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NPR reports:
On Wednesday morning, the United States Department of Justice announced the result of a yearlong investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, which found that BPD habitually violates the civil rights of its residents. These violations, the Justice Department found, have an outsized effect on the city's black population.
[...] The report's findings were far-reaching. Between 2010 and 2015, BPD recorded over 300,000 pedestrian stops (a number the DOJ believes vastly underrepresents actual stops.) Those stops often lacked reasonable suspicion, and were mostly confined to black neighborhoods — 44 percent occurred in two low-income black neighborhoods that make up 11 percent of Baltimore's population.
In the same time period, the report found that BPD made "warrantless arrests without probable cause," stopped black residents three times as often as white, and arrested black folks on drug charges at five times the rate of white folks, despite comparable levels of possession. They were also found to have used unreasonable force against juveniles and people who presented "little or no threat to officers or others."
According to the investigation, the BPD has also failed to respond adequately to reports of sexual assault, resulting "in part, from underlying gender bias." It reported BPD detectives asked questions like, "Why are you messing that guy's life up?" when interviewing women who reported sexual assault.
The World Socialist Web Site reports:
The report finds that despite making up 63 percent of the city's population, African-Americans account for over 83 percent of all criminal charges and are regularly over-represented in arrest reports in comparison to their percentage of the population.
The DoJ found that the percentage of people arrested in a five-year period on the petty and highly subjective charges of "failure to obey" or "disorderly conduct" was 91 and 84 percent African-American respectively. Even starker, African-Americans made up over 83 percent of the area's traffic stops, despite being less than 30 percent of the entire metropolitan region's total driving population.
[...] The DoJ found that over a five-year period, BPD officers made over 11,000 arrests that were subsequently thrown out at central booking for being groundless. [...] Investigators found "BPD uses overly aggressive tactics that unnecessarily escalate encounters, increase tensions, and lead to unnecessary force".
[...] Then there is the first African-American president, who has handed out military grade weaponry to local police departments across the country--at the same time his Justice Department has routinely rejected calls for killer cops to be prosecuted under federal civil rights laws and invariably opposed every attempt to bring police violence cases before the Supreme Court.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Sunday August 14 2016, @08:49AM
So you're saying simple words used by "certain people", that they used most commonly and keep alive when directed back at them will probably result in being violently killed? I suppose you agree with my initial analysis that they are fundamentally more violent then. Thanks.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday August 14 2016, @10:46PM
Aaaaaaand the point goes sailing over your tiny, Zika-esque head at a leisurely Mach 3.4, trailing sonic booms in its wake...as usual.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Sunday August 14 2016, @11:51PM
Right back at ya.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday August 15 2016, @03:59AM
Oh, I got your point plenty well, Entropy. And it's bullshit. Simplistic, reductionist bullshit that costs lives. Do you like having blood on your head?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Monday August 15 2016, @04:46AM
Blood on my hands? I haven't killed anyone...All I said is crappy neighborhoods have a high density of criminals. How is that not obvious? Look at the wasteland that is Detroit.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday August 15 2016, @04:44PM
You really don't seem to understand this...
Okay, let me put it this way: you remember Drumpf saying that it might be time for "second-amendment folks" to "do something" if Clinton is elected and nominates Supreme Court justices they don't like? That's not an outright death threat, it's true, but it's the kind of thing that can land in a certain type of person's diseased mind juuuuust so and spark a shooting rampage that might not have happened had he not said that.
I've heard this referred to as "stochastic terrorism," and compared to that Shakespearean line "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?!"
Now...compare to the current situation. Yes, Detroit and many other majority-black neighborhoods are shitholes; I oughtta know, since I come from the Bronx and lived in Harlem for a while. The question here is: WHY are these neighborhoods shitholes? The answers are complex and multivariate; there are at least half a dozen factors I can name, each with different degrees of dependence on one another and different degrees of "it's their fault" or not.
Now, *here's* where your shit-stirring leads to blood on your head: rather than try and figure out these answers, or even acknowledge that they are complicated, you provide the simple (and wrong) explanation, which is roughly "niggers gonna nig." This causes a certain kind of person, seeing it, to abandon any search for the real and more complicated answers (or not to even bother starting it...), which in turn affects how they vote, how they view black people, how they think money should be allocated in the public sphere, and so on and so forth. One very topical manifestation of this on the national scale is the incredible level of police violence against black people.
Do you see where this is going? Humans are herd animals, and ideas and "answers" that exercise the cerebral cortex less and the R-complex more are unduly privileged because of our biology, both on the individual level and in groups. This is why mob violence, race hatred, and a certain kind of fascist-leaning populism spread so fast and ingrain so deeply; they're tapping into the primitive brain, the threat center, in ways that rational contemplation doesn't.
Do you really want to be part of this?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Monday August 15 2016, @09:51PM
All I said was many neighborhoods are crappy, and have a high crime rate. Police naturally go where there's a high crime rate. Your only response to this is some variant of "It's not their fault, because.."
It's nice to try to assign blame elsewhere, but does that change that their neighborhood is crappy? No, it really doesn't. This was a discussion on certain racial group concentration, crime concentration, and police concentration... That you're trying to derail into a blame game of WHY this is a fact.
If you want to talk about why, honestly, certain racial groups will probably one day have to take responsibility for their community and not make it a crappy place.
Many, many other racial groups came over here and had a very low social standing, worked the lowest end jobs, and moved up in the world. The irish were once the lowest social group of immigrants, where are they today? Indians, and chinese are famous for starting businesses... While some may look down on quickie marts/chinese food places they are still small business owners and involve their entire family.
What is a certain racial group famous for? Being 39.8% of welfare recipients? Receiving more free help than any other racial group per capita, yet still blaming everyone else for their problems? Being 5x-10x more likely per capita to commit violent crime?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 16 2016, @04:33AM
> "All I said was nigger nigger nigger heeeeeeeey nigger nigger nigger."
Fuckin' A. We're done. At this point I don't think you even have the necessary self-awareness to understand what you're missing here, and you certainly don't have the humanity to make an effort to give a damn. I'll let the previous posts stand as testimony; someday you will give answer for them.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...