Recent FB posts by classmates (law school) saying they don't care that police are legally justified in the recent shootings, "LMPD is out of control", calling me mean names and hurting my feelings (sarcasm) etc, I decided to take a break from studying for my criminal procedure final to see what all the screeching was about
By the numbers, it doesn't look to me like there is a race/police problem.
Since 2010 LMPD has reported almost 8000 incidents of officers being assaulted. That's almost
3 officers a day "assaulted" by suspects, for 8 years.
In 2016, the FBI reported Louisville to have a population of nearly
685,000 people. Over 6500 violent crimes were reported (violent crime, rape, and robbery). There were over
84,000 crimes total according to LMPD.
There are no numbers on race, that I can find, for Louisville crimes, so I'll use the FBI 2016 national data. Roughly
70% of crimes committed by White, 27-30% by Black of African American.
Louisville's population is approximately 70% white and 22% Black or African American.
From 2011 to 2015 (that's
5 years) LMPD has 27 Officer Involved Shootings, with 40 officers involved, resulting in 7 lethal shootings of suspects (25%) , 2 self-inflicted, and 18 non-lethal shootings (67%). Of those 40 officers, 16 were a
white officer shooting a black suspect (45%), 13 were a
white officer shooting a white suspect (32.5%), 8 were a
black officer shooting a black suspect (20%), and 1 black officer shooting a white suspect (2.5%). Out of 1235 sworn officers on the
LMPD force as of 2018, approximately 83% are white and 12% are black.
So, you have the numbers more or less lining up. The only disparity I found is on a national level, where in race and crime as a whole. From the 2010 census
73.6% of the U.S. population was white and 12.6% was black of African American. Yet according to the FBI while roughly
70% of crimes were committed by white, the majority of the remaining 30% was by black. There can be several factors that would explain this, or there might be nothing significant.
Some quotes from the snowflakes that started my inquiry, for your entertainment. Just for reference, this is all pertaining to defending 4 criminals who shot at/threw knives at our local officers in the past month, who were subsequently shot when they attacked officers. She is a HUGE Black Lies Matter supporter and is always pestering me on FB when I post pro-gun or pro-police stuff. It finally got to where I can share some of the choice things that were said.
there is footage from three officers, which I assume you have seen, in which one officer in a car radios that shots have been fired at his car; he shoots through his windshield at the suspect and two other officers simultaneously run up on the man shouting "MOTHERFUCKER, MOTHERFUCKER!" and empty their clips into him, then yell at him to roll over on the ground after shooting him 20 times. This seems excessive to me, to put it in the most polite way I can manage.
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I pointed out that offended me, as they were magazines, and not clips. I was told I had no empathy for human life :/
This is probably the crux of the issue. I don't care if these shootings are legally justifiable; I care that three people are dead. Legally justifiable doesn't mean "good." It doesn't mean it's acceptable that people are dying violent deaths in the street. If you care about officer safety AND you are also interested in finding ways to deescalate deadly confrontations between officers and civilians, which aside from these three incidents in our city have increased nationally this year by about 10%, then we can talk about that.
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if you think that the only thing that matters is that the suspect/victim is to blame and therefore their death doesn't matter because they were a "criminal" / aggressor, if you think it's their own fault or they got what they deserved, then there's no point in me trying to convince you otherwise because we have a fundamental disagreement about the value of human life.
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You continue to fall back on the idea that people "who chose to put themselves in those situations by breaking the law in the first place" are, first of all "not scared people," which seems dehumanizing, and in a larger sense have brought death upon themselves. As I mentioned above, I'm not interested in devaluing life on the basis of criminal activity. People should not be executed in the street for breaking the law, as you stated yourself. Three people have been killed this week by the police in this city. How are we going to deal with that? How are we going to prevent this from happening again? That's what I care about.
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Someone tried pointing out that it wasn't the law breaking that got the suspects shot, it was their attacking police. to which we get this gem
No, they broke the law, then the police confronted them, often with weapons drawn, which the police are legally entitled to do, then they (the suspects) respond in kind, which then becomes the justification for the the police kill them. It's a no-win framework for anyone engaged in an altercation with the police that justifies police killings. But more to the point, even if your framing is right, you're just reaching for another reason to say, "It's okay that they died. It's okay that 350 people have been killed by police this year. This is fair." My point is if you don't think this is a problem in the first place, we're never going to agree.
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When I see black and brown bodies consistently having their life stolen from them before their time by the people meant to protect them, I see a system that is malfunctioning.
When you look at that same scene, you see the system working directly as intended.
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