iftttwall

“No justice, no peace!” they shout. Then they break windows.

It makes me furious.

But then I watch the video of the Minneapolis cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, while Floyd repeatedly says, “I can’t breathe,” and three other officers just watch.

Then I see the video of the woman in Central Park calling 911, claiming, “An African-American man is threatening me!” But that was a racist lie.

Christian Cooper just asked her to leash her dog. We’re supposed to leash our dogs in that section of Central Park.

But Amy Cooper didn’t leash her dog. She frantically called 911, claiming she was under threat. She knew that by telling the police “an African American man is threatening me,” she’d probably get a more aggressive response.

The left-wing New Yorker (she donated to Democratic campaigns) was careful to use that pointless, yet politically correct, term for black. Even though she’s a racist.

Watching things like that should help me sympathize with the people rioting last night.

So should my friend Fabian’s experience. When Fabian was 20, he bought his first car, a luxury edition Infiniti J30 Sedan. He’d saved up for it working as an airplane technician, transporting U.S. soldiers to war zones around the world.

Then, while pumping gas back in NYC, police officers approached him, demanding his license and registration.

He produced the documents and showed them that the car was registered in his name. But Fabian is black, and the police would not believe that the car belonged to him. They arrested him and charged him with grand theft auto.

He sat in jail for two days.

Finally, a judge dismissed the case—using the same documentation Fabian had showed the police. They released him—without any apology.

The trauma still haunts him. Fabian says it evokes a sense of helplessness—a fear that “anytime there’s an encounter with law enforcement, getting arrested or even death could be the outcome.”

Yet, as I watch protesters (even two lawyers were arrested) throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, and I see opportunistic young people looting stores, and my privileged left-wing white friends say things like, “the looting of our society by unrestrained capitalism is worse!” I get even more furious.

This country, and capitalism, has done more good things for disadvantaged people of all races than any society, ever.

Fabian, despite his terrible experience, says that living as a black man in America is a gift. He came here as a teen from Jamaica. America, he says, gave him opportunity he would never have had elsewhere.

Now, he’s a capitalist who owns things. He smiles as he says he sees “a cultural black renaissance: promotion of black education, ownership, and acquiring assets as a top priority.”

America, he says, is the land of opportunity.

Even if some cops are racist bullies.

Yet, so much that is exceptional about America is drowned out by the loudest voices on the extremes.

On one side, we have an “unraveling” president, as George Will puts it, an angry bully “banging his spoon on his highchair.”

On the other side are the leftists who defend the violence and looting, like the masked antifa children who want to destroy capitalism.

On Twitter, I watched video of a group driving around in a Mercedes-Benz, passing out bricks (for protesters to throw). I applaud the young black woman who called them “stupid” and tossed the brick back into their car, yelling: “This white b— giving a group of black men a brick to throw! You know that s— could get them killed!”

It could. No one wins in these clashes.

I assume there is less racism in America than there once was, but there’s no way to prove that. Even if there were, Malcolm X wrote, “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress.”

But I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.

George Floyd’s killer was arrested and other cops who abused their power were fired. In the past, police officers were never prosecuted.

For years in America, the percentage of interracial marriage has steadily increased. That suggests progress.

Burning police stations and looting stores won’t speed that progress. It sets us back.

COPYRIGHT 2020 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2U8oPge
via IFTTT

Last Thursday the president of the United States threw a temper tantrum disguised as an executive order, threatening to punish Twitter for daring to annotate two of his comments about voting by mail. Twitter retaliated the next day, slapping a warning label on a presidential tweet about the protests triggered by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.

President Donald Trump’s order was legally meaningless, aiming to increase the civil liability of disfavored social media platforms in ways that are beyond his powers and that would encourage more, not less, scrutiny of online speech. But Twitter’s sudden interest in policing the president’s claims and rhetoric was equally hard to take seriously, promising a kind of dispassionate and consistent oversight it cannot possibly achieve with Trump, let alone every public official on Earth.

Trump, as head of the federal government’s executive branch, is bound by the First Amendment. Twitter, as a private company, is not.

That remains true no matter how many times Trump calls social media platforms the “21st century equivalent of the public square,” claims to be protecting “freedom of expression” and “sustaining our democracy” by fighting “online censorship,” or asserts that he is “applying the ideals of the First Amendment.” Those Orwellian formulations are merely cover for Trump’s attempt to shape political debate by government force—exactly what the First Amendment forbids.

A politician who was committed to freedom of expression never would have issued this order. Nor would he threaten to yank the licenses of broadcasters who offend him or suggest “chang[ing] libel laws” to facilitate lawsuits by thin-skinned public figures who don’t like their press coverage.

Just last year, Trump’s lawyers were arguing that the First Amendment imposes no restrictions on his discretion to block critics from following him on Twitter, even though he uses his account to conduct government business. A federal appeals court disagreed, ruling that Trump’s use of the account for official purposes created a “public forum” where Americans have a constitutional right to debate his policies and pronouncements.

Now Trump seems to be claiming that all of Twitter is a public forum under constitutional law, giving him a First Amendment right to use it as he chooses, unconstrained by the rules that the platform’s proprietors deem appropriate. The only thread of consistency is Trump’s self-interest.

The truth is exactly the opposite of Trump’s view: The First Amendment protects Twitter’s right to restrict or comment on users’ speech. But that does not mean Twitter is exercising that right wisely, fairly, or coherently.

Around the same time that Trump was using Twitter to casually defame an MSNBC host by insinuating that he was involved in a fictional murder, the company decided to take issue with two Trump tweets warning that expanded use of mail-in ballots would lead to “substantially fraudulent” voting and a “rigged election.” Those comments were hyperbolic and included at least one blatant inaccuracy—Trump’s claim that all California residents would receive mail-in ballots.

But that is par for the course with Trump. If Twitter tries to keep up with all of this president’s exaggerations and prevarications, especially when they are matters of interpretation, it will satisfy no one.

Twitter’s next exercise in Trump moderation involved a tweet in which he called for stronger action against violent protesters, warning that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter deemed that comment a “glorification of violence,” ordinarily prohibited by the platform’s rules, but left it up, accompanied by a “public service notice,” because an elected official said it.

As with most of its rules, Twitter enforces that one haphazardly at best, as a search for the phrase “snitches get stitches” on the platform reveals. Such inconsistency, which conservatives plausibly suspect is influenced by political bias, is a big part of their beef against Twitter.

Those complaints may have merit. But that does not mean Twitter’s inevitable failure to evenhandedly enforce its own rules qualifies as a constitutional issue.

© Copyright 2020 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Xv6VGB
via IFTTT

It’s no secret to readers of the Volokh Conspiracy, nor to readers of our parent site Reason.com, that the American criminal justice is in dire need of reform. Police are generally unaccountable for misbehavior (which, among other things allows a small number of sociopaths to consistently engage in excessive force), militarization of local police forces creates opportunities for excessive use of force, no-knock raids create all sorts of problems leading to all sorts of abuses, the drug war has been a disaster for civil liberties, coercive tactics by prosecutors lead the innocent to plead guilty to “lesser charges” to avoid total ruin, and so on. Even in the absence of racism, these problems would fall more heavily on the poor and those living on the margins of society, a population that is disproportionately African American. The presence of racism makes matters worse for them.

All that said, we rely on the media to inform us about these issues, but instead we get a preconceived narrative, as illustrated by the graphic from the Washington Post, below. I take it that readers are supposed to look at this graphic, be outraged at the disparities, and then draw whatever conclusions may follow.

But, assuming these statistics are correct, we can in fact parse them in ways that make us think more deeply about what they mean and why they are presented this way.

First, note that over a five year period, 1,262 Blacks, 887 Hispanics, and 2412 Whites were shot to death by police. In aggregate, that’s a lot of people, and we should hope (and perhaps demand) that cops can be trained to use non-lethal force more often in many situations in which they feel threatened. Police in other countries seem to manage it. On the other hand, I’ve heard a great deal of rhetoric over the past week to the effect that police officers are basically just looking for black men to hunt down, and that there is a decent chance that any encounter between the police and a black man will result in the black man’s death. That is simply not borne out by the data (even if we note that some smaller number of deaths from police violence are not from shootings). Looking just at deadly shootings, black men get arrested two million times or so each year.  Many millions more times, police have other adversarial encounters with black men, such as traffic stops, or confrontations that don’t lead to arrest. A tiny percentage of those encounters lead to deadly shootings, and in some fraction of those, the police use of force was justified by the threat faced by the officer. So the odds of an unjustified deadly shooting of a black man in a confrontation with police in any given instance is tiny.

Don’t get me wrong. EVERY SINGLE unjustified police shooting is a horrible crime, which not only may steal the victim’s life but tears at the fabric of society. But the notion that police are generally trigger happy and shooting to death anyone in sight, especially if he is black? The data don’t support even a moderate version of that rhetoric.

I’m also not arguing that there is not a serious problem with routine excessive use of force by some police officers and perhaps some entire departments. But the data suggest that “police brutality” rarely takes the form of shooting to kill, and is much more likely to be “routine,” non-deadly force.

Second, the number of whites shot and killed by police is surprisingly high, at least if one has assimilated the rhetoric out there. African Americans are getting shot disproportionately often compared to whites on a per capita basis, but if you look at arrest data, you see that African Americans are arrested for violent crime much more often per capita than whites. This creates more opportunities for confrontations between violent criminals and the police, and undoubtedly explains at least some of the disparity.

Even if there were no disparity once arrest rates were taken into account, that would not necessarily be evidence that racism does not cause fatal shootings. Just for example, African American deaths may be concentrated in big cities, where the police have better equipment and are better trained than in small rural sheriff’s departments. Better training and equipment should lead to fewer shootings. African Americans may also be less confrontational with police as they are more likely to expect to be subject to violence if they don’t cooperate, which should also lead to fewer shootings.

Regardless, what the data show is that to the extent the police are using excessive force in shootings, they are doing so against whites (and Hispanics) as well, so even if it’s more of a problem for African Americans, it’s not solely a problem for African Americans. Eliminating racism, in short, would still leave the U.S. with far more deaths from police shootings than seems reasonable.

Third (and this is what struck me the most), the Post could hardly be more transparent about the narrative it’s trying to push. The graphic shows that blacks are shot to death by police more than Hispanics who are shot more than Whites who are shot much more often than… “other”. Other is about 49 million people, which would include about 21 million Asian Americans, who likely have an even lower rate of being shot to death by police than the full “other” category. But if you are trying to frame the narrative as an uncomplicated “cops shoot people of color more than whites” you can’t actually break out “Asians” because that undermines the narrative and means you have to dig a bit beyond the simple formula.

This reminds me of Justice Sotomayer’s dissent in the BAMN case, in which she provided statistics purporting to show that affirmative action was needed to ensure educational attainment for “racial minorities,” but she excluded Asian Americans (who can at least in some sense be considered a “racial minority”) but included Hispanics, who can be of any race (and about half of whom consider themselves to be white). It’s understandable if a story wants to highlight black-white differences, for obvious historical reasons. But whenever you see someone include Hispanics as a “minority” category, but exclude Asians, you know there is a political or ideological agenda behind it.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2XYaOT9
via IFTTT

Voters appear to have ended the 20-year congressional career of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who is best known for his rabidly anti-immigrant and nativist views.

King was soundly defeated in the Republican primary for Iowa’s 4th congressional district, which he has represented since 2003. With 95 percent of precincts reporting at 11 p.m. local time, King was trailing state Sen. Randy Feenstra by more than 9 percentage points in a five-way race.

It is fitting that King’s political career will effectively come to an end in a week marked by nationwide protests against racial discrimination by law enforcement. King has a long history of making what Vanity Fair once called “barely veiled” statements in support of white nationalism. He has suggested that black Americans would be more easily able to afford abortions if they stopped buying iPhones, and for years he displayed a Confederate flag in his congressional office—which doesn’t even make historical sense, since Iowa did not join the confederacy.

His history of comments about immigrants is at least as appalling. While discussing what he saw as the need for an electrified border fence 2006, King compared illegal immigrants to livestock. King has always maintained that he only opposes illegal immigration, but any honest accounting of his time in public office—including remarks like “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” and “immigrants are importing a different culture, a different civilization, and that culture and civilization, the imported one, rejects the host’s culture“—would strongly suggest otherwise.

The last straw for many Republicans may have come in 2019, when King wondered aloud during a 2019 interview with The New York Times: “white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” He claimed the Times had misquoted him, but no one really bought it. His congressional colleagues officially rebuked him on the House floor, and Republican leaders stripped King of his committee assignments. He had trouble raising money in this election cycle, and deep-pocketed groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce backed Feenstra’s bid to unseat him.

Good riddance. King’s anti-immigrant politics and ethno-nationalist ideas may have presaged the Republican Party’s Trump Era, but they should have no place in American politics.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3dFNWyN
via IFTTT