The Burning Issue: Race and Racialism

Discussion in 'Race Relations' started by Matswin, Jul 13, 2015.

  1. Matswin

    Matswin New Member

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    The Burning Issue: Race and Racialism

    Abstract: The problems of racial strife, ethnic conflict, discrimination, and ethnic ghettoization, show no sign of abating. The ideology of multiculturalism and “colour-blindness” has proved ineffectual. This article investigates why. Race as ‘social construct’ is criticized. Racial cognizance has its roots in the unconscious. Therefore it tends to be naïve and exaggerated. This is borne out by research in cognitive science. Light is shed on psychology’s view of ethnoracial difference. Differences depend on which aspects of our common heritage that are become dominant in the population. Thus, it is not necessary to rely on a biological explanatory model. Yet, a categorical denial of biological difference is not the right way to combat racism. Community psychology research shows that ethnic integration does not foster sense of community. Ethnocultural separation, while maintaining cultural transaction, is a better solution than integration. The article highlights the problem of difference anxiety in the context of ethnicity and race.

    Keywords: cultural unconscious, white flight, segregation, psychosocial alienation, dark nature, human kinds, difference anxiety, ideology of sameness, cognitive science, cultural psychology, ethnic sociology.

    Read the article here:
    http://www.two-paths.com/racial_problem.htm

    Mats Winther
     
  2. MrNick

    MrNick Banned

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    Multiculturalism is an oxymoron.....

    People shouldn't be forced into mixed anything .... It's human nature to want to be around your own kind - your own culture. That goes for all races and cultures.

    Why do progressives think communities have cutlural identities in the first place? because they're not mixed....

    I'm Sicilian and you don't see me living in Little Itialy in Chicago... Why? I may be Sicilian but my culture is NOT Sicilian - I'm an American....

    This multiculturalism nonsense is just progressive bull(*)(*)(*)(*).... Progressives are always trying to prove they're not racist by promoting stupid (*)(*)(*)(*) like this...
     
  3. Ronstar

    Ronstar Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    you can't force people to accept racism.
     
  4. perotista

    perotista Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I wonder if the key is community that gets to know each other. I'm retired military which in itself is a community. Its a community where race or culture plays no part or little part if any. When I go to the VFW or American Legion meetings, you see a very mixed bag of people. But we all do have the military community in common. Those whom I associate with are all ex-military either retired or have served. Perhaps the military breeds a culture of its own. Not based on race , but based in a common experience.

    Perhaps the key to ending racism as such is just getting to know each other and having something in common. Sports is another example where shared experiences unite people regardless of race.
     
  5. Egalitarianjay02

    Egalitarianjay02 Banned

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    Rant much? No one is forcing Multiculturalism down your throat. It's just a fact that as societies get close together they share living space. So the best thing to do is to learn how to tolerate each other rather than fight senselessly. There's nothing within human nature that mandates that people discriminate against each other. People learn to get long all the time. It's a choice. Racism is also a choice. You don't have to be racist. You can choose to accept people and learn to get along.
     
  6. Matswin

    Matswin New Member

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    But what if the other party chooses not to get along? The problem is, in my experience, that coloured people often make this choice. They tend to give preference to the in-group while blaming the out-group.

    In my article, although I do not rule out biological difference, I reason in terms of collective cultural complexes, pertaining to different ethnic groups. For example, the imbalance in violent crime for different ethnicities need not be predicated on racial biology. In the article I portray violence as "dark nature", which awakes as a consequence of inculturation, i.e., the goal of fitting every ethnic group into white culture and civilization. The argument is that "dark nature" awakes as a consequence of psychosocial alienation, when people must abide with rules, mores, and a way of life that contradict their inner being. It needn't be so, I argue, could we only achieve a transactional cultural separation, rather than continuing on the path of integration and assimilation, which is obviously a futile path.

    M. Winther
     
  7. Egalitarianjay02

    Egalitarianjay02 Banned

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    Disproportionate violent crime rates among certain ethnic groups has nothing to do with racial biology or having a "dark nature" that is averse to assimilation. The crime rates are caused by differences in environmental quality between the groups (namely poverty), which itself was caused by racist discrimination. When you control for Socioeconomic Status and family and neighborhood quality the crime gap as well as the IQ gap disappears. So what we need to do is end racial discrimination and close the gap in environmental quality in order to eradicate crime.

    Most people regardless of ethnicity are law-abiding citizens who want to get along. You need to stop thinking in terms of "us" and "them", "Colored people" vs. "White People" and look at human society as having problems that need to be solved instead of imaging that one culture is superior and everyone outside of it is a threat.
     
  8. rayznack

    rayznack Well-Known Member

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    Provide a report showing the IQ and crime gap disappears if you control for socioeconomic status and neighborhood quality?

    Is it a coincidence Blacks have both smaller brain volume and lower amount and frequency of genes linked to IQ?

    http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-cont...-Example-of-Educational-Attainment-and-IQ.pdf
     
  9. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    It looks like a graduate student's paper but I'm sceptical about his academic qualifications. Mats Winther's papers have never been published in peer-reviewed publications and what you can find in his 2015 paper is just his personal view on race, put into the academic language.

    These educational attainment alleles could be derived from Neanderthals and East Asians are around 20% more Neanderthal than Europeans.
     
  10. Kranes56

    Kranes56 Banned

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    Actually we're seeing the effects of what happens when there isn't multiculturalism, or at the least what happens when different cultures don't mix together. With White flight to suburbia and increased poverty it's hard for different socio-economic groups to mix. Thus when that happens, barriers rise up. Since this has a racial component to it with minorities being generally poorer, race becomes a dividing factor. After all, it's easy to see different races. Socio-economic backgrounds? Anyone can afford a nice pair of jeans and a short.
     
  11. Matswin

    Matswin New Member

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    (I do not emphasize the concepts of racial biology in the article.) We have to relate to facts. The disproportion of violent crime is stupendous. In USA, 1 in 3 black males can expect to go to prison in their lifetime (here). As I say in my other article:

    "Economical status can’t explain the extent of the racial imbalance in crime rates. The percentage of Blacks living in poverty is higher than that of Whites. Still, there are more Whites living below the poverty line than Blacks. According to the 2004 Census data, the Black poverty rate was 24.7% while the White poverty rate was 8.6% (here). From a poverty perspective, one would expect the per capita crime rate for Blacks to be higher than that of Whites, but the total number of crimes committed ought to be much lower than the White number.

    Obviously, if one believes that poverty generates crime, such as rape, poverty doesn’t even begin to explain it. In the U.S., there were approximately 10.0 million white males and 4.7 million black males living in poverty in 2005. Although there were twice as many poor Whites than Blacks, it is not mirrored in the crime statistics. Even if normalized for economical status, the disproportion of interracial rapes remains colossally high. Interracial robbery is equally disproportionate, and other violent crimes are also disproportionate but to a lesser extent." (here)

    Please don't call people racist simply because they want to relate to facts rather than sweeping them under the carpet. It is not clear to me how denying the facts of reality would be helpful to the black children whose fathers are in jail. Even if there is no such thing as "race", we do have a racial problem. This is what I am saying.

    M. Winther
     
  12. Casper

    Casper Banned at Members Request Past Donor

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    The answer to your first question is Yes, it is their trademark.
     
  13. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    According to Census figures in 2013, 18.9 million whites are poor, which is 8 million more poor white people than poor black people, and more than 5 million more than those who identify as Latino. In 2012, 9,027 whites and 4,512 blacks were arrested for forcible rape, which is roughly proportionate to the poverty rates of these racial groups. There are twice more poor whites than poor blacks in the US and whites accounted for 65.0% of forcible rape, while it was 32.5% for blacks.

    https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/43tabledatadecoverviewpdf
     
  14. Matswin

    Matswin New Member

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    According to the statistics you present, Blacks are hugely over-represented in the rape statistics. You cannot make this strong connection between poverty and rape. In fact, it could be called "poverty racism". After the U.S. financial system imploded in 2008, crime rates went down across the board. Murder, rape, robbery, assault, and auto theft, plummeted dramatically, according to FBI statistics (here). So it seems that it is more relevant to make a connection between poverty and honesty.

    M. Winther
     
  15. MrNick

    MrNick Banned

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    Yeah there is - it's called nature. You don't see lions and tigers sharing the same space, you don't see monkeys and baboons share the same space, you don't see sharks and dolphins swim together now do you? NO....

    Animals (people are animals too) tend live around their own kind....
     
  16. Egalitarianjay02

    Egalitarianjay02 Banned

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    You have seen my source before. Here it is again:

    There are no racial differences in brain volume and Joseph Graves debunked the claim that there were racial differences in the frequency of genes linked to IQ.

     
  17. Egalitarianjay02

    Egalitarianjay02 Banned

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    Some animal species are natural enemies. Are you trying to make the argument that human races are natural enemies because they are a different kind? We are the same kind of animal with only slight variations in appearance. Many subspecies share the same living space and get along just fine. In fact you can raise animals who are natural enemies together like cats and dogs and they will get along fine so there instincts are negated by environment. Human populations are not even true subspecies. There is less genetic differentiation between human populations than between breeds of dogs and different dog breeds mate and interact indiscriminately when they share the same living space.

    So your nature argument fails. Besides unlike animals we have the intelligence to think creatively on much highly level than them. We can choose not to revert to our baser instincts and tolerate each other despite differences.
     
  18. rayznack

    rayznack Well-Known Member

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    The source doesn't say the crime gap disappears after controlling for socio-economic status and neighborhood quality.

    Professor Bruce Lahn has identified several genes linked to brain volume that appear more frequently in Europeans and Asians than Africans:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lahn

    Every study measuring head, skull and brain volume shows Whites and Northeast Asians having larger head, skull and brain volume than Blacks, including a recent MRI analysis of brain volume of Black and White students adjusted for age, gender and educational attainment:

    [​IMG]

    http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013642

    A recent study analyzing 10 alleles linked to educational attainment shows Northeast Asians and Europeans have higher frequencies of these beneficial alleles than Blacks:

    http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-cont...-Example-of-Educational-Attainment-and-IQ.pdf
     
  19. Egalitarianjay02

    Egalitarianjay02 Banned

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    Here is a source that does:

    Lahn's work is inconclusive and his contention that some archaic human species contributed to the brain genes of modern humans is highly speculative.



    That's simply not true. For instance Phillip Tobias did a meta-analysis of the available research on brain size and race and concluded that there was insubstantial evidence supporting the theory that there were racial differences in brain size linked to intelligence.

    From the study:

    I'm going to have Joseph Graves look at this study for a more in depth analysis but the authors themselves do not endorse your conclusion.

    10 alleles is far too small a number to reach any conclusion about differences in gene frequencies related to intelligence between populations.

     
  20. rayznack

    rayznack Well-Known Member

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    So how does race agitator Tim Wise explain away the existence of a greater number of poor Whites than Blacks, or that no White area in the United States - anywhere - is as violent as the most violent Black neighborhoods?

    How is Lahn's work inconclusive and how is that or his belief on the origins of modern brain genes relevant to the fact that genes associated with brain volume are more frequent in Whites and Asians than Blacks?

    Seems like another red-herring.

    You've been bashed over the head for your use of Tobias' assumptions.

    Tobias speculates certain variables have been uncontrolled for in numerous racial brain volume studies - and that this always disadvantages Blacks, somehow - but never supports his argument, or offers a coherent argument as to why Blacks are always disadvantaged, even when the same researchers show Northeast Asians as having larger brain volume than Whites.

    It's clear you're unable to comprehend academic level discussion as you've been unable to show which studies have actually failed to control for any variable Tobias cites.

    Since Tobias' publication, btw, numerous studies have explicitly controlled for these differences, including the MRI analysis I cited.

    The study's data doesn't endorse my view that a Black-White brain volume difference exists?

    Refer to the actual data and tell me if it agrees with your repeatedly debunked contention that no race differences in brain volume exists.

    And you know this, how?

    Did you read the article and find the correlation between the frequency of these alleles and educational attainment and/or IQ?

    Does this study on allele frequencies support your belief that no genetic differences exist accounting for the Black-White IQ gap?
     
  21. rayznack

    rayznack Well-Known Member

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    Hey EJ, did you forget to respond?
     
  22. Mr_Truth

    Mr_Truth Well-Known Member

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  23. Mr_Truth

    Mr_Truth Well-Known Member

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  24. Mr_Truth

    Mr_Truth Well-Known Member

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    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/...too-often-It-s-time-to-take-that-into-account


    Police lie and cover up all too often. It's time to take that into account.


    Police in the United States kill a lot of people, and they almost never face consequences for those killings, let alone for non-lethal brutality or for breaking the law or violating the Constitution. When we talk about police abuses, the worst incidents and the worst offenders are naturally the most attention-grabbing, but it's the system we need to pay attention to, the fact that accountability is actively discouraged and that abuses are covered up and justified from above. It's that system that allows sadists or racists to follow through on their worst impulses, that system that lets a generally well-meaning officer know that there won't be consequences for abuses, and that system that actively discourages police from reporting abuses by other police. It's what makes repeat offenders possible, what allows an officer to slide from minor violations to major ones as the minor ones go not just unpunished but unremarked. And the system is what puts justice out of reach. If misbehavior by officers wasn't overlooked or actively excused by supervisors, if it led to meaningful punishment on the job and in court, that misbehavior would be a lot less common, and the response wouldn't create such a gaping deficit of justice.
    When a case comes down to the word of a police officer versus that of someone charged with a crime, we're told we'd be fools to take the word of a criminal. But these days, after the string of prominent cases and Justice Department investigations of police departments, we'd be fools to take the word of the police, either. Take the lies from Baltimore police following the killing of Freddie Gray. Take the case of Officer Ray Tensing, who lied about his shooting of Samuel Dubose even though his lies would be revealed by his own body camera. Tensing's lies were backed up by two of his fellow officers. Without body cameras or other video, without sustained attention to police violence, there's little question the officers' word would have stood, and it wouldn't have been a rare miscarriage of justice. Reams of evidence—some of which I assemble below—show us that this kind of police behavior is common. Understanding the day-to-day is the key to understanding the high-profile killings. It’s not just that we need to stop police murders of black and brown people, we need to stop the thousands and thousands of "small" cases of police misbehavior. No surprise—there are ferocious attacks on the academic research that exposes what this police behavior looks like in the daily experience of the black population. This reality, as detailed in this essay, shows why I have so little patience for claims that we should dismiss academic research on intensive policing because the police contradict it.

    The amounts cities pay out in civil settlements for police brutality cases tell part of the story: $521 million in Chicago since 2004; $6 million in Baltimore, where payments are capped at $200,000 per person and $500,000 per incident, since 2011; $420 million in New York since 2009. Those numbers tell the story of all-too-common abuses, but they have to be viewed alongside the incredible rarity of meaningful punishment for the officers committing the abuses. Take the killing of Eric Garner: New York City paid a $5.9 million settlement to Garner's family, but the officer who killed him, Daniel Pantaleo, was not indicted and kept his job.

    Again, Pantaleo is not a special case. According to Matt Taibbi:

    A grotesque example is Chicago, where statistics about police abuse leaked out via a civil lawsuit called Bond v. Utreras. In that case, it was revealed that in a two-year period between 2002 and 2004, Chicago police received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total acts of meaningful discipline (defined as a suspension of seven days or more).
    A similar statistical pattern emerged in New York, where after last year's Eric Garner case, the NYPD's Inspector General's office and its Civilian Complaint Review Board both conducted evaluations of chokehold incidents. The upshot of the reports is that between 2009 and the first half of 2014, New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving chokeholds, which had been banned by the NYPD for more than a decade. Of those complaints, the CCRB "substantiated" only 10. And none of those offending officers saw significant repercussions.

    Every time a police officer brutalizes someone and isn't disciplined, unless the police department comes out and says "department policy is that brutality okay," that police department is probably lying about something. If a city is paying out again and again because it's clear that police are hurting people, but no action is being taken to make it stop, then we either can't believe them when they say any given officer doesn't deserve discipline or we can't believe them when they say the department doesn't condone that brutality. Police lying isn't only about violence, either:
    You can walk into any public defender's office in the country and find stacks of arrest reports in which police say they saw something that common sense tells you almost certainly couldn't be. There is even a name for it: "test-a-lying." One lawyer tells a story of police smelling weed in a closed Ziploc bag from some 150 feet away. Another is representing the estate of a man, ultimately shot by police, who authorities said marched into a state police barracks reeking of marijuana ("Because everybody smokes a huge joint before they go to the police station," the attorney says, noting that no marijuana was found in the victim's system at autopsy). A third has a handful of clients who all apparently made furtive motions in the direction of an officer's gun. "It must be epidemic in New York, these furtive movements for police guns," he says.
    Against the Fieldses of the world, the lies of police officers generally work as intended: as effective pretexts to get people searched or fingerprinted and create real criminal records. But the lies almost never cut the other way. In city after city, the laws are set up to make police misconduct of any kind, from a lie in an arrest report all the way up to outright brutality, disappear down a variety of bureaucratic rabbit holes.

    In some cases—like, notoriously, Ferguson, Missouri—police are actively looking to charge people with questionable offenses in order to raise revenue through fines. According to the Justice Department's report on Ferguson, the drive for revenue was a top police department priority, handed down from the top, and:
    Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue. This culture within FPD influences officer activities in all areas of policing, beyond just ticketing. Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence. Police supervisors and leadership do too little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct. The result is a pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment; infringement on free expression, as well as retaliation for protected expression, in violation of the First Amendment; and excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
    While Ferguson has drawn the most attention for these practices—and seems to have raised it to an art form—a report from ArchCity Defenders found that around half of the municipal courts in the area engaged in similar abuses. An NPR investigation found that court fines and fees, and interest on them, are a major burden for low-income people across the country:
    In 2011, in Philadelphia alone, courts sent bills on unpaid debts dating back to the 1970s to more than 320,000 people — roughly 1 in 5 city residents. The median debt was around $4,500. And in New York City, there are 1.2 million outstanding warrants, many for unpaid court fines and fees.
    The growth in the number of people who owe court-imposed monetary sanctions shows up in surveys by the U.S. Department of Justice, too: In 1991, 25 percent of prison inmates said they owed court-imposed costs, restitution, fines and fees. By 2004, the last time the Justice Department did the survey, that number climbed to about 66 percent.

    The fines and fees usually start small, but they grow. And of course it's low-income people who couldn't pay the initial small amount who are hit with interest—higher-income people pay it off without much thought and go on their way. So the desire for revenue creates an incentive for police to aggressively seek reasons to charge people with minor offenses that will lead to fines. Naturally police are not going to target people with good lawyers and a sense of entitlement—those people are way more trouble than it's worth—they're going to target people without the resources to fight questionable charges. In Ferguson, that meant that "African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers." But obviously Ferguson police are not admitting to racial bias.
    Ferguson isn't nearly a special enough case. Take Cleveland, another police department recently investigated by the Justice Department. Cleveland's police were investigated for excessive use of force; the details of that are staggering, as was the refusal at higher levels to seek out the truth of what Cleveland police were doing:

    Supervisors throughout the chain of command endorse questionable and sometimes unlawful conduct by officers. We reviewed supervisory investigations of officers’ use of force that appear to be designed from the outset to justify the officers’ actions. Deeply troubling to us was that some of the specially-trained investigators who are charged with conducting unbiased reviews of officers’ use of deadly force admitted to us that they conduct their investigations with the goal of casting the accused officer in the most positive light possible. [...]
    ... during the time period we reviewed that officers were only suspended for any period of time on approximately six occasions for using improper force. Discipline is so rare that no more than 51 officers out of a sworn force of 1,500 were disciplined in any fashion in connection with a use of force incident over a three-and-a half-year period. However, when we examined CDP’s discipline numbers further, it was apparent that in most of those 51 cases the actual discipline imposed was for procedural violations such as failing to file a report, charges were dismissed or deemed unfounded, or the disciplinary process was suspended due to pending civil claims. A finding of excessive force by CDP’s internal disciplinary system is exceedingly rare.

    In other words, the Cleveland Division of Police didn't just have a culture of illegal violence, it had a culture of lying about that and covering it up. Perhaps as striking as the violence and lying about violence, though, is something the Justice Department wasn't looking for but found anyway:
    Although we did not investigate CDP’s search, seizure, and arrest practices, our force review revealed concerns we would be remiss not to address. The documents we reviewed to determine the lawfulness of CDP’s force practices often described stops, searches, and arrests by officers that appear to have been unsupported. Notwithstanding the limited nature of this review, what we saw suggests that some CDP officers violate individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights by subjecting them to stops, frisks, and full searches without the requisite level of suspicion. Individuals were detained on suspicion of having committed a crime, with no articulation or an inadequate articulation in CDP’s own records of the basis for the officer’s suspicion. Individuals were searched “for officer safety” without any articulation of a reason to fear for officer safety. Where bases for detentions and searches were articulated, officers used canned or boilerplate language. Supervisors routinely approved these inadequate reports without seeking additional information from the officers about the circumstances that justified the encounter that ultimately concluded with a use of force.
    That's a routine—shared with Ferguson—of stopping and arresting people on made-up grounds. Those made-up grounds then translate into real charges that can affect people's lives for years. In Ferguson:
    ... in the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car, blocking him in, and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The
    officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator’s license, and with having no operator’s license in his possession. The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years.
    Let's be clear: Every time police use force against someone and then fail to report it, every time they use "euphemisms such as 'escorts to the ground' and 'guiding' suspects to the ground," as the Justice Department found in Seattle in 2011, they're lying. Maybe the force was necessary and justified, but if they didn't report it as required, they lied. If they reported some use of force—using euphemisms or blunt language—and their supervisors didn't investigate it, they lied. When police make up a fake reason to stop someone and then charge that person with a real crime, they're lying. When Ray Tensing says Sam Dubose dragged him with his car, he's lying, and his fellow officers are lying when they back him up. It's not uncommon. So it's time to admit it: Police don't deserve any special benefit of the doubt. Their word doesn't deserve greater weight than the word of civilians. Because they had trust and they abused it. This is why it's important to think seriously about research showing police practices we may not already know about, rather than rushing to discredit it because the police say it isn't so.







    Let's see the forum anti-government right wingers express great rage over these police crimes.
     
  25. Mr_Truth

    Mr_Truth Well-Known Member

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    Brutalized Behind Bars



    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/o...=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article



    New York City’s longstanding failure to curb brutality by guards at the Rikers Island jail complex fell under a spotlight last year when the United States attorney in Manhattan joined a class-action lawsuit and then the city agreed in June to sweeping policy changes.

    Now charges of gratuitous beatings and even torture by corrections officers in the New York State prison system are attracting federal scrutiny. Though it is hard to fathom, the state system for disciplining officers who batter inmates without cause is even worse than in the city jails. To begin to fix this problem, state officials will need to win stronger disciplinary provisions in the next round of contract negotiations with the corrections union and generally take a much more aggressive approach to getting abusive officers off the job.

    The state’s problems were made clear in an article in The Times on Monday, published in collaboration with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization. It examined the 2014 case of Ramon Fabian, an inmate at the Ulster Correctional Facility, who was taken by a corrections officer, Michael Bukowski, beyond the view of other inmates and the prison’s surveillance system and viciously assaulted.

    Mr. Fabian told investigators he lay groaning on the floor of his prison cubicle for almost an hour before hobbling to lunch. A sergeant sent him to the medical unit, and he was driven 80 miles to a hospital in Albany, where doctors removed part of his right testicle in emergency surgery.

    State corrections officials moved to fire the officer. But the politically powerful union exercised a contract provision that puts disciplinary cases like this one before an arbitrator who is jointly chosen by the union and the corrections department. Arbitrators often end up “splitting the baby” to keep both sides satisfied and ensure they are chosen for future cases. Even when compelling evidence warrants dismissal, officers often get off with less.

    For example, since 2010, the state has tried to fire 30 prison guards — and prevailed only eight times. In the same period, an additional 80 cases brought against corrections officers, sergeants and lieutenants were settled with their unions for penalties other than dismissal.


    The fundamental problem in NYS prisons is that ALL inmates are seen as less than human. "Mutts" is the most polite of the terms. This...


    I think there needs to be more balance in editorials. From this piece you would think that the prison guards are all thugs and the inmates...

    The arbitrator in the Bukowski case found that the officer had used excessive force and lied to investigators. But the arbitrator lowered the penalty from dismissal to a 120-day suspension without pay, making a mockery of the process.

    Arbitrators’ decisions are considered final and binding; in the past courts have ruled that those decisions may not be overturned even when they commit errors of law or fact. In this case, however, state officials refused to return the officer to the job, and the union, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, sued to reinstate him. A state court ruled that suspension for this kind of assault “shocks the judicial conscience” and ordered the case reheard.




    The arbitration process is not the only problem. The article in The Times reported, for example, that in the office that handles these investigations, most of the investigators are corrections officers. They belong to the same union as the guards they investigate — and sometimes go back to work in the prisons.

    Governors and state legislators are notoriously fearful of crossing a union that represents corrections officers. But the complaints of brutality in the state prison system and the obvious weakness of the disciplinary system cry out for a more effective way of getting brutal corrections officers off the job. If the state fails to deal with this problem, it could find itself hauled into court by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which frequently sues governments over this very issue. The division is currently enforcing agreements with nearly two dozen state and local governments aimed at protecting the rights of people in confinement.






    Gee, what happened to all the anti-government right wingers? Why aren't they protesting these brutal government abuses??????????
     

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