The Gates Arrest: what does it say about race?

That's the issue? Really, J-Rod? And you know he doesn't trust law enforcement....how? He said the police acted stupidly, which they did. Where exactly is he wrong?

 

Quick statistics lesson:

You only get a 3% probability over 5 years if you assume a few things that don't really hold up.

1. There are no repeat offenders among the police. If there are (for the sake of argument) 450 complaints against police each month, you have no way of knowing how many of those complaints are against the same officers, or against officers who also had complaints in prior months. That makes your 3% an upper limit at best.


2. You assume that the entire population interacts with the police on a regular basis, and everyone at the same rate. If I don't interact with the police at all in a month, then my probability of encountering a corrupt/abusive cop is exactly 0%. A better statistic would be the number of complaints per interaction with police, not over an arbitrary period of time.


3. Probabilities do not follow addition, but rather tend to follow an exponential format. If the probability of not running into a corrupt/abusive cop in 1 month (1 - monthly rate of abuse) is 99.95% (.9995), then the proper equation would be (1 - monthly rate of abuse)^(number of months). For the short term, because of rounding, it winds up being close to simply adding, but over 60 months you get a difference of 0.04%


4. Most of all, you are assuming that the monthly number you gave is representative of a typical month. There's an equal probability that it is an excessive month as it is that it is a mild one. Without further information, you can't really extrapolate anything from a single data point.

Kimball Kinnison

 

What do you mean,"How do you know he doesn't trust the police?"

Didn't I make it clear that President Obama, while admitting that he doesn't know what happened, concluded that the police were "stupid." It's an opinion that even President Obama, after learning the facts, no longer holds.

He held the police liable using nothing but his mistrust of the police...this coming for the head of the Executive branch of the United States of America.

 

He heard about what happened, knew very little facts, and made a judgment call based on those scant facts. In fact I'd say quite a number of people here did the same thing. Not only that they've been posting ahem...semi-racist stuff here ever since. So again, how do you know he doesn't trust the police? He made a remark that the police acted stupidly--which they did--that doesn't indicate he has anything other than an opinion. It makes him human. Of course conservatives these days really don't care whether he's human or not. So I'm not surprised that they're trying to make an issue of this, either.

Oh, and here's my thought pattern on all things Obama: If a conservative thinks it's 'important' it's probably not. And it's most likely crap.

 

Well, okay you're wrong. First yes it can include repeat offenders, but each incident is also not limited to one officer, so lacking other information I'm assuming that's at worst a wash.

Second, the 3% wasn't for the public, it was for the police. A police officer has 3% chance in 5 years of showing up on the list, not that any individual member of the public has a 3% chance of running afoul of the police. That's why I said "probability of an officer being involved over 5 years" not "the probability of you being involved with the police over 5 years".

Third, I actually used the multiplication method which gets you 2.96% and rounded. While you're right that using the adding method gives you 3% flat, if you feel the need to stand on that .04% as a stance against rounding, I will spot you that .04% for your argument. I'm sure we all feel safer.

On your final point there are 2 other months listed and both have roughly similar incident numbers. July's also came out and they're comparable too. Apr had 495, May had 423, Jun had 431. Thanks for showing you didn't bother to look at the site before condemning the math.

Were there any other statistics complaint to deal with or was that about it?

Edit// Oh one last absolute destruction of a specious argument. that site does not list every single complaint. I 'm not going to go back and check but I don't believe I said it did. For example, between 1999 and 2004 there were roughly 1774 police brutality charges filed a year in Chicago. 2002-2004 there 10,148 charges of were 10,149 charges of brutality, false arrest, sexual abuse, or racial harassment.

Those are the statistics of the sort where Mr 44's 95% figure come in. It is not applicable to the website I linked.

 

FID, your gonna believe what you want. And that's fine. But the police didn't act stupidly. Even Obama admits his remarks were improperly "calibrated." So you can think that the cops acted stupidly, but in a room with you and Obama you would be the only one who has that opinion.

He made a call based not on facts, as he admitted that he didn't have them. On what else could he have made that call, absent of facts, other than mistrust of the cops?

 

Umm, no. My aunt's neighbor across the street was breaking into eveybody's house in the neighborhood, and my college campus, in broad daylight for months, carrying around a huge luggage bag that she would stuff things into. Nobody suspected her for the longest time, because she was just a petite little woman who enters into beauty contests. Appearances can be dcveiving.

So, the neighbor definitely SHOULD have called the police. (I don't know half my neighbors either.)

As I addressed in my other post, that would be just as wrong. It shouldn't matter if you have a cane, there was an 85 year old man in a wheel chair who shot a police officer in my city a few years ago. Or even better, what about that security guard who helped that poor old man into the Holocaust Museum? Was that old man really that innocent and helpless?

In fact, just a few days ago I was reading a recent news article on how crime rates among the elderly are increasing. We live in a messed up world. Elderly people pretend they need help, and shoot you in the back. Children in a foreign country offer you some food, and they end up blowing you up. Mothers drown their children in the bath tub. This is the world we live in, so we should not discriminate on either race or age/ability/status.

People kept bringing up "if it was Larry Summers instead of Skip Gates, he wouldn't have been arrested." If that's true, then that's WRONG. I don't care what fancy degree you have, what your status is: The. Law. Is. The. Law.

See above.

 

He's a politician, of course he's going to make a half-assed apology if the public thinks he 'misspoke'. And they did act stupidly. They didn't have to arrest Gates, all they had to do was put him in handcuffs and their car while they verified his identity and then went on with their way.


And I don't know...what else could he have based his opinion on? Oh! I know, word of mouth. Yeah, you know that thing we do on here every day. I'm sure he heard that Gates was arrested in his own home and that's it and made the call from there. I think you're showing your own personal bias in concluding he has an inherent distrust of the police. Don't be so obtuse. Unless you're intentionally doing it. Well...in that case, party on.

 

Espy

The article is probably one of the best I've read about affirmative action and race. I don't really know what to add.

 

Here is an interesting editorial from Bob Herbert at the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/opinion/01herbert.html

 

There are only two people who know what really happened. A person should not be arrested just for yelling at cop, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea to yell at cops. The smart thing would be not to yell at them. From what it seems like, Gates was the first one to throw race out there. The cop didn't arrive on the scene just because he was black, he showed up because someone had reported suspicious behavior. The only action that could have been motivated by race was him him arresting Gates. He didn't drive past and see a black man in a fancy house and decide he needed to make sure he lived there.

But cops arresting people who yell at them is by no means limited to one race. Would he have let a white woman yell at him the same way? Who knows, but I doubt it. I can agree that there are real issues involving the police and the black community. I just think this incident has almost nothing to teach us about them. The only thing it can teach us is that it is just stupid to yell at cops, and that they should learn to take it better. (BTW, that isn't an either/or thing)

The Gates incident is so far removed from lower class minority's problems, that whites are now less likely to see them as important issues because if one black man cries racism for no good reason, then they all must be doing so. I do believe in class as an issue much more than race, and feel I as a middle class white male probably have more in common with the poor minority than Gates does as a very rich and powerful black man.

As for the article, of course both factors will play a role, but is it 99% internal issues vs 1% discrimination, 50/50, or 20/80?
I don't think it is 50/50, but would say it is somewhere between 99/1 and 80/20. Of course historical discrimination may have exacerbated some of the problems, such as mine workers in South Africa having two families, one at the mine and one in the countryside because the white mine owners wouldn't let the workers bring their families to live with them at the mine so it inculcated a culture where polygamy and promiscuity became the norm. But at that point, I don't see there is anything the whites of South Africa can do to fix the problems they caused.

 

Not to mention that "shockingly high black crime rates" is generally another way of saying "shockingly high numbers of blacks charged with/convicted of crimes". Which, personally, is not something I'd be triumphantly touting while arguing that that racism doesn't exist in any significant degree among police forces.

 

So what exactly are you saying here? That blacks don't in fact commit any more crimes than other group of people, they are just prosecuted more? Is it racist to acknowledge that there are in fact material differences in the rates of crime between them? And if you don't think there are material differences, do you have any evidence to back that up?

I know some have mentioned drug laws, but we should also realize that not all illegal drugs are the same. Is there a huge difference between crack and cocaine? No, and there is a problem in laws treating one very differently than another. But there is a big difference between crack and pot. But even not couting drug charges, there is still a lot of other crimes out there.

 

They didn't have to arrest Gates, all they had to do was put him in handcuffs and their car while they verified his identity and then went on with their way.

But FID, even as you typed that, do you honestly think it would have made a difference in perception? Or rather, I should ask how much difference do you think it would have made?

What would have been the next step? Un-handcuffing him and leaving him on his front lawn while screaming? How would you have viewed a headline that read "POLICE HANDCUFF GATES THEN RELEASE HIM ON HIS FRONT YARD WITHOUT CHARGE?"

Do you think everyone would have stepped back and collectively concluded that Gates was detained based on a reasonable belief according to his actions? I'm pretty sure people would still be complaining about that as well, because if so, then that's what should be the conversation now.

For another point of law, what you just described is still an "arrest" or "seizure." Arrests are based on the facts known at the time, and are certainly fluid. Someone can be arrested and un-arrested during the same instance. Even in your example, Gates would have still been handcuffed because of his actions.

I suppose the police could have handcuffed him, placed him in the car and told him that if he calmed down he would be released, but then what if he didn't calm down? Really there's no fundamental difference between what happened and your suggestion.

 

People were talking about the story before Obama was asked about it. That's WHY he was asked in the first place.

The bigger topic IS the incident itself and the debate over what people's intentions were, not another excuse to complain about something Obama did because he can't do anything right.

 

A quick Google search gives some interesting stories.

Even if blacks don't commit more crimes than whites, they're more likely to be caught because they're more likely to be stopped and/or searched. Blacks could even be committing LESS crimes than whites and still be convicted of more due to the more frequent attention.

 

That the American media and public remain, to this day, nearly a half-century after the major wars of the civil rights movement were fought, utterly, detrimentally, morbidly obsessed with race.

 

But is it the American media? Hell, when was the last time a Senate topic went to 11 pages? I don't think that this is fueled by the media. It's fueled by us and the media is giving us what we want. It's an interesting topic with many angles. And I don't think it's race, exactly, that we are obsessed with.

I think that race is being used as a swerve, but part of the real obsession is that last week Obama's inexpirience and mentoring influences showed themselves.

And as I said, this is the focus of the debate.

 

Obama is in this instance a mere subset of the morbid race obsession.

 

If that's true, and I don't believe that it is, it's because of the afore mentioned swerve.

EDIT:And if it was true, what's morbid about a constant examination of race relations? Isn't it part of the responsibilities of the American people? Isn't it, for the most part, a responsible and nessecary part of life in a melting pot?

 

Man, this is Lewinsky all over again, but even more ridiculous.
The world is on fire in a thousand places, there's hundreds of pressing issues that need to be resolved, and what do our friends the American Republicans focus on? A flub-up by their president about an arrest without a crime.

 

But that doesn't really answer the question, do blacks commit more crimes or not? I would think they would if only because poor people commit more crimes than middle class people, and a greater percentage of the black population is poor. But if we adjusted for class, I'm not sure what the truth is. But we should at least acknowledge that it is possible that blacks are committing more crimes. Also I'm sure the type of crimes committed are different. A black person if stopped by police on the street might be found with some drugs, but if police stopped me they wouldn't find anything, even if I was engaged in securities fraud. White collar crime isn't something that a random police search will discover.

But I can say I'm pretty sure Baltimore has higher crime rates than Salt Lake.

 

A thing about Baltimore's crime rate. The city (I live in Baltimore County) has lower rates of other crimes than they do for murder. And usually the only people dying from murders are drug dealers and people who associate with drug dealers. On that note I feel no sympathy for them.

 

On a normal day, no it is not racist to say that. However, after you post this:

Then yes, yes it is.