Turns out there's a wikipedia page for US police killed in line of duty. Quite a contrast with a page for UK police killed.
For anyone too lazy to click, US killings of police run about 50 or above, the UK runs about 1 a year.
The context is the culture: US view police as maintaining order against crime in the midst of an armed populace, meaning a focus on conflict and violence, while the UK has a different history. In short, there's not an arms race in the UK, there is in US.
A very popular book in 1951, so popular mom gave it to dad for Christmas, was this (from the entry in Goodreads):
As he mentioned, he had six convicts who assisted in his research. IIRC he didn't discuss his research much, but tells stories, stories which one reviewer found fictional. But at the end, again if I remember, he described some of the six convicts as men who couldn't be rehabilitated and released.
Reading "Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight" which is good, better for anyone who didn't live through the Johnson administration and read her memoir.
Just reached June 4, 1968, when RFK was assassinated, following the killing of MLK in Memphis. The author quotes an excerpt from a speech by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the next day (who had campaigned for RFK) in which he said: "America is a land of violent people, with a violent history..." Seems to fit today.
I tweeted this today: "Is it strange that the NRA's good man with a gun guarding a school or church never requires an AR-15, but John Doe defending his home has an absolute right to an AR-15?"
Not sure that expresses my intent--in other words: shouldn't the good guys have weapons at least as good as possible assailants? It's obvious to me that an AR-15 or similar weapon is not for self-defense.
Homicides are up, fatal car accidents are up. I suggest it's a combination of factors (that's always a safe suggestion):
AOC links Gosar's video to a "nihilism" among Republicans holding that nothing Congress does really matters or is meaningful pic.twitter.com/zFYlFwI3f9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 17, 2021)
Long discussion in Post of the possible causes for increase in murders this year in America (not occurring elsewhere if article is right).
Thinking of a metaphor for human society--as a nuclear reactor, with police as the control rods absorbing or not the excess neutrons, thereby damping or permitting greater interactions.
One might expand the applicability of the metaphor to the pandemic, with the control rods being the vaccines, masks, lockdowns, etc.
You'd have to expand the discussion to include the rates of the radioactivity of the alternative materials which could be used for a reactor. (I'd assume that radium, for example, could explode given the right setup.)
Back to homicide--it seems to me one effect of the pandemic likely has been to change the characteristics of the public, those who are active in exchanges with others. During the past year the "public" has become younger and poorer as the old and the better-off have been much better able to reduce their time in public. That might well mean that the remaining "public" is more reactive, somewhat as if the uranium was more highly enriched.
Mr. Chauvin was convicted yesterday. I've not tried to follow the ins and outs, but based on what I've heard/read I've no problem with it. Scott Johnson at Powerline says the prosecution case was stronger than his initial expectations, which is significant.
If I could, I'd like to gather people on both sides of the verdict and ask this question: if the parameters of the case could be changed, what change(s) would convince you to change your mind? By parameters I mean such things as the length of time Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck, Floyd's actions, the prosecution witnesses, Floyd's health condition (Bob Somerby has a hypothetical there.)
While the exercise would be interesting, I don't know if it would be educational at all. I don't think people make decisions that way, by considering parameters one at a time. It's like buying a house; the final choice is more a gut feel than reasoned.
I really liked Rosa Brooks' last book, so I pre-ordered her new one, Tangled Up in Blue, Policing the American City. Haven't started it yet, as I'm still finishing Midnight in Chernobyl. She and Peter Moskos, who I follow on Twitter, had an interesting exchange. Here's a quote from a Georgetown interview:
It’s incredibly hard to be a good cop. This really came home to me once I started patrolling.
By underfunding other social services we’ve created a society in which cops are all-around first responders to everything from shootings, stabbings, domestic assaults and burglaries to mentally ill people walking down the middle of the street talking to themselves. And no one really has the skills to handle all those very different kinds of situations well.
In the interview she uses my favorite phrase: "It's complicated".
Reis Thebault, writing in the Washington Post, identifies Michael Milken as “the ‘junk bond king’ who was charged with insider trading…”I was curious so I checked wikipedia.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board says that Milken “was never charged with insider trading.”
In March 1989, a federal grand jury indicted Milken on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud. The indictment accused Milken of a litany of misconduct, including insider trading, stock parking (concealing the real owner of a stock), tax evasion and numerous instances of repayment of illicit profits.He pled guilty to six counts, which likely were the least serious ones, securities and tax violations (i.e., not insider trading). So it sounds like a plea deal: the feds got jail time and a scalp on the wall; Milken avoided a long and expensive trial which might have resulted in much more serious penalties and which can be described as "technical", and therefore worthy of a pardon.
The national annual average (of police shootings) since 2015 is a rate of 0.31 (per 100,000). And yet New Mexico is 0.98 and New York is 0.09. This is a large difference.Second piece is mostly on people shooting police
Western states worst, NE states best, highest black states better than average.
Lack of density -- more space -- is correlated with being more likely to be killed by cops. Think of what this means. Common sense tells you it's not a view of "big sky country" that makes cops shoot someone. Whatever really matters, is correlated to density (or lack thereof). Maybe it's single person patrol. Or the time for backup to arrive. Or meth labs. Or gun culture.
The greater the percentage of blacks in a state, the less likely cops are to shoot and kill people.
1) Whites don't really care about who police shoot; period; end of story. And without the pressure over bad (or even good) police-involved shootings, cops never learn how to shoot less. Other things being equal, cops simply shoot more people if there isn't any push-back from (to over-generalize) blacks and liberals and media and anti-police protesters. Call it the Al Sharpton Effect, if you will. Basically, in many places, police organization and culture do need to be pressured into changing for the better.
2) Police can be recruited, trained, and taught to less often use legally justifiable but not-needed lethal force less. The state variations in police use of lethal force are huge. Some states (and particularly jurisdictions within states) do it better than others. Instead of saying "police are the problem" we could look at the states and cities and department that are doing it better and learn.
A central question for the Maryland Court of Appeals is whether a young person can be sentenced to life without what prison reform advocates say is any realistic chance of release. The cases follow several Supreme Court rulings that distinguish between adult and juvenile offenders, who the court says are not as culpable and have a “heightened capacity for change.”Then there's this Chico Harlan article about a North Korean spy who successfully bombed a South Korean airliner, killing 115 people, during the run-up to the Seoul summer Olympics. She's living quietly as the mother of two teenagers.
The high court in 2016 prohibited mandatory life sentences for juveniles without parole and has said young offenders must have a “meaningful” chance to show they have matured and to be released.
From the Los Angeles Times: Californians are 30% less likely to die a violent death today than other Americans. Since 1980, California’s rate of reported crime overall has fallen by 62%. The state’s criminal arrest rates, too, have fallen considerably, by 55% overall, and by 80% among people younger than 18 — a population, it is worth noting, that is now 72% nonwhite.Violent crime in California has fallen by an impressive 50% in the same period. This includes drops in robberies (65%), homicide (68%), and rapes and assaults (more than 40%). That last figure is even more remarkable when you consider that the legal definitions of both assault and rape were expanded during these years.
"Multiple factors account for the rising proportion of older Americans in prison. First, ever the trendsetters, baby boomers are somewhat more criminally active in late life than were previous generations."
