Blaming social media smacks a bit of prior waves of blaming N.W.A., Twisted Sister, Kojak and Elvis.
I'm having trouble with that article because what does it mean to say that merely "some cities" are having a rising murder rate? Is it also a trend that half the children are above average?
And AHBPOE, it uses weasel words to identify a "Ferguson effect" even though it acknowledges the data undercut that hypothesis.
Right! It's fascinating. Is it exactly that stupid? Is it just that it provides a more concrete way to track who said what to whom, when those fights would have been more ephemeral in the years before they got typed out?
3 to 1. To 2, before I step into a meeting, I erroneously typed "the rising urban murder rate" because I got suckered by headlines I was distracted. It is just about some cities, but the number is bigger than five.
I hate to see you wrong, love to shoot you in the back.
2: But most American cities have been experiencing declining murder rates for years, right? In that context it'd be meaningful if "some cities"--presumably only those on the list--have an increased rate. It might not be a trend so much as the end of one.
Here in Baltimore, we had rising murder rates before it was popular.
Crime is up in my immediate vicinity, which I wouldn't be that freaked out about except that there's a dude rolling around (in a white van, natch) who has attempted two child abductions and one woman abductions in a ten-block radius of the house in the past two weeks. He has braces with pink rubber bands, so it's not like he should be that hard to identify, yet the LAPD still hasn't caught him. At least he hasn't succeeded yet as far as we know.
6: Possibly, but how perceptible does that tend to be every individual year?
kind of nuts that Baltimore has more murders than NYC with
less than 1/10 of the population (I guess if you use the "less than" symbol they think you are trying to write html?)
2 and 6 are on it. Yesterday, David Menschel, a criminal justice attorney and activist, erupted on Twitter at the errors (and his opinion the poor journalism) of the NYT article.
Here's the first tweet. There are 22, with a few corrections today.
My hasty read on it is that he is about 80% right. I do think there's a kernel of a story there, but not the one the NYT wrote.
Good short rebuttal from Ta-Nehisi Coates on one piece here.
Longer, generally thoughtful and quite detailed piece from Reason.
Ok, so this is just a coded way of indicating that the police officers in question are basically just crazy racists, yeah?
Among some experts and rank-and-file officers, the notion that less aggressive policing has emboldened criminals -- known as the "Ferguson effect" in some circles -- is a popular theory for the uptick in violence.
I mean, labeling it "Ferguson"? And given that the uptick seems to have happened in places like NY, which was until recently using the "harass lots of poorer/minority people a bunch" theory of community relations it's suspicious when the theory is "we just aren't cracking enough heads".
And the fact immediately afterwards someone who disagrees with that starts talking about a 'culture of violence' which, while no one says it, sounds exactly like good old fashioned white supremacists style 'I'm not against black people just that their culture is inferior/violent/etc.' stuff.
I mean, the article carefully mentions, low down in the piece and quickly moves on, that this is happening in places with massive and often increasing economic insecurity. And a lot of it seems to be people getting into what sound like minor conflicts and then suddenly they escalate, just like you'd expect to see from people under serious, long term stress. That alone, even leaving out the ridiculous American gun culture, should be enough right?
I haven't read the linked articles yet, but I would think that violent crime rates would be a pretty noise-filled statistic as a matter of course and that one year couldn't tell you much.
I feel like I need to put some blanket non-endorsement comment here, but it's bad enough to think that garbage like this is worthy of attention, as I undeniably did. I apologize.
Also, there's definitely submerged racial intention in the article's choice of cities, right? Out of the 100 most-populated incorporated places, those in the chart are 1, 3, 5, 9, 22, 26, 31, 37, 50, and 60.
I actually had the exact same reaction as you when I first saw the headline, lurid. If it hadn't been for Menschel's tweetstorm I would never have looked further.
Is there a reason to believe that a rise in murder rates is anything but a dead-cat bounce? I mean, crime rates were dropping to levels unprecedented for decades not long ago; there's got to be a point at which the precipitous decline stops, and we're back to random variation around whatever the baseline level is. (IT'S ALL ABOUT LEAD!!!</Kevin Drum>)
No hairshirt. Seriously. This place is at its best when we can swarm like underfed piranhas.
It will take you piranhas a long time to eat through this fucking hairshirt.
fucking hairshirt
No, LK! The hairshirt is the OPPOSITE of erotic lingerie!
You could think of it as erotic lingerie with a moustache.
I'm just alarmed that the nibbling piranhas earlier in the sentence didn't chase all thoughts of eros from your depraved minds.
Full-body merkin.
16: yeah, Seattle's Omelas-horrible police force says stuff like that a lot.
23 -- for August, homicide here was at about 2007 levels, caused mainly by street gang members killing one another. For the year as a whole up 7% year over year since 2014. If you want to describe that as a "dead cat bounce" I guess you can, but there is an actual explanation which is more gang crime.
Also, the "it's all lead" theory is demonstrably wrong. Or, more precisely, it seems likely that lead was responsible for some unknown portion of the increase in violent crime in the 60s-90s. But the notion that the decrease in lead was the cause, let alone the sole cause, of the post-1994 crime drop is almost certainly wrong, since you had similar observed declines among different age cohorts regardless of age exposure to lead.
20: I see the pattern. Those are all prime numbers, except the ones that are even and the one that is nine.
Drum blogged this article and addressed the lead angle.
And, it's not the case that lead isn't a problem anymore. There was a really good series of articles in the Trib this year about crazy levels of lead contamination in poor Chicago neighborhoods (and cuts in the funding to address it). So part of the baseline is still attributable to lead.
OK, am back. Had some dinner so no longer starving piranha. Now just nibbly. A few thoughts:
1. More than one reporter has told me that they save the most important quote/last word in the article for what they want the reader to come away with. This seems insane to me, because most readers are nowhere near as compulsive about finishing articles as I am, but they say it and they seem to believe it -- so. I feel compelled to point out that the final quote in the NYT article is indeed very powerful. If anyone reads that far.
2. The issue is not really rising murder rates. It's rising murder AND other violent crime. If just one is going up, either someone is juicing your crime stats or there is something reeeallllly weird happening in your city. The article accomplishes a nice little sleight-of-hand by not telling you how many of the 35 cities they're talking about had rises in both. Boo.
I'm on funky hotel wireless, so points 3 and 4 in a minute.
32 -- yuck. Drum, who is usually pretty careful and reasonable on these things, is way overstating the evidence for the lead/crime hypothesis again. Decent responses here and here, also excerpted below.
Eliminating lead from petrol in the USA between 1975 and 1985 dramatically reduced lead exposure in childhood and this occurred over a period that could explain the post-1990 decline in crime in the USA. Ecological studies have generally but not always found correlations between lead exposures in childhood and crime rates 20 years later. But these studies have not found the same relationships between lead exposure and crime. Nevin found a relationship for all types of crime (violence, sexual assault, murder and property crime) but Reyes only found a relationship for violent offences and there was only a suggestive relationship for murder. Mielke and Zahran's supported Reyes findings in their analysis of aggravated assault in six US cities. McCall and Land's age-period-cohort analysis found no association between lead exposure and rates of murder in their age-period-cohort analysis..
There are a small number of epidemiological studies that find dose-response relationships between lead exposure in childhood and both self-reported and officially recorded criminal offences in young adulthood. A causal relationship is biologically plausible because lead is neurotoxic in animals, produces hyperactivity, and impairs learning 28. There is now suggestive human neuroimaging evidence that lead exposure is related to size reductions in brain regions involved in executive functioning and decision making.
But the evidence is not sufficient to conclude that variations in environmental lead exposure in childhood over the past 50 or so years in the USA explain, first the rise, and then the decline in crime rates. The major reason for doubt is that the associations in ecological studies are much stronger (explaining 60-90% of the variation in crime rates) than the weaker relationships in the cohort studies (that explain less than 1% of the variance in offending). Lead exposure in childhood may have played a small role in rising and falling crime rates in the USA but it is unlikely to account for the very high percentage of the decline suggested by Nevin and Reyes.
3. I am actually quite sympathetic to law enforcement wanting to pay close attention to changes in the murder rate. Frankly, I would PREFER that they be responding to data rather than political pressure or other factors that might influence them.
3a. To that point, it is actually not at all true that we don't know how to prevent people from murdering their nearest and dearest. There is quite a lot of data, particularly regarding domestic violence (intimate partner violence, more specifically). Some of it comes out of my own city -- the Philadelphia Women's Death Review team in the early 2000s, and another domestic-violence case review team a few years later. They found that a handful of factors -- such as whether the abuser had previously attempted to choke the victim -- were powerful predictors of whether the survivor would become a murder victim. I realize the reporters can't fit everything into one article, but the bit about how we can't do much about violence between people who know each other infuriated me.
4. I am much less sympathetic to the *media* wanting to pay close attention to changes in the murder rate. It's catchy, but it's potentially very dangers -- someone in the Twitter thread linked above said that DC's mayor has apparently ALREADY proposed heightened sentences based on [heavily covered in the media] rising murder rates.
Dangerous. I hate stupid Windows laptop trackpads.
24: I read "underfed piranhas" as "un-derfed piranhas" for longer than I'd like to admit.
I'm not familiar enough with the data set to be able to properly say this means the end of the secular decline or this is within the usual noise taking it into account. I agree that the article is cherry picked.
But for Milwaukee that's a huge rise--something must be going on there, right? Looking for dumb explanations, the first thing I did was check temperature: this summer has been a bit warmer than last summer. And there might be some local political dimension on top of that. Still strange that that would take place over a single year, though. Presumably the same racists in charge this year were the ones in charge last year.
Tigre, scroll all the way down on the second article you linked and read the comments by David Carpenter, who is the only reviewer who seems to have taken a serious look at the argument.
Also, it's cool that they include reviewer comments. My conclusion: reviewers are overworked and/or lazy.
40 -- if you look at the previous study, also linked above, they do a cohort study based on crime rates in the US, and the cohort studies just don't support the notion that lead was the primary mover in the post-1994 crime drop. Drum is just way overstating the case for this.
I clicked the link, searched for "lead," didn't see it, and ignored it. Where should I look?
I should also mention that one of the theories I considered and threw out was population size. Cities are growing again, in general (Chicago most definitely is NOT). And the really important figure should be murder rate per 100K population, not absolute numbers of murders. But no major American city is growing so quickly that it would change population size enough in one year to account for something like this.
That's because I linked to the wrong thing. Whoops. Pages 20-25 here. It's the same data that largely explains why the legalized-abortion-did-everything hypothesis for the crime drop is also wrong.
In other stupid murder news, the governor of New Jersey believes that the ""the silence of the president of the United States on this [death of police officers] increases the danger to police officers across the country."
The article notes that the president has in fact already made a statement about the murder of law enforcement officials.
Yeah, I'm not an expert, but that seems pretty weak. They say period effects swamp cohort effects (violence keeps increasing for a while across cohorts) but that's not really so surprising, because it makes sense that earlier violence would sow the ground for later violence, especially when the cohorts are separated by only 3 or 4 years. But, not an expert, and have to go offline for a while...
IHNRTAB, are they really making a big deal out of changes in the murder/violent crime rate over the course of a couple of years? That's awfully stupid.
HNRTA, yup, this is bad journalism and bad statistics. Minneapolis had a couple of big bumps in the murder rate 15 years ago, and there was some handwringing, and a little bit of change in policing patterns, and the murder rate immediately fell back to below normal levels. Analysis of the crimes at the time suggested that it was the same people who always get murdered -- poor people and people of color -- and that most of the reasons were pretty banal too -- intimate partner violence, drugs-and-gangs, etc.
I would wager that by 2018, Milwaukee's murder rate will be back to the usual level and no one will remember this piece.
The amazing thing about the multi-decade nationwide decline in crime rates is that no one can actually explain it. It seems like exactly the sort of thing where knowledgeable social scientists would have it all figured out. Sure, demographics and policing and lead and abortion all contribute a bit, but you add all the pet theories up and you get maybe halfway there. It's still a mystery.
Since no one knows why crime went down, it would be surprising if people knew why crime is going back up.
And of course the across-the-board decline for years and years and years is utterly remarkable and unpredictable, but it generates virtually zero media coverage. A small tick the other way on the other hand is literally front-page news.
Sure, demographics and policing and lead and abortion all contribute a bit, but you add all the pet theories up and you get maybe halfway there. It's still a mystery.
Yes, that's right and well-put. It's really a testimony to just how little we actually know about how society works.
54.last But it's not going back up! Or at least this article doesn't give evidence that it's going back up. Don't fall for their lies!
Obviously I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty skeptical that using the age of victims instead of the age of the murderers is really going to let you distinguish period effects and cohort effects. It seems to me that the kind of errors that replacing victim with murderer would produce, even if they're not huge, are exactly in the direction that would make a cohort effect look like a period effect. Also, that paper seems really focused on a much smaller time period than the lead hypothesis would have you look at. It seems quite plausible that there was a crack-based period affect in the late 80s and early 90s on top of the longer term lead affect.
I don't have any problem believing the social media fight piece, though I don't think it's a response to the kind of arguments we have here. My Facebook feed includes segments of the age/race/gender/economic demographics that overlap with the story and u are plent of accusations hurled about who stole from whom or disrespected someone or cheated or lied and clearly some of these do then turn into physical altercations just from what little I see. I suspect it's more like that than someone deciding to off a troll or whatever.
Minus the nonsense my phone put in, plus what I meant. I'm going to bed, so anyone who wants to fight me will just have to wait.
In a very real sense, I am not an expert, and I've only started reading those two papers and there's a lot to absorb there, but this jumped out at me:
Adjustment for educational failure eliminated the association between self-reported crime and lead levels but the association with convictions persisted, albeit much attenuated. They estimated lead exposure explained less than 1% of the variance in convictions and self-reported crime and argued that this was too weak to explain Nevin's very high estimates of the percentage variation in crime rates attributed to lead exposure (63-90%) 11
Huh? I'd have to read the reference to be sure, but it sounds like they regressed out a variable we know to be strongly correlated and causally related to lead exposure and then found little relationship. But ... who cares? No one's claiming that people with unusually high lead levels for their educational attainment are more likely to commit crimes than others.
The risk of any arrest increased 1.40 times for each increase of 5 µg/dL in prenatal blood and 1.27 for each increment in average blood lead level during childhood. The risk of arrest for violent offences increased 1.34 times for each 5 µg/dL increase in antenatal blood lead, and 1.48 for each 5 µg/dL increase in average blood lead during childhood.
I would really like someone to combine these values with the change in blood levels for the affected population over the time period in question, and compare that to the crime rate. Is that in one of those references?
Also, that paper seems really focused on a much smaller time period than the lead hypothesis would have you look at. It seems quite plausible that there was a crack-based period affect in the late 80s and early 90s on top of the longer term lead affect.
Or any kind of social hysteresis, really. Lead might've driven the increase. Living in the resultant violent society might then cause criminal behavior that's more persistent and pervasive than a simplistic linear model would predict.
I suspect it's more like that than someone deciding to off a troll or whatever.
I called it "limitless rage" but I think it's specifically the limits that make online conflicts so extreme, as with road rage -- you have a limited ability to act or speak, a limited time in which to act or speak, and some vague sense of having been offended in public that can't fully be cashed out. But what you're talking about is more codified and ritualized, or calculated, than some fucker spontaneously cutting some other fucker off in traffic. I'll keep turning it over in my head. Something about the semi-public, semi-private, ubiquitous interactions, the weird boundaries -- I can't really pin it down yet and may definitively fail.
I can't tell if some of you are arguing that the content of this story is simply not newsworthy, because I agree that the framing is crap, but I think it's basically newsworthy. I'm not sure an article of this length should take a deep dive into pseudo-sociology, but it's worth noting that a ton of people died violent deaths so far this year and that they should collectively be mourned. I don't doubt that the actual causes are city-specific variations on the general theme of oppression and being shut out of the economy.
I got more smarm than charm tonite.
The framing of the article isn't "lets mourn this loss of human life". The not-so-hidden subtext is "get scared because those people are on the rampage again."
To make 63 a little clearer, if a cohort effect is causing a period effect and you assume they are independent you will underestimate the explanatory power of the cohort effect.
Sorry, I can't hear you, I was distracted by the sound of all my wine glasses shattering. And, coincidentally, for some reason the puppies next door are *very* upset.
ARGH
"That is not a situation that can be solved by policing," Superintendent Harrison said. "It speaks to a culture of violence deeply ingrained into a community -- a segment of the population where people are resolving their problems in a violent way."
Sorry, I can't hear you, I was distracted by the sound of all my wine glasses shattering. And, coincidentally, for some reason the puppies next door are *very* upset.
Wait, 66 in response to "I agree that the framing is crap"?
I think Ile punched someone between posting 68 and 69.
The irony is that I have my browser set up (not deliberately) to block the NYT. I can't read a single word without opening a different browser, and I very rarely do, because by the time I've considered opening a separate application I remember that it's never worth it. So posting this was a spectacularly unforced error on what has otherwise been a shitty day. I'm kind of in awe.
(That is, this was the first time in months I actually did bother to open Safari to follow a link, not this one.)
Ok, so this is just a coded way of indicating that the police officers in question are basically just crazy racists, yeah?...I mean, labeling it "Ferguson"?
It's because a lot of this country, including you and a number of people on this blog, decided that you were sure Ferguson was a bad shoot despite not having the basic reports or any facts beyond some unverified news accounts and various social media horseshit. You all decided to rake a guy over the coals for months and it turns out you all didn't have the slightest idea what the hell you were talking about. Before you get your scoff going maybe take a minute to recall how that worked out for you last time.
It's not the only thing going on, but it's real, particularly in Baltimore. Mosby has decided to go off the rails with a wrongful arrest legal theory and the rank and file, rightfully so, have decided that shaking guys down for guns isn't worth having some ignorant crusader try and take you livelyhood and your freedom. The month after those Baltimore indictments, the murder rate tripled. Overall, it's up approx 75 percent.
If you want to describe that as a "dead cat bounce" I guess you can, but there is an actual explanation which is more gang crime.
I think the spanish tiger is right. I suspect there's more to come because the left and right seem locked in a dance to totally fuck everything up. The CA led to push to release tons of felons isn't going to be without consequences, as is the drastic reduction in drug penalties. I hope I'm wrong, but I think the push to reduce the drug penalties to a slap on the wrist but to leave it a crime is going to be a disaster. AFAICT this removes almost all of the legal risk but leaves the financial incentives entirely intact. How is the drug trade not going to be even more worth fighting over now, especially in light of the continuing erosion of wages and job opportunities?
Yeah, the Baltimore situation does seem to be pretty much the result of an ongoing work-to-rule strike by the force. Which of course is totally illegitimate -- do your jobs! But which also puts the lie to some of the dumber "you don't need police" rhetoric that you see here and elsewhere.
One thing I've heard is that the uptick in gang shootings here, combined with some property crime rises, is because the middle class heroin epidemic, which I thought was some weird New England thing, is now starting to burn through the ghetto. Who knows if that is true (I sure don't) but it would suck if it were.
On the lead stuff, there are plenty of problems beyond just the cohort stuff, though there is also a lot more to be said there, too. Drum is on the way outlier edge of people who look at these issues in claiming importance for lead, but there's a good chunk of the internet that now seems to take him even further (even Drum wouldn't say "we know that it was all lead" but you see that repeated a lot in the world of blogs).
I heard someone very knowledgeable and powerful in LE here make the point in 75. Personally I think the return of felons is likely more dangerous than the sentencing changes, because the evidence was pretty weak that sentencing worked as a deterrent.
76.1: They're not refusing do respond to calls for service, they're just not doing proactive work, and I don't blame them. Mosby is pursuing a theory that the pursuit and disarming of Freddie Gray was illegitimate, which is totally at odds with established case law.
64: I think I'm not quite talking about the same thing. TNC writes about something like how there's no available response to Yo, I heard you was messin' with my cousin! and I'm talking about that level of discourse except on Facebook you get friends and enemies from both sides jumping into it. I'd expect a social media dispute that ended in homicide to have started more like that.
A theory I've heard for Baltimore is that during the unrest a ton of pharmacies were cleaned out (property damage was limited to a small area of a few blocks except for pharmacies, which were hit all over the city). The idea is that the current uptick in shootings is a result of fighting over rights to sell the stuff that was stolen.
You all decided to rake a guy over the coals for months and it turns out you all didn't have the slightest idea what the hell you were talking about.
I'm fairly certain that whole think didn't convince any great number of people about anything except the need for an independent prosecutor of some kind.
77: I agree, thanks to the fact that prisons have nothing to do with rehabilitation. Prison fucks you up. Then you get dumped back into the community with no resources and a rap sheet that makes employment hard to find.
A judge I knew used to assume that sending a young adult to prison was the same thing as turning them into a life-long criminal. I don't know if that's a common view or not.
Apparently, your middle-aged first-time felon did a bit better coming out.
They're not refusing do respond to calls for service, they're just not doing proactive work, and I don't blame them.
May I?
75. Oh come off it. You honestly think "It's because we can't aggressively crack those people's heads the way we did before because those people started objecting too loudly" isn't racist? That naming it after a case where a black person was shot and prompted a whole lot of protests and the Black Lives Matter campaign doesn't reflect anything there? I get that you want to reflexively defend any damn thing that comes from cops, but that's reaching pretty damn far, especially when, as the article immediately points out, they're talking about something totally unrelated to what happened in Ferguson and which couldn't have been caused by it, or the general reaction.
Also while it's nice to see that you're defending this thing here, but it doesn't exactly help your argument that I ended up foolishly wrong for calling that racist.
disarming of Freddie Gray was illegitimate, which is totally at odds with established case law.
What weapon was Gray disarmed of?
"It's because we can't aggressively crack those people's heads the way we did before because those people started objecting too loudly" isn't racist?
That's not what's going on. Reality is that loads of cops specifically sign up for the worst areas, eager to get out there and get good arrests. Drugs are easy to find, the gold standard is getting a gun. But getting guns off the street and making people wary of carrying those guns requires proactive work. It's also the type of work that's reasonably dangerous because you're dealing with felons who resolve things with an illegal firearm. Even done 100 percent right sometimes those situations go sideways on you due to decisions being made by the subject.
The Ferguson effect isn't cops pulling back because people are objecting. If you're out in a community doing work trying to take guns off of felons, some of those encounters are going to end up with a shooting. It's inevitable. Even if it's a totally legitimate shoot, if that community is going to instantly lionize that felon and do it's best to take your job, then you are going to stop doing that type of work. You'll respond to calls, but proactive work will dry up. That's the Ferguson effect.
Again, it's not the only thing going on with the murder rate, but in some places it's a real thing, particularly in Baltimore. LA probably not so much, but they've also had a better community relations and is less of a god forsaken hellscape.
I agree with 89.2, but that's really beside the point on most of this. The protests have been around the police killing or shooting of people who did not have weapons. Or who had weapons but were killed by things that happened after they were cuffs.
And the effect showed up before Ferguson, as even the article notes, so unless policing is subject to some very strange quantum effects (someone call essear!) then there's no way to assign causality or even influence there.
91: It was still a good shoot, but it didn't matter. Wilson had to do into hiding and will never work as a cop again. Baltimore is even worse. Gray was a known dealer who'd been arrested half a dozen times between December and April. Chasing him and checking him for weapons isn't just legal, it's exactly what the cops in those beats should be doing. They know they're not going stop drug use, but they can at least take guns away and make the street dealers wary of carrying guns. Mosby deciding to try and criminalize that type of work is an ongoing disaster.
How does beating a restrained suspect (who was carrying a knife, not a gun, and one that may have been legal) to death make street dealers wary of carrying a gun?
And I hope you're right about Wilson needing to find a new line of work.
So a key cop job benefit is being able to kill guys with arguably legal knives without impunity, and if we take that away from them they can't be bothered to do the rest of their work? Fascinating insight into cop psychology.
I'm not entirely convinced that "checking him for illegal weapons" was what people objected to with the Baltimore case. It may have had more to do with the "arresting him after not finding any anyway" and "killing him" bits.
Seriously though defending Darren Wilson is one thing but come on here. The Freddie Gray case simply doesn't have anywhere near enough ambiguity for you to wedge in a defense of the police actions.
It seems to me that "good shoot" means, or should mean, "not a crime." I don't understand it to mean "good idea" and think it's completely fair for potential employers to question Wilson's judgment, even if they don't think he ought to be in jail.
And was he a bad fit for the community that employed him? His post-employment conduct suggests that maybe he was.
If it's a good shoot, it is because Wilson put himself in a position where he was in actual danger from Brown, while there was a zillion other paths he could have taken that would not have done so. I wouldn't want him on my police force either.
The CA led to push to release tons of felons isn't going to be without consequences, as is the drastic reduction in drug penalties.
Something to come back to in a year or so and examine. (Prop 47 also allows people convicted of now-misdemeanorized crimes to clear their records, so that should be a boost to many.)
94, 96, 97: How many fucking times do I have to tell you people to wait for autopsy results?
the medical examiner surmised that he may have gotten to his feet and was thrown into the wall during an abrupt change in direction. He was not belted in, but his wrists and ankles were shackled, putting him "at risk for an unsupported fall during acceleration or deceleration of the van."
I just wish someone could have warned you about this outcome.
Sorry, you're appealing to the autopsy that called the death a homicide? What are you talking about?
101.1 So is that gross or criminal negligence?
How does that autopsy refute anything? It shows that he was unbelted during a ride. This was was against policy, a policy put into place because police were using it as extra-judicial punishment.
99: Could you illustrate the effect any better? Yes, it's not the fault of the robbery suspect who tried to take a cops gun and then turned to attack him a second time, it's the fault of the cop who foolishly tried to detain him. Yeah, it's a real mystery as to why some police lately are reluctant to do proactive work.
Also, the quote you pull as obviously exculpatory is 'the medical examiner surmised... may have'? This does not seem to be to be a certain explanation. As I said on the last thread, people ride in vans without seatbelts all the time, and usually they live through the experience. Given that the police put a living man in that van, and took out a dying one, I have no problem assigning responsibility for his death to the police officers involved, and the medical examiner appears to agree with me by calling it a homicide.
I know it's got to be tough feeling like the voice of the police around here, but you're not making any sense.
I'm sorry do you somehow have more proof for the claim that he tried to take Wilson's gun, and then attacked him a second time now than you did back when people were arguing about it before? Some kind of secret evidence that never came up?
God, I'm talking about 94 and 96 talking like Gray was beaten to death.
They broke policy, and a guy died, which gets you to manslaughter on the guys doing the transpo. The damage Mosby did was trying to pursue wrongful arrest charges on all the initial officers who arrested him.
'They broke policy' is putting it pretty gently when some of the policies they broke were 'don't try to hurt people once you have them in custody' and 'if someone is hurt when they're in your custody you don't just leave them back there to die'.
108: If you can't be bothered to read any of that the first time I'm not going to rehash it with you. That Brown grabbed the gun and then came back at Wilson is the opinion of basically every expert who's examined that DOJ report.
They broke policy, and a guy died, which gets you to manslaughter on the guys doing the transpo.
You make it sound as if 'breaking policy' was a purely technical thing. They broke policy by treating him in a way that killed him. Like I keep on saying, people ride unbelted in vans all the time. It's not a great idea, maybe, but they generally live. This wasn't 'they broke policy and then he was hit by a meteor, so technically it counts as manslaughter'. They broke policy and killed him.
I think "beaten to death" is a bit provocative as far as language goes, but within the permissible set of terms that could describe that situation.
There's 0 evidence of rough ride at this point and the autopsy says he suffered no injures from from being restrained. The first stop they make is to put leg shackles on him and they put him back in the van, on his belly, still physically and verbally alert and active. The autopsy concludes he suffers the injury after losing his footing during the ride, with injuries similar to a diving type accident.
Yes, he shouldn't have been able to get to his feet and continue fucking around in the back of the van because they should have restrained him per policy. That's negligent and gets you to manslaughter. But it is not the cops beating a shackled prisoner to death.
108 -- dude, give it up. You were just wrong, GSwift was right, and you should admit it on this issue to avoid losing all credibility on other ones. As the DOJ (in the context of a report harshly criticizing other practices by the Ferguson PD) expressly found, the credible evidence all points to Wilson legitimately acting in self-defense after a struggle over his gun and then being attacked.
109 seems like a probably legit complaint (that is, the wrongful arrest charges don't seem to have a great deal of support), but still doesn't (IMO) justify anything like the work-to-rule strike that's apparently going on in Baltimore.
You sound as if you've completely lost contact with reality. In the absence of a rough ride, you think death is a reasonably plausible outcome of being put in the back of a van without a seatbelt on? I mean, there's nothing to argue about at this point, but that seems insane.
112. 113 -- I don't think GSwift disagrees with you. What he's saying is that Baltimore cops fear making proactive arrests because there are guys who weren't involved in the transportation of Gray who are being wrung up on charges of wrongful arrest. Again, I don't think this is a legit reaction even if the wrongful arrest charges themselves are b.s. But the point isn't that the Baltimore cops acted just fine, it's that they're being overcharged in ways that (maybe) threaten legit police work.
Or maybe that's not what GSwift is saying. I dunno. But 117 seems like the reasonable-cop gripe with what's going on in Baltimore.
the wrongful arrest charges don't seem to have a great deal of support
Has the prosecutor moved off her position that (a) he was arrested wrongfully without probable cause before they found the knife and (b) the knife was legal? I haven't been following this closely.
A couple of the officers are charged for not calling medical assistance after Gray was injured, nothing to do with the arrest itself.
Wikipedia doesn't have a picture of the knife, so we'll never find out about that.
This is a pretty good run-down of the situation, from basically a GSwift-esque perspective. Basically, they almost certainly had reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk, once they did so and found the knife they almost certainly had a reasonable basis for an arrest, or at least one that shouldn't provide for criminal prosecution.
116: It's what the autopsy says!
117 is what I'm getting at.
It's what the autopsy says!
No it isn't. The autopsy doesn't say a damn thing about 'in the absence of a rough ride'.
116/124: just to make this explicit, we're using "rough ride" in the sense of "intentionally swerving/braking to harm the prisoner" right?
Every schoolbus has (or had? I'm not up to date on current schoolbuses) unbelted teenagers clowning around. The death toll remains low.
125 is right. Also, 117 is not remotely the argument made in 114 and later points along that line of thought.
126: Yep.
128: And the kids have their hands and ankles shackled? Come on, you're a New Yorker. Surely you've noticed all those bars and rubber straps and such on public transit for people to hold onto while they're riding around in a standing position.
129: Dude, scroll all the way up to 109.
You can't have it both ways. If death is a perfectly ordinary sort of thing to happen when you put a shackled unbelted man in a van and drive around normally, then doing that isn't just violating policy negligently, it's intentionally doing something that is likely to kill him. I don't believe that you're right about that, but if your superior knowledge of what it's like to be shackled in a van is accurate, it's not exculpatory at all.
I don't understand 116 in light of 127. What evidence do we have that the van movement causing the injury was intentional vs. a normal sudden stop (or whatever)? (Genuine question, not a rhetorical one; I haven't been following this case for a while.)
I think 'that it killed him' and 'that it was a common enough practice that there was local slang for it' are together enough. It is not impossible that a fluke accident snapped his neck. But generations of kids horsing around in the backs of schoolbuses suggests to me that it would be a hell of a fluke.
133, 134 -- I could see the facts getting to reckless (or depraved heart, essentially intentional disregard of a known risk) murder. Which I think is what the driver has been charged with. Which strikes me as maybe aggressive but not unwarranted. The theory would be that shackling without buckling in a suspect is reckless, because you are intentionally disregarding the clear risk that he will be hurt and die if the van stops suddenly. But not intent beyond that. As far as I know there's no evidence or testimony supporting the intentional rough-ride-to-injure hypothesis. Obviously if there is, that changes things.
And, you'd probably have to know a bit more even to get there -- is death from being shackled in a moveable van clearly foreseeable such that it gets you to recklessness, or just something that does happen sometimes but not all that much, such that it is merely negligent (no question that it was a negligent homicide). I don't really know the answers to those questions, but they are what you'd have to know to draw conclusions about the charges.
The pictures of the van don't match the school busses I've been in, and the shackles, but arguing about our guesses about probabilities is pointless.
And, more importantly, as I said above, I don't think the Baltimore cop gripe is really about the driver of the van or Gray's transportation, at all. It's about charging the arresting officers. This is a decent if overwrought article about the non-involved Baltimore cop's perspective.
As far as I know there's no evidence or testimony supporting the intentional rough-ride-to-injure hypothesis.
I think the fact that they ignored departmental policy in a department with a history of "rough rides," is more than enough to get that to trial.
Reading the link in 101 more closely, I notice that the autopsy was leaked, not released. The asymmetrical pattern of leaks seems to be all to common in these types of cases.
Charging the arresting officers may be wrong, but using that to justify the end of proactive police work is still a fascinating psychological response.
By this same logic, if a black kid gets murdered by a police officer, what sort of response by the citizenry is acceptable?
Looks like nearly the entire increase in murders comes from just Baltimore, St. Louis, and Milwaukee (all of which are set to match their 1990 peaks).