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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.
This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.
I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.
The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.
And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.
So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.
I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.
Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.
Well said. At a minimum I am simply not interested in hearing from anyone who doesn't know any cops or hasn't at least done a ride-along. The moral panic about policing is mostly just ignorance, a symptom of our class-segregated society.
When bad actors (like Kamala in this case) weaponize that ignorance, they damage the fabric of society for their own personal benefit.
The “moral panic” isn’t just about ignorance, though for many people ignorance of policing conditions no doubt plays a role. It’s also about a severe lack of accountability for the police who do abuse their positions of authority. When police who steal money are awarded immunity from both government prosecution and private lawsuits, or when police officers who shoot unarmed suspects, charge them with resisting arrest, and publicly lie about the whole thing are told “no biggie,” people reasonably get pretty upset. It’s one thing when a cop abuses his position—that’s bad, but you’ll never get a force that’s made up of 100% moral, upstanding officers. It’s quite another thing when a cop abuses his position—and his department, the local prosecutor, and the courts all protect him from punishment. That’s the sort of thing that reduces public support of cops, no different than how the Catholic sex abuse coverup led to greatly reduced trust in bishops and priests. Every time a cop abuses his position and gets a nice paid vacation out of it, protected from any legal or personal financial harm, while the taxpayer pays to settle lawsuits on his behalf, people look at it and say, “The system is broken.” They don’t need to have ever ridden in a squad car to know that.
But what about all of the times when a Cop abuses his power and is absolutely punished for it?
What about all of the times a case falls apart at trial for what are really, really minor technical errors usually in evidentiary handling? If I see the killer of my husband go free because there was "reasonable doubt" about how the pistol recovered from the trunk was found, do I get the same level of sympathy as these "taxpayers paying to settle lawsuits."?
More importantly - what if the truly heinous abuses of police power represent <1% of all cops while the other 99% are just trying to get home safe and not fuck up their cases.
(Side note: You cited Catholic clergy sex abuses and the up-the-chain indictment of Bishops and Cardinals. Do you feel the same way about public school teachers and administrators where the sexual abuse rate is multiple times of the general public (which, itself, was multiple times of that in the Catholic church)?)
You're making kind of a wild argument - Cops should be incredibly close to perfection and, if they fail, we should feel justified in indicting the entire system of policing for multiple years at a time. How do you expect positive changes to be made?
If I'm a police Commissioner and I discover real malfeasance, hold a press conference and say "Yeah, I'm totally going after these crooked cops" but then you stand up and say "It happened on your watch. You should resign, maybe be prosecuted. This whole department is suspect" .... when does corrective change actually occur? Everyone seems to be too busy indicting the entire system into oblivion .... despite it's working so incredibly well most of the time.
But I suppose you have history and precedent on your side. This all ends with "defund the police" which has resulted in a murder rate among the most vulnerable demographics skyrocketing.
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