4 ms·
> We're going to have a special mental health response team to deal with suicidal people and the non-violent mentally ill." Who would oppose that? When it dive
by LeonB 5y ago
> We're going to have a special mental health response team to deal with suicidal people and the non-violent mentally ill." Who would oppose that?
When it diverts funding away from mainstream policing then it would be very strongly opposed by police unions.
And it does not need simply a lack of opposition. It needs people to actively support it, and be motivated to support it as it requires funding.
And there’s a bunch of straw manning in your arguments that is quite distasteful.
- roenxi 5y agoWikipedia suggests [0] that the majority of NYPD officers come from minority backgrounds. Whites are slightly overrepresented in leadership vs. the demographic backdrop of New York. Though that is probably inertia, as they used to be a majority instead of just the largest minority back in the 90s. It seems to be a stretch to say the NYPD could be a hotbed of racism in particular. They look rather diverse. I suppose possibly the argument could be made that black NYPD officers are racist against whites, whites against latinos and latinos against blacks. But from what I've understood that isn't the accusation being made at them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...
- aaron-santos 5y agoThis would be a very good time to break out the systems-level thinking and apply it to racism in policing. In particular, the idea that if individual racism is low implies that racism is also low the composition of those individuals is a fallacy of composition.
- roenxi 5y agoSo, the NYPD is hiring a most of their workforce from minorities, who are then banding together to support systemic racism, because I am making the fallacy of composition? I'll admit my argument here isn't proven with academic rigour, but the NYPD isn't the racist actor in the current narrative.
- ghufran_syed 5y agoYou mean it could be a “fallacy of composition” - if you provided some evidence for the claim that a group of likely non-racist individuals are nevertheless racist as a group - whatever that means.
- aaron-santos 5y agoIf the argument is that low individual racism implies low systemic racism of the group then I very clearly mean yes it is a fallacy of composition. I want to disentangle the idea that a fallacious requires implies a judgement of the truth value of the argument. It doesn't. It just means that avenue of reasoning is flawed. There may be other ways of proving that the NYPD is not as a group racist, but by arguing by way of individuals is not one of them.
- void_mint 5y agoIs your assertion that only white people can uphold an inherently racist system?
- ghufran_syed 5y ago“inherently racist”? Inherent: “existing in something as a permanent, essential, or characteristic attribute.” Once you define something as “racist”, then it’s not hard to conclude it’s “racist”. Sounds a lot like the christian doctrine of “original sin”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin “Is it your assertion that only white people contain original sin?” - yup, both sentences seem equally meaningful IMO.
- void_mint 5y agoIt's just so interesting that you'd try to sidestep my question by bringing up religion, and then just asking my question back to me. Do you think black people can't make decisions that are negative for other black people? Do you think every woman votes entirely for feminist movements? If yes, I have a bridge to sell you. If no, you seem to have answered my original question more honestly than your first attempt.
- rhizome 5y agoRace doesn't exist in humans. Races are subspecies, and homo sapiens doesn't have those. "Race" is a concept maintained to exist by people who think society should be organized by ethnicity, and those people are called racists. Racists have an extensive literature supporting this fundamentally fallacious worldview, stretching back centuries. In the US, who has benefited from the historical ethnic organization of society, and who might feel they're losing something when society is organized that way less than it used to be? "You will not replace us!" they chant. >Once you define something as “racist”, then it’s not hard to conclude it’s “racist”. As I laid out, racism can be defined in concrete terms that, as it happens, don't constitute a tautology. "Original sin" is entirely fictional, invented to convice people that they are fundamentally guilty of something, a guilt from which release is inconceivable. This was the innovation of Christianity: you were born with a debt that cannot be relieved.
- LeonB 5y agoHere in Australia, the English colonialists established many policing units composed of aboriginals from one area (nation) who would then be responsible for hunting down and massacring the aboriginals in another area (nation). The institution itself was racist -- regardless of the composition of individual members working under that institution. To insinuate that an institution's ability to be racist depends on the ethnicity of its individual members is to deny that institutions have their own power.