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On Sunday I speculated that the Dems will use a George Floyd-like psychological operation to increase Democrat turnout in the election. Today, Kamala issued a statement about Sonya Massey, a black woman killed by police whose body cam footage was released recently:
The body cam footage shows two police officers answering a call from Massey about a prowler in her yard. Massey acts mentally unwell throughout the encounter, answers that she is on medication when asked about her mental health, and has a difficult time telling the officers what her last name is or retrieving her photo ID. The officers are somewhat friendly if impatient, but the vibe changes when Massey grabs a pot of boiling water after the officers requested she turn off the stove. The officers say they are stepping back while she grabs the boiling water (crazy people may use boiling water as a weapon, something that has lead Starbucks to ban giving patrons boiling water), and Massey says “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”. Either because of this statement or because of a physical sign we don’t pick up on the body cam, an officer points his gun and demands that she drop the boiling water. She does not drop the boiling water but instead continues to hold on to it. Right before she is shot the body cam just barely picks up Massey throwing the boiling water toward the officers, with the water landing on the ground and steaming where it landed. I want to thank Twitter user Fartblaster4000 for turning that moment into a helpful gif.
Massey’s death is certainly not the preferred outcome of the encounter. Once the officers picked up on Massey being crazy, they should have mentally decided to leave her house if she did something like equip a plausible weapon. The three seconds that the officer gives for Massey to drop the pot of boiling water was insufficient — of course, the pot was in her hand and thrown toward the officer before the officer shot. Springfield is the third most criminal city in America, so perhaps the officers did not believe they had the resources to call mental health professionals in their place. In any case I do not think that the officers should have moved toward her but instead left the premises until they felt she did not pose a threat. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for crazy people to attack police officers with whatever is around, and it’s rational to be afraid of a crazy person who has a pot of scalding water in their hands, able to disfigure you for life.
According to a UPenn study, BLM may have been the political ingredient that shifted the election toward Joe Biden:
If the relevant voters are swayed more by victimhood narratives than Covid, this explains why Republicans are bringing up the topic of migrant rapes. I predict we are going to see more victimhood narratives in the coming months!
What immediately jumps out at me is that "drop the boiling water" is not the kind of an order that is easy to comply to. Seeing as, you know, dropping a pot of boiling water at your feet will predictably scald your legs.
That's what makes these moments such an obvious win for demagogues.
People spend lots of time debating the minutiae of the encounter which just makes it more visible and talked about.
Instead, as a society, we need to say, "I don't care". The overwhelming evidence from body cams is that almost all police shootings are justified. But there are more than 330 million people in the U.S. There are more than 20,000 homicides. The police are dealing with violent, unstable, and drug-addicted people. There will always be mistakes.
Instead of arguing about this detail or that detail, we should simply frown, ignore, and move on. Whining about police should be considered low status behavior.
The body cams are for scrutinizing them collectively, as a society, to be sure that the mistakes are rare, rather than "ignore and move on".
Scrutiny of this kind is probably best left as a local matter rather than coopted as a national political strategy.
Yeah this becoming a Big Issue in the summer of election year is right on time. Very hard to even want to talk about it. Are we gonna actually fix this at the national level or not? What's the specific policy proposal? Why hasn't it been implemented or at least proposed in Congress in 4 years of Democrat rule? Etc etc.
My contempt toward the use of this event as a political strategy threatens to overshadow my raw spontaneous personal feelings about the event itself, which is a shame.
You can't fix it. For one, cops are people, so some of them will make mistakes, or panic, or even simply be malicious. You can, and should, minimize this with proper hiring and training, but it will never be entirely zero, because cops are people. Meanwhile, racial tensions are not driven by the deaths but by the media coverage, and the media coverage is not driven by the deaths either but by political expediency.
According to the Washington Post the police killed 245 black people last year. That's pretty much one per work day. We certainly don't get national attention for every one. That only happens when it's convenient.
Suppose we had some magic way to lower police violence by 9/10ths. By this point the US would have the nicest police in the world by far. But there would still be more than one black person killed by the police each month. Today, there is much less than one big news story per month even though they could do this multiple times a week if they wanted. One or two a month would still be more than plenty to keep going as they are going.
US police killed 1161 people in total in 2023. If it were lowered by 9/10ths, you'd save 1045 people a year (assuming this lowering of police violence doesn't just increase the rest of the violence), but you would otherwise change nothing. For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths. So even that is only a small drop in the bucket. You can round that down to nobody. (After all, one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.)
The actual police violence doesn't matter at all in the big scheme of things, and not even with literal magic could you do something about police violence and thereby change anything about society.
Ironically, in our rush to deem police as morally bad in 2020, traffic deaths rose from 10.99/100k in 2019 to 12.89 in 2021, around 8000 additional deaths, with no appreciable change in total miles traveled. It's pretty clear to me (and anecdotally, comes up in conversation occasionally as generally accepted) that they basically stopped enforcing traffic laws at the time, which has lead to more deaths than if police killings dropped to zero. And the number of murders went up quite a bit too. I'm fairly confident that, overall, Black Lives Matter has a negative count of (Black) lives saved, but I'm glad (/s) they feel good about their advocacy.
IMO one of these cases where systems are more complicated than they seem. Something about Chesterton and fences, even though I think there's substantial room for improvement in how we do policing and criminal justice overall.
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