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Politics

美国糟糕的治安管理

Jun 2, 2020 Jeffrey Sommers

米尔沃基—乔治·佛洛伊德死于明尼阿波利斯警官德里克·肖万之手——确切地说，是死于他的膝盖之下——这一事件在全美绝大部分主要城市引发了一波和平抗议和暴力骚乱。相关视频被拍下来公诸于世，人们因此认识到，非洲裔美国人被排除在美国宏大的进步叙事之外，而据认为美国的状况会随着时间的推移而逐步改善。

这样的看法得到了数据的证实。布鲁金斯学会近期的一项研究显示，截止2016年，一个典型白人家庭的净资产近乎是黑人家庭的十倍。尽管美国仅占全球人口的5%，但却拥有全世界 21%的被监禁人口，其中1/3都是非洲裔美国人。

几乎每个星期都会传出有关非洲裔美国人死于警察或义务警员之手的新消息。每次都会引发媒体的不满和绝望，同时呼吁改革治安程序。但问题却从未得到解决，部分因为其中综合了许多问题。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 16 Comments on this article

Paul Daley Jun 7, 2020

This is just silly. Blacks account for about half of US murder victims but only a quarter of the victims of police killings. Does that suggest that the police are more or less likely to kill blacks than the general population? You could argue that police should be exemplars in a society in which racism is all too common, but one should also be clear about where the racism is coming from in the general population. According to the FBI's crime statistics for 2018, a black man is 15 times more likely to kill a white man than a white man is to kill a black. That is an ugly fact, but it is true, and it is a fact that America needs to acknowledge and treat, if it hopes to come to grips with the problems of racism.
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Joe Ryan Jun 7, 2020

Prof. Sommers' essay might also have suggested that we end “The War on the People We Buy Our Drugs From.” One particular step among others would be to have the U.S. Government remove marijuana from the DEA’s Schedule I, but the principle should of course be applied more generally than just to marijuana. A lot of commutations of prison sentences should follow right away.

Hopefully, this would allow policing to lighten up substantially, benefiting us all and African-Americans more than most.
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Mark Weber Jun 6, 2020

In Europe there are countries that have these socialistic redistribution mechanisms. A lot of uneducated asylum seekers come to europe and with or without massive redistribution some groups do very well and others dont. In Switzerland for example about 80% of African refugees live on welfare after 10 years while for other immigrants (like Tamils from Sri Lanka) this number is about 10-20%.

Although the crime rates for immigrant groups are in most of the time not published separately it is obvious that Africans have much higher crime rates here too. It would absolutely make no sense for the police not to stop more black people when fighting drug dealing in the streets because in many places this business is in the hand of Nigerian gangs. Politically correct policing would just make the police less effective.

This of course does not justify police brutality. But if you assume that within every police force (or any other group) there are some racists this explains why black people are more often victims of police brutality. They commit a larger number of crimes.

So reforming the police is certainly warranted after seeing such pictures but I don't think this will solve the underlying problem.

Also, telling people that they are victims (because their ancestor were slaves hundreds of years ago) and they are entitled to handouts is certainly not going to help.

People like Jeffrey Sommers just juse the African americans for their political aims - just like Trump does this on the opposite side.
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Peter Schaeffer Jun 4, 2020

The key (but unstated) law enforcement doesn't discriminate against minorities with respect to shootings in the USA. The issue has been studied to death for years and it is simply not true. See "NBER WORKING PAPER SERIESAN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN POLICE USE OFFORCE" by Roland G. Fryer, Jr" (NBER). Quote

"This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks andHispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactionswith police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, butcannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings–we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utilitymaximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expectedcosts of officer-involved shootings"

See also "Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings" by David J. Johnson (and others). (PNAS) Quote

"Despite extensive attention to racial disparities in police shootings, two problems have hindered progress on this issue. First, databases of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) lack details about officers, making it difficult to test whether racial disparities vary by officer characteristics. Second, there are conflicting views on which benchmark should be used to determine racial disparities when the outcome is the rate at which members from racial groups are fatally shot. We address these issues by creating a database of FOIS that includes detailed officer information. We test racial disparities using an approach that sidesteps the benchmark debate by directly predicting the race of civilians fatally shot rather than comparing the rate at which racial groups are shot to some benchmark. We report three main findings: 1) As the proportion of Black or Hispanic officers in a FOIS increases, a person shot is more likely to be Black or Hispanic than White, a disparity explained by county demographics; 2) race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot; and 3) although we find no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings, when focusing on different subtypes of shootings (e.g., unarmed shootings or “suicide by cop”), data are too uncertain to draw firm conclusions. We highlight the need to enforce federal policies that record both officer and civilian information in FOIS."
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Keith Roberts Jun 4, 2020

This article is a good start, but we should pay serious attention not just to how we spend tax money but also to how we get it. A brief comment that the Fed can print all the money we want is inadequate, and probably mistaken. The inequality we have derives, in the first instance, from inadequate federal and state policing of businesses. There are mechanisms available to prevent the grotesque channeling of corporate income to top company executives, private equity thieves, and major stockholders without doing significant damage to GDP, production and innovation. And where such mechanisms don't exist, we have legislatures that could pass laws to provide them. Apart from laissez-faire ideology, there are two major reasons for the inadequacy of government supervision over our markets. One is the consistent Republican demand for lower taxes, in the service of choking the government to death in a bath tub. This demand, focused on the wealthy, has greatly tilted the tax burden away from those most able to shoulder it. The second reason is that with the ability of the wealthy and their corporations to conceal their money in offshore tax shelters, there is less and less revenue and wealth within reach of the tax collectors. Similarly, the ability of wealthy firms and citizens to select their State of residence based on its tax policy has created a race to the bottom among the States. These are not simple problems to solve, but a Biden Presidency should focus on them. With an adequate and fair flow of tax money to the government, it could do a great deal to restore fairness throughout the land.
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Brian G Jun 4, 2020

What is happening to our liberal cities?
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Petey Bee Jun 3, 2020

Although it is obviously relevant, this moment is not about fixing race relations in the US. It is about a very specific pattern of conduct and policy of police depts. Namely killing unarmed suspects who are minorities (that is to say, murder), and then not punishing the killers.

If police brutality is not punished it continues. If it is firmly punished that is the necessary first step.
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Laurie McGinness Jun 3, 2020

From the outside the USA appears to be rapidly reaching the status of a failed society. The scale of inequality and its intergenerational nature over the entire history of the nation suggest that reconciliation between black and white, rich and poor or even Democrat and Republican, is impossible. The symptoms of widespread drug abuse, gun violence and poverty cannot be denied. It is hard to avoid, looking further back that the United States was set up by rich white men for the benefit of rich white men. The prognosis for such a nation in 21C is very poor.
- Mark Weber Jun 6, 2020
  
  Europe is catching up fast. They just "solve" the problem with high crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods by not sending the police there anymore...
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美国糟糕的治安管理

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