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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I assert that the linkage between the BLM movement and its activism and the increase in the murder rate, particularly for black men, is the clearest, most obvious linkage in social science in the last generation, and possibly since the invention of the discipline.

Surely the obvious counterpoint is that the BLM movement utterly failed at the ballot box, with multiple major cities having elections resulting in the side pushing for increased police funding winning (or not even having a serious candidate pushing for any kind of police reform).

But I'm guessing your claim is that the protests themselves discouraged the police from doing their jobs, leading to less effective policing (per officer/dollar spent). Which seems to just prove BLM's point that the current way we do public safety / law enforcement is bad for black people.

But I'm guessing your claim is that the protests themselves discouraged the police from doing their jobs, leading to less effective policing (per officer/dollar spent). Which seems to just prove BLM's point that the current way we do public safety / law enforcement is bad for black people.

I'm having a hard time understanding this argument. I assume that you accept that less police attention = more black people getting murdered. How does this mean that policing is bad for black people?

If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.

The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role). The police murdering black people directly and the police deciding to do nothing about others murdering black people are both reasons for black people to not like the police.

If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.

The system did not "arbitrarily decide to not protect them". The loudest section of the Black Community, and the much louder social groups that blacks allow to speak for them, demanded that police stop protecting them, and enforced these demands with overwhelming social and physical compulsion.

The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role).

There are no shortage of deep-blue cities and even states where such a policy could be implemented exactly as Blues might wish it, completely unconstrained by Red interference. No such system has ever been demonstrated. If such a system were indeed possible, probably it should have been developed and deployed and its efficacy demonstrated, rather than gutting the existing system with no replacement on-deck.

But hey, no rush. As demonstrated in this thread, most people aren't even aware that any of this has happened. The people who believed, falsely, that thousands of unarmed, innocent blacks were being killed by a racist police force are blissfully unaware that the murder rate among blacks is currently a line going straight up, because the people who sold them the former lie have declined to enlighten them to the later reality. After all, it's just thousands of extra dead Black people per year for the indefinite future, the annihilation of three decades of social engineering nation-wide. Obviously more important issues obtain, and will continue to until memories grow foggy enough to allow this entire fracas to be blamed on racist Reds.

There are no shortage of deep-blue cities and even states where such a policy could be implemented exactly as Blues might wish it, completely unconstrained by Red interference.

I think the elections since the George Floyd protests show pretty clearly that this isn't a straight-forward Blue vs. Red issue. Portland, about as deep-blue as it gets, re-elected Ted Wheeler, for instance. I recall police reform not going over well in the NYC mayor election either.

While writing "Black Lives Matter" on things may be popular among the Blue Tribe, implementing their policy proposals seems to consistently lose at the ballot box.

BLM's specific argument (if one should exist) was that cops were engaged in 'open season' on black people - that it was their actual presence making life hard for the downtrodden.

You cannot pretzel that back to a vague, generalized, 'reasonable' complaint about 'failures of modern law enforcement practices, therefore BLM is on to something' without appearing dishonest or suspect.

BLM wanted less police-as-we-know-it, not less money/effort put towards public safety and law enforcement. One of their commonly repeated complaints is that the militarization of police is expensive leading to less money to hire actual people who they believe would be more effective than expensive equipment at improving public safety.

See Campaign Zero, for instance, which lists:

  1. Public Safety Beyond Policing: "Campaign Zero builds and sustains efforts that support communities to redefine public safety and create solutions that do not involve police."
  1. Shrink the Reliance and Power of the Police: "Diminishing the power of police requires a targeted and multi-faceted approach. This involves reducing when law enforcement can be deployed, what actions they can take when interacting with individuals, and defining when and how they are permitted to take those actions."

as their first two policy goals.

(EDIT: That list formats correctly as "1." and "2." in the preview, but not in the post...)

Both of those bullet points are completely compatible with reducing cop presence. Or if not presence, cop interactions - to diminish the overall surface area where police and black Americans interface with each other. The second point in particular gestures towards this.

Yes, the policy proposals I listed because they relate to reducing police presence both are compatible with reducing police presence. They both explicitly talk about reducing the number of police in exchange for increasing the number of people working in public safety.

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