This one sentence in an AP story totally condemns themselves

[cnelsen]

"Smith’s death is just one of several high-profile U.S. cases in recent years in which a white officer killed a black suspect, including the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson that sparked months of angry and sometimes violent protests."

Can you spot the self-damning aspect of the sentence above?

Explaining the motivating factors behind the protests in St Louis, the AP mentions "several high-profile US cases in recent years", a recognition that those cases are fueling the present one. But, of course, how does a case become "high-profile"? Of the 400 police killings in 2014, how did the Michael Brown case land on the front pages? Well, by landing on the front pages. And by APs own admission, the high-profile cases are those in which a white officer kills a black suspect.

2nd day of St. Louis protests calm at malls, restaurant area

(In the Mike Brown case, the New York Times even knowingly manipulated the data to inflame racial hatreds):

What's the deal with the New York Times on race?

 

[The Irish Ram]

They are fueled by George Soros. Without His money, this would go back to the same level of interest that the blacks had 10 years ago. It is a division intended to weaken us. And it is working.

 

[usmbguest5318]

"Smith’s death is just one of several high-profile U.S. cases in recent years in which a white officer killed a black suspect, including the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson that sparked months of angry and sometimes violent protests."

Can you spot the self-damning aspect of the sentence above?

Explaining the motivating factors behind the protests in St Louis, the AP mentions "several high-profile US cases in recent years", a recognition that those cases are fueling the present one. But, of course, how does a case become "high-profile"? Of the 400 police killings in 2014, how did the Michael Brown case land on the front pages? Well, by landing on the front pages. And by APs own admission, the high-profile cases are those in which a white officer kills a black suspect.

2nd day of St. Louis protests calm at malls, restaurant area

(In the Mike Brown case, the New York Times even knowingly manipulated the data to inflame racial hatreds):

What's the deal with the New York Times on race?

by APs own admission, the high-profile cases are those in which a white officer kills a black suspect.

Seriously? Are you being purposefully inflammatory or do you truly believe accurate the inference you penned in your OP? Does it not occur to you that there are multiple kinds of "high-profile cases" and that ones in which "a white officer killed a black suspect" are but one genre of them?

 

[cnelsen]

"Smith’s death is just one of several high-profile U.S. cases in recent years in which a white officer killed a black suspect, including the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson that sparked months of angry and sometimes violent protests."

Can you spot the self-damning aspect of the sentence above?

Explaining the motivating factors behind the protests in St Louis, the AP mentions "several high-profile US cases in recent years", a recognition that those cases are fueling the present one. But, of course, how does a case become "high-profile"? Of the 400 police killings in 2014, how did the Michael Brown case land on the front pages? Well, by landing on the front pages. And by APs own admission, the high-profile cases are those in which a white officer kills a black suspect.

2nd day of St. Louis protests calm at malls, restaurant area

(In the Mike Brown case, the New York Times even knowingly manipulated the data to inflame racial hatreds):

What's the deal with the New York Times on race?

by APs own admission, the high-profile cases are those in which a white officer kills a black suspect.

Seriously? Are you being purposefully inflammatory or do you truly believe accurate the inference you penned in your OP? Does it not occur to you that there are multiple kinds of "high-profile cases" and that ones in which "a white officer killed a black suspect" are but one genre of them?

Yes, there are high-profile divorce cases, and high-profile bankruptcy cases, but you are throwing in a red herring. My point is that the white officer/black suspect cases are high profile because they are white officer/black suspect cases. The point is, the media is feeding the violence and unrest. In at least the NYT's case, it is intentional as I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in my article linked above.

If the media were really concerned about police violence (and we all should be), more than half the "high-profile cases" would be about whatever-color-policeman killing white suspects.

 

[usmbguest5318]

"Smith’s death is just one of several high-profile U.S. cases in recent years in which a white officer killed a black suspect, including the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson that sparked months of angry and sometimes violent protests."

Can you spot the self-damning aspect of the sentence above?

Explaining the motivating factors behind the protests in St Louis, the AP mentions "several high-profile US cases in recent years", a recognition that those cases are fueling the present one. But, of course, how does a case become "high-profile"? Of the 400 police killings in 2014, how did the Michael Brown case land on the front pages? Well, by landing on the front pages. And by APs own admission, the high-profile cases are those in which a white officer kills a black suspect.

2nd day of St. Louis protests calm at malls, restaurant area

(In the Mike Brown case, the New York Times even knowingly manipulated the data to inflame racial hatreds):

What's the deal with the New York Times on race?

by APs own admission, the high-profile cases are those in which a white officer kills a black suspect.

Seriously? Are you being purposefully inflammatory or do you truly believe accurate the inference you penned in your OP? Does it not occur to you that there are multiple kinds of "high-profile cases" and that ones in which "a white officer killed a black suspect" are but one genre of them?

Yes, there are high-profile divorce cases, and high-profile bankruptcy cases, but you are throwing in a red herring. My point is that the white officer/black suspect cases are high profile because they are white officer/black suspect cases. The point is, the media is feeding the violence and unrest. In at least the NYT's case, it is intentional as I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in my article linked above.

If the media were really concerned about police violence (and we all should be), more than half the "high-profile cases" would be about whatever-color-policeman killing white suspects.

I'm confident you think you proved something. What you in fact did was write something. What you've proven is that you're capable of expressing your point of view in a manner that is clear.

If the media were really concerned about police violence (and we all should be), more than half the "high-profile cases" would be about whatever-color-policeman killing white suspects.

"The media's" role is to care about the the accuracy of information it communicates to its audience. Why anyone would think that "the media" cares about violence is beyond me; that is not why "the media" exists. Individuals, not "the media," should care about violence. [1] As consumers of media, it's the audience's "job" to distinguish between when a media personality or organization is performing their job as "the media," the entity/person whose raison d'etre is to communicate accurate information, and when they are merely speaking as an individual.

The media informs people about events that occur and knowledge and information that humanity obtains. Among the things about which the media might inform the public are the findings of study after study whereby it has been shown that police use force against minorities whereas they do not with the same or comparable frequency use the same/comparable force when interacting with non-minorities in comparable situations.

Inasmuch as your "assault" -- what it is in your essay you sought to prove -- has to do with the media and not the researchers' findings about which the media inform the general public, it is clear that what bothers you is that the media are reporting the findings. Well, in lambasting the media, you're merely shooting the messenger for doing what messengers are supposed to do: disseminate information.

If one suspects the findings are inaccurate or do not align with what is so or "whatever," one's burden is to perform one's own methodologically should research and publish findings of one's research. Provided one's work withstands soundly rigorous scrutiny, it too will be communicated by the media. Merely saying something, however, does not, in most cases, entitle one's remarks to be being reported in the media.

For whom does there mere utterance of words constitute enough reason for the media to report that the words were indeed uttered? Individuals who are in positions of power (actual, implied, assumed or apparent) such that what they say matters, has influence, regardless of the intellectual/rational merit of the speaker's remarks. If one is such an individual, upon one saying "whatever," the media will report that one said it.

Now one might wonder what are the findings about police violence, well below are some:

POLICE KILLINGS OF UNARMED AMERICANS

• A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011-2014 -- found that "evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being black, unarmed, and shot by police is about 3.49 times the probability of being white, unarmed, and shot by police on average.” Additionally, the analysis found that “there is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.”
• An independent analysis of Washington Post data on police killings found that, “when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are, in fact, less likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police.” According to one of the report’s authors, “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black. . . . Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”
• An analysis of the use of lethal force by police in 2015 found no correlation between the level of violent crime in an area and that area’s police killing rates. That finding disputes the idea that police only kill people when operating under intense conditions in high-crime areas. Mapping Police Violence found that fewer than one in three black people killed by police in 2016 were suspected of a violent crime or armed.

HOW POLICE DETERMINE WHOM TO STOP

• A report by retired federal and state judges tasked by the San Francisco district attorney’s office to examine police practices in San Francisco found “racial disparities regarding S.F.P.D. stops, searches, and arrests, particularly for Black people. ”The judges, working with experts from five law schools, including Stanford Law School, found that “the disparity gap in arrests was found to have been increasing in San Francisco.” (Officers in San Francisco were previously revealed to have traded racist and homophobic text messages, and those working in the prison system had reportedly staged and placed bets on inmate fights.)
  
  In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15% of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42% of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).” In 2015, whites searched without consent were found to be carrying contraband at nearly two times the rate as blacks who were searched without consent.
• The Department of Justice’s investigation into the behavior of police in Ferguson, Missouri, found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.” The scathing report found that the department was targeting black residents and treating them as revenue streams for the city by striving to continually increase the money brought in through fees and fines. “Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority,” the report’s authors wrote. “They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence.”
  
  “African Americans are more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops even after controlling for non-race based variables such as the reason the vehicle stop was initiated, but are found in possession of contraband 26% less often than white drivers, suggesting officers are impermissibly considering race as a factor when determining whether to search,” the authors wrote. Nearly 90 percent of documented uses of force by the Ferguson Police Department were used on African-Americans, and every documented use of a police canine bite involved African-Americans.
• In Chicago, a 2016 Police Accountability Task Force report found that “black and Hispanic drivers were searched approximately four times as often as white drivers, yet [the Chicago Police Department’s] own data show that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as black and Hispanic drivers.” The police department’s own data, the report found, “gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.”
• A 2014 analysis of Illinois Department of Transportation data found the following: “African American and Latino drivers are nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be asked during a routine traffic stop for ‘consent’ to have their car searched. Yet white motorists are 49% more likely than African American motorists to have contraband discovered during a consent search by law enforcement, and 56% more likely when compared to Latinos.”
• A 2015 analysis by The New York Times found that in Greensboro, North Carolina, police officers “used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists -- even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.” That pattern held true for police departments in four states. In Greensboro, “officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.”
• A 2013 ruling by a New York Federal District Court judge found that the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” practices violated the constitutional rights of minority citizens of the city. Between January 2004 and June 2012, the city conducted 4.4 million stops. Eighty-eight percent of those stops resulted in no further action, and 83% of the stopped population were black or Hispanic, despite the fact that those minority groups, together, made up just over half of the city’s overall population. (The number of stop-and-frisk stops has dropped dramatically since its peak in 2011.)
• A 2011 investigation by the Justice Department found that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, headed by Joe Arpaio, had “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos,” and that the office also tried to interfere with the department’s investigation. The sheriff’s office “engages in racial profiling of Latinos; unlawfully stops, detains, and arrests Latinos; and unlawfully retaliates against individuals who complain about or criticize [the office’s] policies or practices,”the report’s authors said. (Arpaio responded by saying, “We are proud of the work we have done to fight illegal immigration.”)

RACE AND THE USE OF NONLETHAL FORCE

• A 2016 study found that “African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.” The study looked at 19,000 use-of-force incidents between the years 2010 and 2015.
• A 2016 study by a team of researchers analyzed suspects’ booking photographs for phenotypical signs of whiteness to test the following hypothesis: “the Whiter one appears, the more the suspect will be protected from police force.” Their findings: “police used less force with highly stereotypical Whites, and this protective effect was stronger than the effect for non-Whites.” (See also:
• At least one study found that Latino populations suffer from similar effects. A Department of Justice investigation into the Seattle Police Department found that more than 50 percent of cases “determined to be unnecessary or excessive uses of force” involved minorities. “Analysis of limited data suggests that, in certain precincts, S.P.D. officers may stop a disproportionate number of people of color where no offense or other police incident occurred,” the report said. The investigation found that, regardless of the race of the suspect or victim, police using force were doing so unconstitutionally nearly 20% of the time.

WHEN OFF-DUTY OFFICERS ARE KILLED BY POLICE

• A 2010 governor’s task force examining police-on-police shootings found even black and Latino police officers face a greater risk of being killed by police. In cases of mistaken identity, 9 of 10 off-duty officers killed by other officers in the United States since 1982 were black or Latino. “Inherent or [subconscious] racial bias plays a role in 'shoot/don’t-shoot' decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities,” the report found.

FINDINGS ON THE USE OF HANDCUFFS

• A Stanford study of police practices in Oakland, California, found that officers were disproportionately handcuffing blacks. “Regardless of the area of the city, disproportionate treatment by race was similar and the raw totals were stunning,” according to a Washington Post summary of the findings. The Post continues: “2,890 African Americans handcuffed but not arrested in a 13-month period, while only 193 whites were cuffed. When Oakland officers pulled over a vehicle but didn’t arrest anyone, 72 white people were handcuffed, while 1,466 African Americans were restrained.” The researchers also found significant differences in the way officers spoke to African Americans: “Using only the words an officer uses during a traffic stop, we can predict whether that [officer] is talking to a black person or a white person” with 66 percent accuracy.

STUDIES THAT FOUND LITTLE OR NO EVIDENCE OF ANTI-BLACK BIAS
There are some studies that draw other conclusions.

• Research by a Washington State University professor found that, while shown video simulations, officers were less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects. They also took an extra 0.23 seconds, on average, before firing on black suspects in the simulations. “We found that officers were slightly more than three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects,” the researchers noted, while allowing for the possibility that the officers might act differently in live situations, and that the officers may have adjusted their behavior because they were being tested. (See also: This study found race matters in police shootings, but the results may surprise you)
• In a 2007 study, researchers used simulations to compare the abilities of police officers and the general population to determine whether to shoot a target that was flashed before them. The targets featured a mix of armed and unarmed black and white people. While “both samples exhibited robust racial bias in response speed,” researchers concluded that “officers outperformed community members on a number of measures, including overall speed and accuracy.” The bias related to response speed was found to be anti-black.
• A controversial working paper by Roland Fryer, Jr. found that police officers are more likely to use their hands, push a suspect into a wall, use handcuffs, draw weapons, push a suspect onto the ground, point their weapon, and use pepper spray or a baton when interacting with blacks. The study found no evidence of racial bias when it comes to police shootings, but Fryer’s methodology has come under criticism. Fryer defended his work, but admitted his research is far from perfect.

The focus on police violence towards blacks is the result of there being abundant evidence of the existential role racial bias plays in the incidence of that violence. Nobody thinks police violence is a good thing. What people think is that to the extent that police violence occurs, the incidence of its occurrence should not accrue from racial bias, and yet it does.

For decades, the United States of America has employed mass incarceration as a convenient answer to inconvenient questions. In doing so, the U.S. government has glossed over the glaring racial inequalities that permeate every aspect of its criminal justice system. The government has both fostered and perpetuated those inequalities in clear violation of its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as other international agreements.

More importantly, however, the proliferation of racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system has a real impact on the lives of people of color living in the United States. Behind each statistic lies the face of a young black man whose potential has been cut short by a harsh prison sentence mandated by draconian drug laws. Behind each percentage point lies the face of a Latina child who will only know her parents through hurried, awkward visits in a prison visitation room. Behind each dataset lies a community of color bereft of hope because its young people have been locked away.

It is the human face—a face of color—of the racial injustice of the United States criminal justice system that is the most compelling reason for reform. It is time for the United States to take affirmative steps to eliminate the racial disparities in its criminal justice system.
Source​

So the next time you want to aver that you "proved" something, you put up something that has a testable/falsifiable methodology so we can examine it to confirm cogently and credibly for ourselves whether indeed you proved it.


Note:

1. As with most professionals, when I, the business consultant, present the findings and recommendations to clients, plenty of those recommendations are not what, normatively speaking, I had rather the client do. The thing is that the client didn't ask me to report to them a set of recommendations based on my goals and value system of priorities; they asked for recommendations based on their goals and value system of priorities.
   
   My clients don't care about my value system as goes how I would run their business; they care about what I know that can be brought to bear to run their business using their value system to maximize their profits, efficiency, etc. Accordingly, the reports my teams and I provide to our clients carry the firm's name. My name is there merely a practical matter, not to indicate my personal views, recommendations or normative stance on the questions they asked of my firm.
   
   So it is with "the media" when it reports information. "The media" does not give a damn about violence, nor should it. "The media" should and does give a damn about reporting information: raw data and sound analysis of raw data. Thus, "the media" cares about reporting information about violence, not about violence itself. Now media personalities, on the other hand, may or may not and to varying degrees care about violence itself, its etiology(s), and its manifestations.
   
   The distinction I'm highlighting is subtle, but it's nonetheless a very important one to keep in mind when one produces, disseminates and/or consumes information. What's clear to me is that many people exercise procrustean formulations whereby they simply do not keep that subtlety in mind.