Words, Numbers, Lives, and Law: Things that Matter

[pure_doxyk]

Okay.  I haven't had a lot of time for blogging lately, but this is important.

I'm not a journalist.  But I *am* a type of logician, and this one logical fail going on seemingly everywhere in my country is causing insane levels of harm.  Here it is:  It is not the same to say,

• Police shot and killed a man on Storrow Drive today.  
  
  • He was suspected of a crime and carrying a knife.
  • The trooper who shot him was following protocol, and ordered the man to put down his knife before killing him.
    
    VS:
     
• Police shot and killed roughly their 400th American citizen in 2015 today, based on an estimated count by the Washington Post.  [1]
  
  • Estimated counts by the press are necessary because the reporting of police killings in the US is entirely voluntary.
  • The number of fatal shootings by cops in England last year was ZERO.  In Australia, where the police do carry guns, the number was SIX.  [2]

I keep running over article after article like the former, and yet I hardly read ANY like the latter.  What a different point it makes!  What an entirely different world when you look at these police killings through the lens of how it is in other western countries.  By focusing so extremely tightly on "whether the victim deserved it" and "whether the cop was 'justified'" (more on that in a minute), American media is completely glossing over the UNBELIEVABLY HUGE PROBLEM this country has:  Our police are, as an organization, mad serial killers whom we hold almost completely unaccountable for their actions.  [3]

Even when it comes to light that they're abusing their power to further our awful racism problem, or to kill children and harmless old people in weapon-soaked and crazily mis-handled "drug raids" that read like something out of a KGB bedtime story, we keep that flashlight firmly focused on the individual incidents, on the victims and the details that may have contributed their own fault to their death; on the cop with the nice family and the details that may contribute to his innocence.

Seriously, go read the news, go turn on your local stuff.  This is what 90+% of our media coverage about police shootings consists of:  Here's a(nother!) victim.  Here's what they did wrong.  Here's why we should maybe forgive this cop.  Roll credits.

It's getting too Orwellian for me by far.  Not that I could really stomach the news-o-tainment beforehand, but come on, people; this is positively end-of-the-world shit right here.  We as a country have cancer, and you're bringing us technically-accurate test results on our itchy toenail fungus.  And the problem isn't that your facts are wrong; it's that you're reporting the wrong facts.  This is what we in the logic world like to call a "framing problem", and here's how you fix it:

1. THE LAW MATTERS.  And because of the law, it never, ever, ever matters whether the victim was suspected of a crime, so stop talking about it.  If the victim had been convicted of a crime which carried the death sentence, then their criminal record would be relevant here.  But in this (and every other civilized) country, we do NOT punish the vast majority of crimes by executing people in the street without a trial.  That is the law and IT MATTERS.
   
   1. If you doubt that this law matters, consider what it would be like to live in a place where it wasn't the law:  Where the cops could, in fact, legally shoot you if they wanted to.  …I believe those are ISIS and the Taliban's laws.​
   2. Therefore, being shot by the police is NEVER "justified" unless such extraordinary circumstances apply that we would, as a democracy, actually be ok with applying a summary death-sentence without a trial.  (Such circumstances could happen:  Take the two sniper-murderers from a few years ago, who were caught red-handed shooting innocent people and ran away, firing guns and obviously intending to kill more - that probably justified a murder for the sake of protecting other citizens.  Um, except that the police managed to take them alive.  ::cough::theywerewhite::cough::)
      
      1. STOP USING THE WORD "JUSTIFIED" unless the above applies.
      2. As a reminder, aiming a gun at a police officer is ALSO NOT a crime that is punishable by summary execution in the streets without a trial.  Neither is refusing to obey an order, wielding a knife, running away, or having a criminal record.  STOP USING THE WORD "JUSTIFIED".
2. IT MATTERS that this is NOT a problem other countries share.  This isn't human nature or unfortunate coincidence - this is a sickness, and it's killing people who are NOT supposed to die, and ruining lives, and now causing civil unrest across the country.  Can we please take it seriously as a national crisis already?
   
   1. The international statistics are not invisible or hard to find.  They're actually easier to find than ours, since in most other countries, reporting an incident like a police shooting is mandatory - whereas for some unbelievable reason no-one seems to be able to articulate, in the US, police departments can choose to report the incidents or not, as they like.  More evidence of just how serious and systemic this problem is.  
   2. The fact that the numbers are SO UNBELIEVABLY DIFFERENT - basically they're under ten deaths a year for every country except America, who reported (reported) 400 in 2012 [4] - is NOT a reason to ignore them.  Seriously, you guys are always looking for shock-value - why not admit and treat these numbers as the jaw-dropping WTF they are?  
      
      1. We spend a TON of taxpayer money on our police departments, and we have every right to expect them to do at least as good a job as other developed countries. 
      2. The police work for us, and we did not hire them to kill us - but how do we hold them accountable, especially when things have gotten so corrupt that they don't even have to report murdering someone when they do it?  In the seven years ending in 2011, only 41 officers were even charged with a crime relating to killing someone - not convicted; charged. [5]  The answer is that we MUST TALK ABOUT IT:  We MUST keep the frequency and unacceptability of these incidents in the light.  This weird silence we keep about the shocking difference between US and other countries' death-tolls by police is one of the major things allowing it to continue happening.
         
         1. And it's also one of the major causes of the civil unrest, too.  People's family-members are dying and nobody's even getting in trouble for it.  When we aren't talking about it in the media, when looking around it's obvious that nobody cares this is happening, what do you expect them to do?  Nothing?
3. IT MATTERS that the murders are racist.  The media's treatment of the blindingly obvious racial elements of police murders is almost comically see-no-evil … but that approach is causing a lot more evil, and it's stupid and preventable.  By acknowledging that police forces overall are clearly racist, and part of the greater racism problem in America, the media could make it possible for us to start fixing those problems.  Continuing to hide them is only letting them get worse.
   
   1. It's uncomfortable as a white person to acknowledge that you have the privilege of being somewhat less likely to be murdered by the police; I get it.  Do some reading on how to acknowledge your privilege without being a jerk - it exists; it's not that difficult - and get over it.  If you can't talk about uncomfortable things, you prooooobably shouldn't be in journalism.  And it doesn't take much perspective to realize what the result of weighing your discomfort against other people's murders ought to be.
   2. If you don't actually agree that BLACK LIVES MATTER, stop typing that article right now and get the fuck out of this country, because equality is one of our most fundamental founding principles.  Seriously, GTFO.  I'll wait.
   3. Stop being so damn flinchy about bringing up race, as though as soon as you do, everything else goes out the window.  In case you never noticed this before, dark-skinned people are people, and have many of the same concerns as light-skinned people.  You can, in fact, say "Well it's obvious that there's a racist element here, since 75% of the deaths due to police shootings in this area last year were of black people.  Also, we should talk about the number of deaths this year compared to European countries, and whether there will be charges brought, and the fact that this victim is a child," and most people will follow you just fine.  You do not in fact need to teach a college course on racism in order to acknowledge that it clearly exists, so quit using that excuse to avoid it.

…I'll stop there, because I'm mentally exhausted, and also completely disgusted with blogging platforms lately - seriously, I have a ton of writing to do; I can NOT deal with how revoltingly awful WordPress' interface is, and the fact that I can't even just copy/paste standard markdown and have it work like it does in a zillion less-complex platforms…I'm tearing my hair out trying to write this and properly format a simple ordered list, because even though I can see the HTML it's sloppy as fuck and I *know* it won't display correctly…ugh.  Ugh ugh ugh.  Anyway, hopefully I'll find a fix to that problem (maybe I'll just start writing in markdown and posting it as plain text, since unformatted md is often easier to read that the crap WP formats), and other problems besides; but for now, at least I got some air on this topic before I turn into a shooter myself.  (Don't worry, I'd get my police-badge first, to make sure I wouldn't be punished for it.  AMERICAN POLIZE POSSE UNPROSECUTED KILLAZ 4EVA YEAAAAH!)

::faceflops::

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/31/411027052/fatal-shootings-by-police-twice-as-high-as-official-number-report-says
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-do-us-police-kill-so-many-people-2014-8?op=1
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/04/11/thousands-dead-few-prosecuted/
[4] http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/armed-police
[5] http://www.wsj.com/articles/police-rarely-criminally-charged-for-on-duty-shootings-1416874955

Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.