3 ms·

> The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers

by CPLX 11y ago

> The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail. The reason people are "making it sound like that" is because that's actually what's happening. Freddy Gray was plucked from a sidewalk, detained, and then killed, for literally no lawful reason. The context for his story, and the many others like it, is the war on [certain] drugs [when used by some kinds of people] that is current social policy. This approach to criminal justice appeared at precisely the same time that overtly racist means of policing were outlawed, to accomplish the same goal. Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not? Did a country with a few centuries of of legally enshrined racism and violence towards blacks just, you know, stop doing that fifty years ago, suddenly? Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

mc32 11y ago
Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries. Also, people don't get killed like this everyday, these are exceptions, not acceptable exceptions, but its also not routine as you make it out to be. The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.
- CPLX 11y ago
  > Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries. What homogenous countries with a comparable level of economic wealth have situations that even remotely resemble our mass incarceration and drug war policies?
  - lsniddy 11y ago
    China is a good example, though they incarcerate less and execute more
    - analyst74 11y ago
      If you do drugs in China, how much you get punishment depends on your skin color and citizenship. If you are Chinese, you are fucked, with the exception of powerful bureaucrat maybe; but if you are foreigner, you generally get off free, maybe a policeman will give you a stern speech about not breaking law again. One thing I find funny though, is despite the war on drugs, average Americans, rich or poor, are still doing them, giving police more bodies to send to jail.
    - CPLX 11y ago
      A quick glance at the stats suggests the U.S. incarceration rate is approximately 5x higher than China's. That's a big difference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...
- bambax 11y ago
  > But they happen in most counties If you meant "countries": no. No other country jails that many people, either compared to its population, or in absolute numbers. Not now, not ever. The US is not "the land of the free", it's "the land of the jailed". "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"... and I will promplty put those bums in my private prisons where I'll watch them be raped to death. That should be the quote on the so-called Statue of "Liberty". We should ask for that statue back.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Oh, there is no question we jail too many people, and we jail rather than treat the mentally ill. Reform is definitely needed, no question. What I was saying is that other countries also disproportionately incarcerate their poor. It's not a uniquely American racist thing. Go to Angola, Nigeria, Russia, China, it's no different. Yes, we overdo the incarceration fixes all ills thing, we've got an unhealthy fetish for it, but my point was, the poor everywhere are disproportionately affected. People seem to take it that I'm okay with that. I'm not, but its not uniquely American and its not a policy to target ethnicities. If America were all white or all black we'd still have a problem of overrepresentation of poor in the system. By overrepresentation I mean normalizing for crimes.
    - bambax 11y ago
      Yes, disproportionately incarcerating the poor is probably universal. But incarceration-fetish is uniquely American. No other country has ever done that in all of history. When it is done in such huge numbers it really isn't "law enforcement" anymore, it's just some form of apartheid. The rest of the world should subject the US to the same kind of shaming that was used against South Africa. But of course, the rest of the world doesn't have the balls to do that, so here we go.
darkroasted 11y ago
Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not? It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues. Do you know what Ockham's razor is? The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang. If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.
- beat 11y ago
  Do you really think things are different in wealthier communities because they "self-police"? Calling the police in a poor neighborhood is dangerous business... not because of gang retaliation, but because of the police themselves. And as you observe, the police generally do nothing about street dealers, and what they do is ineffectual. So why even bother calling them?
  - darkroasted 11y ago
    Well, in a "wealthy" community, generally the police are members of the community. They live nearby, go to the same schools, etc. So all policing in a sense is self-policing. There is much less of a sense of the police being the "other", and vice versa, the police have less of sense that the population is all "others" and all "savages". When you are an outside police force, you only deal with the criminals, so you it becomes your sense that the entire community is criminal. Also, I put "wealthy" in scare quotes, because this dynamic also applies to areas like Chinatown or the Hasidic Jew communities of Brooklyn. These communities are not rich, but have low crime rates and rarely involve the police in their disputes, they mostly take care of problems using internal social sanctions. More generally, "self-policing" means problems are nipped in the bud early before they escalate to crimes requiring the police, and never have a chance to escalate to murders and retaliation killings. Most "policing" is taken care of by families and parents. Growing up, it was normal for one parent to complain to another parent about the behavior of the second parent's child, and the second parent to enforce discipline on their own children. I cannot remember a single time in my neighborhood where we had to call the police on a neighbor. I cannot actually recall a single instance of crime, such as burglary.
analyst74 11y ago
I do believe ams6110's post have some merits. If you grow up in the ghetto with role models largely being gang members and most your friends have been or are going to jail, it's difficult to grow into a mentality that value education and achievement. It just happens due to historical reasons, especially racism, majority of the ghetto are blacks. This actually perpetuate the unspoken racism, where people consciously or unconsciously associate black people with all the bad things happening in ghetto. As a counter example, Asian Americans were also highly discriminated against in the past century, immigration from Asia were barred, those who were here cannot acquire citizenship, cannot own land, etc etc. Asians were generally viewed as poor uneducated labours, not too different from blacks. But today Asians are hardly viewed as that, largely thanks to large influx of educated and hard working Asian immigrants in recent years (due to immigration law preference), who changed the public perception of Asians, lifted Asian neighbourhoods from ghetto status and gave positive role model and connections to poor Asian kids (local or immigrants). Conclusion? Focusing on "helping" visible minority actually reinforce the perception that certain ethnic groups need help. What we need to focus on instead, is to help those in need of help, without regards to skin colors.

by CPLX 11y ago

mc32 11y ago

Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries. Also, people don't get killed like this everyday, these are exceptions, not acceptable exceptions, but its also not routine as you make it out to be. The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.

CPLX 11y ago
> Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries. What homogenous countries with a comparable level of economic wealth have situations that even remotely resemble our mass incarceration and drug war policies?
- lsniddy 11y ago
  China is a good example, though they incarcerate less and execute more
  - analyst74 11y ago
    If you do drugs in China, how much you get punishment depends on your skin color and citizenship. If you are Chinese, you are fucked, with the exception of powerful bureaucrat maybe; but if you are foreigner, you generally get off free, maybe a policeman will give you a stern speech about not breaking law again. One thing I find funny though, is despite the war on drugs, average Americans, rich or poor, are still doing them, giving police more bodies to send to jail.
  - CPLX 11y ago
    A quick glance at the stats suggests the U.S. incarceration rate is approximately 5x higher than China's. That's a big difference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...
bambax 11y ago
> But they happen in most counties If you meant "countries": no. No other country jails that many people, either compared to its population, or in absolute numbers. Not now, not ever. The US is not "the land of the free", it's "the land of the jailed". "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"... and I will promplty put those bums in my private prisons where I'll watch them be raped to death. That should be the quote on the so-called Statue of "Liberty". We should ask for that statue back.
- mc32 11y ago
  Oh, there is no question we jail too many people, and we jail rather than treat the mentally ill. Reform is definitely needed, no question. What I was saying is that other countries also disproportionately incarcerate their poor. It's not a uniquely American racist thing. Go to Angola, Nigeria, Russia, China, it's no different. Yes, we overdo the incarceration fixes all ills thing, we've got an unhealthy fetish for it, but my point was, the poor everywhere are disproportionately affected. People seem to take it that I'm okay with that. I'm not, but its not uniquely American and its not a policy to target ethnicities. If America were all white or all black we'd still have a problem of overrepresentation of poor in the system. By overrepresentation I mean normalizing for crimes.
  - bambax 11y ago
    Yes, disproportionately incarcerating the poor is probably universal. But incarceration-fetish is uniquely American. No other country has ever done that in all of history. When it is done in such huge numbers it really isn't "law enforcement" anymore, it's just some form of apartheid. The rest of the world should subject the US to the same kind of shaming that was used against South Africa. But of course, the rest of the world doesn't have the balls to do that, so here we go.

darkroasted 11y ago

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not? It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues. Do you know what Ockham's razor is? The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang. If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.

beat 11y ago
Do you really think things are different in wealthier communities because they "self-police"? Calling the police in a poor neighborhood is dangerous business... not because of gang retaliation, but because of the police themselves. And as you observe, the police generally do nothing about street dealers, and what they do is ineffectual. So why even bother calling them?
- darkroasted 11y ago
  Well, in a "wealthy" community, generally the police are members of the community. They live nearby, go to the same schools, etc. So all policing in a sense is self-policing. There is much less of a sense of the police being the "other", and vice versa, the police have less of sense that the population is all "others" and all "savages". When you are an outside police force, you only deal with the criminals, so you it becomes your sense that the entire community is criminal. Also, I put "wealthy" in scare quotes, because this dynamic also applies to areas like Chinatown or the Hasidic Jew communities of Brooklyn. These communities are not rich, but have low crime rates and rarely involve the police in their disputes, they mostly take care of problems using internal social sanctions. More generally, "self-policing" means problems are nipped in the bud early before they escalate to crimes requiring the police, and never have a chance to escalate to murders and retaliation killings. Most "policing" is taken care of by families and parents. Growing up, it was normal for one parent to complain to another parent about the behavior of the second parent's child, and the second parent to enforce discipline on their own children. I cannot remember a single time in my neighborhood where we had to call the police on a neighbor. I cannot actually recall a single instance of crime, such as burglary.

analyst74 11y ago

I do believe ams6110's post have some merits. If you grow up in the ghetto with role models largely being gang members and most your friends have been or are going to jail, it's difficult to grow into a mentality that value education and achievement. It just happens due to historical reasons, especially racism, majority of the ghetto are blacks. This actually perpetuate the unspoken racism, where people consciously or unconsciously associate black people with all the bad things happening in ghetto. As a counter example, Asian Americans were also highly discriminated against in the past century, immigration from Asia were barred, those who were here cannot acquire citizenship, cannot own land, etc etc. Asians were generally viewed as poor uneducated labours, not too different from blacks. But today Asians are hardly viewed as that, largely thanks to large influx of educated and hard working Asian immigrants in recent years (due to immigration law preference), who changed the public perception of Asians, lifted Asian neighbourhoods from ghetto status and gave positive role model and connections to poor Asian kids (local or immigrants). Conclusion? Focusing on "helping" visible minority actually reinforce the perception that certain ethnic groups need help. What we need to focus on instead, is to help those in need of help, without regards to skin colors.