Revenge of the Thin Blue Line 45: Southern View Police Chief Roy Maki is a worried about BLACKS "a RIOT/LOOTING" in response to the death of Sonya Massey

Former Sangamon Sheriff's Deputy Sean Grayson was charged with 1st Degree Murder for the unlawful killing of Sonya Massey.  

In the early morning of July 6th, Sonya Massey was shot to death inside her unincorporated Springfield home after she had called the police for a possible intruder.  The family has viewed the body camera footage but, as far as I know nothing has been released to the press or been improperly leaked.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reacted to the charges.

"I am enraged that another innocent Black woman had her life taken from her at the hands of a police officer," Pritzker said. "I'm grateful to the Springfield State's Attorney's office for bringing the appropriate charges in this case. May Sonya Massey's memory be a blessing, and may it fuel our work to build a system of justice in this country that truly protects all of its citizens."

In case you didn't know members of The Thin Blue Line don't like Governor Pritzker because he doesn't support them...

In response, the Police Chief of Southern View, Illinois Roy Maki released this ridiculous SAFETY ALERT to his constituents.  Because???  Because black people of course...  

Have you ever heard of Southern View, Illinois?  I had not.  It is a little hamlet of 1600 people abutting Springfield, Illinois at the intersection of 55 and 72.  It's just north of the Illinois State Police recruit Academy.

Sheriff Maki is greatly a-feared of "a RIOT/LOOTING and DESTRUCTION of PROPERTY" from the "Shooting of the Female subject".  First, of all this isn't the Queen's English, no one in America is a "subject".  Victim is the correct title but why is Shooting and Female capitalized?  But, despite placing his phone number for any questions the Sheriff's Office has not responded to press questions of why he felt it necessary to respond to said questions.  I'm reminded when the Cook County Sheriff's Intel Division released a memo about the 30,000 strong ANTIFA army that was going to descend upon Gettysburg for the 4th of July in 2020.

And why would there be RIOT/LOOTING despite all protests being peaceful at this point thus far and that Southern View may not even be involved?  Why because black people of course... 

The Springfield City Council wasn't to pleased with Chief Maki's ridiculous letter,

“I think it was very offensive and unprofessional to say we’re going to be looting and rioting businesses,” said Springfield Alderwoman Lakeisha Purchase. She and fellow city council member Shawn Gregory were at the Wednesday protest to show support for the family and community. She said that there had been no disruption from any of the protests.

Lakeisha?  Well, as Chief Maki would no doubt note, with a name like that she's black and you know how those people are, with the RIOT/LOOTING at all.  No matter how far we've come it always comes back to this; it's an unforgivable crime in this country to be black and no matter what mistreatment, injustice, or extrajudicial killing you face, for some White People it's always 1964 and you people are protesting wrong and just obey the police.

The Revenge of the Thin Blue Line 41: Harvard Economist Roland Fryer Study Destroys Racial Bias in Police Shootings or does it?

So, at work a friend asked me if I had heard the Harvard study showing there is no racial discrimination in shootings.  I said I hadn't and he began to play a video with his phone facing away from me.

So, right away I could tell the speaker was an African-American man.  I will leave it up to you to determine why rightwingers absolutely love hearing conservative black writers and thinkers like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Colon Noir, Candace Owens or whomever regurgitate reactionary agitprop and direct snide inflammatory insults at Democrats, progressives, LGBTQ persons and other minorities.

Bari Weiss lies about Crime

Anyway as I listened to about 30-60 seconds of the speaker who it turns out is Harvard Economist Professor Roland Fryer, who stated he had published a study showing there was no bias in police shootings.  Reading up on it, the study was conducted in 2016 and published in July 2017, so it's post Ferguson but, pre-George Floyd and BLM burning down every city in America 4 times over during the 2020 "Riots".

Now, this video was a snippet from a 75 minute interview with Bari Weiss, so already I know it's going to have a hard right slant while it masquerades as a Neutral follow the facts not feelings or even adopts a pseudo-left patina.  It's also under the umbrella of the "University of Austin", which if you don't know is a Billionaire funded reactionary laboratory designed to undercut education by claiming it's all about stopping Cancel Culture and Wokeness. 

My first question was where did the data come from before we got off topic.  We got off topic because my friend wanted to defend the Jan6th Coup Attempt ("It wasn't an insurrection") and decry the southern border migrant influx.  His defense of the Jan6th criminal conspiracy boiled down to 'They [i.e. the Police] let them in' therefore it can't have been a Coup Attempt.  Shades of a Nixonian belief, If police officer let's you do it, that means it is not illegal.

But, getting back to Professor Fryer, in the snippet he claimed other academics went to him and pressured him to not publish it.  And if that was remotely true he'd name names.  No names?  Didn't happen.  Fryer, also leans in and in semi-stunned tones claims after getting his results of not finding any racial bias in police shooting from his 8 RAs, he hired 8 "fresh ones" and redid the study and got the same result!  Shocking!!!  Of course, you could hire a million RA's and if you feed them the same data every time you're probably going to get the same result.  The old stand by of Garbage In, Garbage Out, still applies I see.

Or if anyone did go to Fryer and ask him not to publish it was because they knew as soon as his study was released shameless bad faith actors would seize upon it and tout it for decades proving there was no racial bias in policing.  Because... No One... NO ONE... reads a study like this in it's entirety.  And yes before you go, Well I found 3 people who read this from cover to cover, functionally no one reads everything.  Instead what they do is read the Title, perhaps find a tidbit or two in the study that conforms to their narrative, and cite it over and over and over by repetition.

 

And that's the biggest disservice of this paper because, grotesque Reactionaries like my friend or Megyn Kelly are going to reference it to prove there isn't any bias in Police work.  Even though, and this is classic, Professor Fryer states, "that yes we saw some bias in the low level uses of force, everyday pushing up against cars and things like that..."

Just as an aside, sure there's Police brutality in everyday interactions with black an hispanic people and police like throwing people up against cars blah blah blah... but let me minimize it so I can provide Faux News and rightwing grifters like Bari Weiss the ammo they need to claim 'Ackshullay there really isn't Police brutality'...

And of course, the whole fucking point isn't that White Cops are all Klansman running around gunning down black people on a daily N-word hunt, but that Police brutality and systematic racism stem from the day-to-day interactions and injustices meted out in disproportionate number of traffic stops, unequal application of laws, over-policing of certain neighborhoods based on demographics, targeted harsh sentencing of black and brown peoples while certain whites get special treatment, plus a whole host of other micro-aggressions which minorities face from the Justice System on a daily basis.

Judge Adrian acknowledged he was supposed to
impose a mandatory 4-year sentence against Clinton,
 but he would not send him to prison.
“That is not just... I will not do that.”

But, Crypto-Fascists like Fryer say and take certain actions specifically to upset others.  Don't make the mistake of thinking Fryer or any other fascist believes the bullshit they say, they say it precisely to upset you, to trigger you (as the MAGA Chuds proudly declared in 2020), to get you flustered, to waste your time refuting their nonsense, and ultimately to make you despair and give up.  Fascists win when regular people no longer fight back and cede the ground to the Fascists. 

That's what Fryer is all about.

So I won't tell you I read this whole study, but right away even Fryer and his team have to acknowledge

Interestingly, as the intensity of force increases (e.g. handcuffing civilians without arrest, drawing or pointing a weapon, or using pepper spray or a baton), the probability that any civilian is subjected to such treatment is small, but the racial difference remains surprisingly constant.  These are rare events. Yet, the results indicate that they are significantly more rare for whites than blacks. With all controls, blacks are 21 percent more likely than whites to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn and the difference is statistically significant. [3]

So, getting back to where the data is from you will be unsurpirised to learn it comes from Police Departments themselves, and Fryer admits it's difficult to get any data around Police shootings other than it happened and almost impossible to get data from the day-to-day indignities black and brown persons suffer at the hands of bigoted Police Officers. 

And why choose the data he chooses?  Certainly, Professor Fryer would state he didn't want his paper to be about any one high profile police shooting of a black person, like Laquan McDonald in Chicago, or Walter Scott in South Carolina, but his decision to narrowly say their is not racism in Police shootings also afforded him the opportunity to ignore Eric Garner being choked to death in Long Island.  So, the data mainly comes from Police department records themselves Houston Police Department (2005-2015), New York Stop & Frisk (2003-2013), and from cities Boston, Camden, Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, six Florida counties.

Notice this data completely excludes entire regions of the country and every State in the Deep South, the regions of the country where most Americans would say Institutional Racism is a way of life and abuse of force and authority goes back centuries.

But, anyway my time is more and more precious to me so there's not much more to be gained from an 8 year old study or anything to be gained from watching his interview with the odious rightwing troll Bari Weiss.  But, understand two things about this study as with John Lott's totally bogus NRA-funded study that Americans use guns in self-defense 3,000,000 times a year or Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent study that vaccines cause Autism this study will forever be cited as absolute proof that there is no anti-black bias in Police Work, Police Officers merely go to where the crime is, and crime is an inherent part of black and brown society. 

Remember language is a weapon and the language that Fryer employs is designed to give cover to the growing demands of right-wingers that the handcuffs be taken off their Police, because we know Police never lie in reports, Police never arrest innocent men, and every euphemistically named Officer-involved shooting (OIS) is a good shoot.  After all who you gonna believe New York's Finest or your lying eyes?

Prosecutors released new footage of a viral attack on two police officers that appears to conflict with police accounts of their initial interaction with a group of migrants that quickly escalated into a melee that triggered nationwide outrage.

Professor Fryer then concludes with a Bill Cosby, a beloved black authority figure especially to Whites, style condemnation of black people,

The importance of our results for racial inequality in America is unclear. It is plausible that racial differences in lower level uses of force are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities (emphasis added) rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external forces. 

Conclusion: 

So, while reading this I did find multiple refutations of Professor Fryer's work.  (I won't go into his personal failings or foibles but leave that to you to decide if it undercuts his research and work.)

2020 update: The specific flaws of Roland Fryer's paper have now been characterized in two studies (by other scholars, not myself). Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2019) reanalyze Fryer's data to find it understates racial biases. Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath (2018) do something similar through a statistical simulation.

Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed, however. It suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors, and he has communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading. While there have long been problems with the quality of police shootings data, there is still plenty of evidence to support a pattern of systematic, racially discriminatory use of force against black people in the United States.

There should be no argument that black and Latino people in Houston are much more likely to be shot by police compared to whites. I looked at the same Houston police shooting dataset as Fryer for the years 2005-2015, which I supplemented with census data, and found that black people were over 5 times as likely to be shot relative to whites. Latinos were roughly twice as likely to be shot versus whites.

The Revenge of the Thin Blue Line 39: Police Domestic Violence Ohio to California road trip

"Ha ha ha I can't believe you got'em!  You expert, rootin'-tootin', eagle-eyed, Goth-loving marksman! I love it! You managed to find a way to win... and everybody still loses!!!" Joker, Under the Red Hood (2010)

Domestic violence is the most prevalent and least controlled crime in America.  In 1987, the Illinois legislature finally mandated Police Officers, at a minimum, write a report when going to a domestic disturbance type situation.  Up until just before Covid I was working with Officers who started their careers back before this mandate.  I'm sure you remember how the response of Officers used to be next to nothing other than a vague warning that they'd do something if they came back a second time that night.

Tracy Chapman, who's enjoying a resurgence due to Luke Combs covering Fast Car, had another song on that ground-breaking album called Behind the Wall.  The lyrics encapsulate much of the perception, true or  not, of the police response to domestic violence.  It's also been known that domestic abuse amongst families of Police Officers is at least as common as the general public and most likely vastly underreported  due to a variety of factors.

So, it comes as little surprise former Officer John Snowling, drove from Ohio to California to attempt to gun down his ex-wife.  Snowling, was a retired Ventura Police Sergeant.  Marie Snowling filed for divorce in December 2022.  As we all know women who are battered, who eventually do leave their abusive husbands, are very much at risk to be murdered.  Snowling tracked her down at Cook’s Corner in Trabuco Canyon, about 50 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, and shot 9 people including her. Three people died and six others were injured before Snowling was killed by law enforcement. The fatal victims have been identified as John Leehey, 67, Tonya Clark, 49, and Glen Sprowl, 53.  After entering and shooting Marie and others, Snowling apparently ran out of ammo or had a weapon malfunction, exited the bar and went back to his vehicle to get more guns and/or ammo.  The Officers confronted him outside at his car. 

“He just had very normal career, nothing really else to report,” Ventura Police Cmdr. Sarah Heard told reporters.

In military parlance, this is known as NSTR (Nothing Significant to Report), which is laughable because I wonder (and in reality know) how Snowling treated domestic abuse victims when he was on the job.  Snowling worked from 1986 to 2014.  So his career encapsulates the generation which was supposed to respond and actually try and do something about domestic abuse.

Again we see, the poisonous fruits of the NRA and Republican push against Gun Control.  Marie Snowling was most likely a long term victim of spousal abuse.  That she finally managed to free herself, file for divorce, is an unforgivable sin to Republicans who are beginning to push back against easier divorce in the perpetual rightwing war on women.  Of course, Republicans and the Gun Industry are also trying to denude firearms restraining orders.  And Snowling was, of course, able to purchase multiple guns because there really is no controls on guns and when a shooting like this happens Republicans simply XIT out their Thoughts & Prayers and move on to the next NRA funded dinner to rake in more blood-soaked campaign donations.

So, anyway the Good Officers who responded to the Bad Officer, shot and killed him and as the Joker said...  Everybody Still Loses...

The Revenge of the Thin Blue Line 21: Shooting the (Grand) Rapids, death by Cop

Big Toad Barr's Wild Ride

Lester Holt: Can we talk about the big lie?
Bill Barr: Which one is that?
LH: Well you write about the big lie being black live matter...
BB: Yeah [smirks]
LH: What did you mean by that?
BB: Well Black Lives Matter is based on the premise that the main threat to black welfare in the inner city are out of control police force that gratuitously kill African Americans and that's simply not borne out by the facts. - From an interview of the odious toad Bill Barr by Lester Holt, as the Corporate Media again helps to polish despicable conservative turds and allow a flagrant criminal to re-enter polite society while hawking his book about the Trump White House.

I suppose we had gone too long without an extrajudicial killing of a person of color.  Often Officers will tell me, as I express dismay at these incidents, 'Yeah well police kill far more white people than black.' And I'm not sure how to tell them that this is not a good argument other than to reply like Chidi in The Good Place,  

"Okay. But That's Worse. You, You Do Get How That's Worse, Right?"

And watch them brush off such sarcastic retorts. Why? Well, I don't know but, Police in the United States kill far too many people for any claims by such a noxious criminal asshole like Bill Barr to be taken seriously (of course he is taken seriously by the Corporate Media). In fact, violence and death at the hands of the Police is so pervasive Police and the Federal Government routinely undercount the true number. A study found that over 31,000 people died from Police encounters, but only 14,000 were classified as such;

More than half of all police killings since 1980 do not appear in official government data, according to an explosive new study in The Lancet, a top medical journal. The researchers reveal how “systemic misclassification” in the federal database that tracks the causes of death in America has produced, over four decades, an undercount of more than 17,000 deaths at the hands of police. The proportion of undercounted police killings of Black Americans is even more extreme, the research shows, rising to 60 percent.

So, an unidentified Officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan shot and killed Congolese refugee Patrick Lyoya around 8am on April 4th. Predictably, the incident arises from a traffic stop for improper registration and then escalated out of control ending with the unnamed Officer shooting Lyoya in the back of the head while on top of him.

Now, here's where the bad faith actors will get involved. First off, there's going to be the subjective fear for my life defense. It's impossible to disprove the Officer wasn't scared therefore his killing of Lyoya is justified. Secondly, there is going to be the weapons involved defense. Call it the Kyle Rittenhouse Defense; i.e. there's a gun involved therefore I am afraid the "Criminal" will take the gun from me and kill me with my own gun; ergo we are back to subjective fear for your life defense. Third, every white rightwing asshole including those who justify the January 6th violence against Police, will declare with finality Lyoya should just have complied. And lastly, the video evidence is going to be parsed and dissected frame-by-frame for the simple fact that individual still images from the videos can then be presented in a way to present a wholly different picture as opposed to what went down in real time.

Decades ago Police Departments began crafting these Use-of-Force continuums to create justification of violence against people as began to point out police violence is a problem. To justify the extrajudicial killing of Lyoya. It will be something like this:

1. Lyoya get out of the car (escalation).
2. Lyoya ignores "commands" to get back in the car (defiance).
3. Lyoya runs from the scene (presumption of guilt).
4. Lyoya grabs the taser and ignores commands to drop the taser (active "aggressor")
5. Lyoya continues to "fight" the Officer, they go to the ground, the force of Lyoya's fighting is such that it deactivates the Office's body-worn camera (fear for life)

And thus the Arbitrator will be able to reframe the encounter as Lyoya being the aggressor, who is responsible for the escalation of violence and the passive voice of Officer involved shooting will dominate the narrative until voila the official statement is Justified Shooting.

7-10 years ago I would have concluded the Officer would not have faced consequences but, with the increased high profile incidents and despite Bill Barr's mendacious bullshit, I think once the initial investigation is completed charges may be recommended for the still unnamed Officer.