and there don't need to be: just look at a handful of publicized cases and be angry.
But of course, people do like statistics. You can't be angry without statistics. (Truly, you shouldn't. It's unhealthy). Also, that framework makes a terrible export. (Which is unfortunate because Canada loves importing protests from the States instead of making its own).
So, various other progressive movements globbed on to the name, as they do, but fortunately it's a more visceral thing than, say, Occupy Wall Street, so they are at least mostly on topic. I think the real problem, which is the source of most of the recent anger (see the equally badly named and easily co-opted slogan "Defund the police"), is that police are killing a lot of people for stupid reasons.
It is still important to emphasize that black lives matter, because they do, and it's infuriating that that makes people uncomfortable. But the root cause is the United States has an unreasonable approach to policing in general, which creates as many problems as it solves. And I think if you talk to most BLM supporters, they aren't going to tell you about racial sensitivity training or hiring more black cops: they're going to tell you how the police in a developed country shouldn't act as if they're expecting a war.
I'll join you on beating that drum. Statistics are the key skill for making policy decisions. One that the vast majority of the population, educated or not, fail to grasp.
>So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true.
Is it though? Seems to me you're advocating feelings matter more than facts. I believe it would be more accurate to say "police in the United States are killing people for stupid reasons, which is true." while keeping in mind that those incidents are the exception, not the norm. The police shot 28 unarmed people in 2019. On a population of 320 million.
>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.
>We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015 and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.
>In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
I think the issue isn’t just police killing unarmed black people but also an incredibly large disparity in use of all physical force which your stats allude to:
>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities.
Further down in their comment they cite statistics about variant violent crime rates by race, where African Americans commit more than 50% of violent crime, which seems in line with your cited non-lethal force rates. Violent criminals receiving proportionate rates of violent force doesn't stand out as a disparity.
>African Americans commit more than 50% of violent crime,
Out of curiosity, I understand that you're simply citing statistics from a source but I'd like to know if you think this reflects reality? If so, what reason would you suggest creates this?
That’s fascinating. I personally haven’t found any statistics on how many crimes of any type are committed that didn’t include estimates, only statistics that count arrests(1) since those are discrete and easily countable.
I agree that statistics are an incredibly powerful tool to understand the world but I disagree that they’re the “only lens on reality” since in some cases, ideologues are able to summon numbers that fit a preconceived notion.
I believe it reflects reality, or is at least a strong approximation of reality.
I think the cause to first order is economics. Second and third order terms with much less but still contributing importance are political (decades of policy failures like the War on Drugs and welfare expansion, for-profit prisons, etc), and cultural (there is far too much celebration of crime culture, gang culture, and respect culture that normalizes the state of things in the black community).
> they're going to tell you how the police in a developed country shouldn't act as if they're expecting a war.
Which gives me a bit of whiplash when I see many of those people outraged that the Capitol Police didn’t just start shooting indiscriminately into the crowd on 1/6.
> Which gives me a bit of whiplash when I see many of those people outraged that the Capitol Police didn’t just start shooting indiscriminately into the crowd on 1/6.
What I've seen is mostly people pointing to that response as proving police know how to respond nonviolently to mass, even violent, protests, and therefore that the reason they choose a different stance and response when, e.g., BLM is involved is racial bias, not neutral procedure.
The Capitol Police retreated from most of the capitol building and only shot one rioter before eventually recapturing the building later that evening. Police responding to BLM protests shot virtually nobody and retreated from multiple police stations, some of which were either occupied for weeks or burned to the ground.
> The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election
I noticed that that the BLM protests happened a few months before the 2016 election and then vanished. Then the same thing happened before the 2020 election.
To be specific, the data shows Google search interest - not number of protest events.
Protests are not necessarily “newsworthy”; however, that search interest would track media stirring up news before elections seems likely.
Further, (and I say this as a Minneapolitan) the significant protests of this summer were very clearly and obviously precipitated by real world events, not astroturfed protest crowds.
One question is why and how certain specific real-world events go viral and others get memory-holed.
I would surmise that a lot of the protests this summer were, emotionally, a consequence of the stress, economic uncertainty, and way-too-online cabin fever of the early stages of the COVID epidemic.
You wouldnt believe how sophisticated the firms are that the dem party hires. They have their own versions of Cambridge Analytica which are more than capable of amplifying messages.
"You are actually on CIA website marked as terrorist. \s" what is the context of this joke Im not following. I stated a fact (FBI statistics) and then an opinion. Are we allowed to do that on the internet?
> The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election via amplification of convenient (and unfortunate/terrible) imagery to turn out voters.
So, Trump was behind it, so he could run on a law and order platform? Because he certainly did take advantage of it.
I'm afraid the boring truth was that ordinary people got angry during a time of high unemployment, with protests and rioting being a predictable result. It's not as though large protests over police shootings are new.
- The BLM movement, while the source of many large large scale protests (several of which turned into riots and outstayed their welcome) never, at any point, even pretended to stage a coup or murder a member of the Capitol Police.