The best that complying gets you is a little bit better of a chance of surviving. Either way, you're just rolling the dice, and it becomes a judgement call that an untrained panicking individual has to make in the moment.

It doesn't give us much data to interpret besides "when a civilian knows they could be murdered by a gang, do they run or submit?"

I would wager it is a much higher chance of surviving. You are rolling the dice any time you leave the house, what matters is the statistics, if you have a 0.000001 percent chance of being killed by the police, you are still "rolling the dice", but if that goes up to a 99% chance once you decide to start resisting, or run away, that is significant to consider in your calculations isnt it? Whatever the actual numbers

We need police, and policing is a hard a stressful job that isn't rewarded much considering the risk and public derision associated with it now, so while we certainly need to address the issues in policing I think saying they are just a murderous gang is a little disingenuous and ignores the majority of what police do day to day.

I don't think other country's police forces have similar issues with murdering the people they police on a regular basis.

I think most countries have their own issues with police in some way, it is a complicated problem. I'm not sure how the statistics measure up per capita, and it is a little more complicated than that in the big picture I think if you consider how reliable reporting on those things would be in a more authoritarian country for example.

There are certainly better examples of police forces in the world, but I would also argue they don't deal with the same issues the US does, like the amount of guns for example so its not just a matter of simple math IMO.

One of the uniquely US aspects of policing is how militarized they are. Police forces around the US take trainings on how to have the warrior mindset, and how to be ok with pulling the trigger on a suspect the second they "Fear for their lives". They aren't taught to deescalate or control situations, only that they're policing hostile populations and should be constantly afraid for their lives in all circumstances which is absurd.

I would agree on that for sure, they are exporting that model to other countries as well, if you interact with police in Canada you will notice a lot of similarities, though less extreme of course.

There needs to be changes but I think to do that you also need to address some of the issues that caused the police to become so militarized in the first place. There are serious issues with gangs, guns and drugs, so while I disagree with how the police operate there are issues they have to deal with that I don't think get addressed in situations like this, people just want to see them punished as a whole, but to me that will just lead to more division and more situations like this.

I think it's fair to point out given that you responded to other posts prior to my observation, but after having posed the question.

And here we are with both you and sirthom having not answered what, I think, is a very simple question. You both operate from a position of having an opinion, but each of you are reluctant to share that opinion.

If community policing is the answer, we have to ask why we don't have community policing today. Why on earth would the Memphis police department be hiring people from outside the city?

The disparity talk has been re-hashed a million times as I have said. At the end of the day I believe in self accountability for my own actions. Few years back, a black guy got gunned down on a porch on my street by another black guy in a gang/drug related thing. Sure we can have a discussion on the 37 multi-variate reasons that led that guy to that point in life to go kill that other guy and frame it in a way how it's really not his fault that the system took his dad or that the school never gave him a chance or fill in the reason, but in the end it was his choice to go pull the trigger.

My question to you is why the acceptance of facts and statistics at face value so difficult?

I don't think there's any difficulty any of us have in accepting statistics, and I am fine to accept any specific statistic on crime disparities irrespective even to whether they're mathematically valid and the research methods are sound.

If any statistic reflects a disparity, then we are then left with the question: Why? Why does this disparity exist?

All I've simply asked of both you and sirthom, given that you've each noted a statistical disparity, is why you think that disparity exists?

This post was edited by Handcuffs on Jan 29 2023 03:41pm