Category: police

Chicago cop, citing gender precedent and seeking affirmative-action benefits, prevented from changing race to person of color from Caucasian

February 29, 2024 • 9:30 am

This event was more or less inevitable given that organizations can allow people to change their genders (a social construct) but won’t allow them to change their race (another social construct).  That is, many people and groups approve of “transgenderism” but strongly oppose “transracialism”.

It’s a mystery to me why, if you feel you’re of a different sex or gender than your natal sex, it’s okay—and often approved by authorities—to be identified by your assumed gender. But if you truly feel that you were born as a member of the “wrong” race, as was, famously, Rachel Dolezal in Spokane, Washington, then you are not allowed to identify as a member of  your chosen race. When Dolezal was outed as white by her family, she was demonized, universally excoriated, and then fired from her job as chapter president of the local NAACP.

Defending the idea that you could be sincerely “transracial,” philosophy professor Rebecca Tuvel compared transracialism with both transsexualism and transgenderism in an article in the journal Hypatia, and ignited a huge academic firestorm. As I wrote at the time:

. . . . more than 400 academics have signed an open letter to the editor of Hypatia calling for the article to be retracted. “Our concerns reach beyond mere scholarly disagreement; we can only conclude that there has been a failure in the review process, and one that painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege,” the letter says.

The journal’s Facebook apology responded to those concerns by saying that it would be looking closely at its editorial processes to make sure they are more inclusive of transfeminists and feminists of color, whom the journal said had been particularly harmed by the article. The journal also apologized for its initial response to the backlash, saying that an earlier Facebook post had “also caused harm, primarily by characterizing the outrage that met the article’s publication as mere ‘dialogue’ that the article was ‘sparking.’ We want to state clearly that we regret that the post was made.”

But Tuvel’s article wasn’t pulled, and it’s still up (see first link above).  I defended her because I think Tuvel’s argument for tranracialism, assuming someone’s desire to change races is sincere, showed clear and strong philosophical parallels with transgenderism. But for some reason I still can’t fathom, even progressive whites oppose transracialism, including the kind like Dolezal’s in which one identifies as the member of a group said to be oppressed. The differential response must have something to do, I think, with an assumed “sacredness” of racial minority status.

Well, according to the New York Post, a Chicago cop named Muhammad Yusuf, who initially gave his race as “Caucasian,” but could easily be considered a person of color, has decided to change his racial designation so he can take advantages of perks given to PoCs.  It’s not a ruse, for he really is a minority-group member, and after joining the force he realized that he might have been promoted faster had he provided a more accurate racial designation. Click on the screenshot below to see the archived Post article:

The cops, by the way, refused to change his racial designation even though Yusuf gave them the results of a 23andMe test showing his genome had a non-Caucasian origin. So Yusuf is suing them.

Excerpts:

A Chicago police officer is suing the city to change his race on his official records after the department said it would allow officers to freely change their gender to match their identity.

Mohammad Yusuf, 43, said in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed last week that he is looking to change from “Caucasian” as he “currently identifies as Egyptian and African American.” However, the Chicago Police Department is not allowing him to change his race.

The lawsuit comes as the department allows an officer’s “gender identity [to be] corrected to match their lived experience,” Yusuf’s lawsuit alleges.

And, the decision is impacting Yusuf’s professional advancement, he claims.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Chicago Police Department for a statement, and it said: “We do not comment on pending litigation.”

According to the lawsuit, Yusuf alleges that he has been repeatedly overlooked for promotions due to his “Caucasian” race. These promotions, he claims, have been given to other minority applicants with only very few going to Caucasian applicants.

The 20-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department points in his lawsuit to CPD’s promotion system that “particularly” benefits “minority candidates,” even if they did not score well on promotional exams.

Yusuf specifically claims he “scored in the first promotional tier” on the sergeant’s exam in 2019. But, he was not promoted then and has still not received such a promotion.

Since that time, he alleges in the lawsuit to have seen “over 75 Merit Promotions to sergeant,” with “less than five” going to candidates who identify as Caucasian.

“Despite Yusuf’s exemplary qualifications and the purported race-neutral policy of the Merit System, Yusuf has been repeatedly bypassed for promotion in favor of less qualified candidates, based on their race, specifically African American officers, some of whom had disciplinary issues and were not suitable for the responsibilities of a sergeant,” Yusuf said in his complaint.

Yusuf said he first joined the force in 2004 and, at the time, the department only offered three race selections: Caucasian, Black and Hispanic. He chose “Caucasian” and it was put on his official record, he said.

Now, the department offers “over nine” different racial designations for incoming officers. But, it is stopping him from changing his race to more accurately reflect his identity due to a “blanket prohibition” against changing an officer’s race, the legal filing said.

. . . . After repeated rejections, Yusuf claims he was told he would first have to produce a DNA test before his race could be changed on his record. He then provided the results of a “23 and Me” genetic test, which showed his heritage and race, but the department ultimately said it was “not possible” to change his official record, he claims.

So Yusef is suing Chicago for a Title V civil rights violation.  He has a good case, for if the Police Department allows a gender (or sex) transition, it should allow a race transition, so long as it’s sincere. And although Yusef is doing this for reasons of ambition, he nevertheless has a good claims, for he’s not really Caucasian.  Further, gender is said to be a social construct, and so is race, so what’s the difference? (Race isn’t really a pure social construct, for even the wonky “traditional” races like black, white, and East Asian have diagnostic genetic/biological differences if you do a multivariant DNA test.)

At any rate, Yusef seems to have a valid claim and I’m curious about whether the Police Department, which surely does practice a form of affirmative action for promotion, will fold.

And speaking as an observer of human nature, I still don’t understand why transracialism, particularly like the case above—but also in the case of Rachel Dolezal—is considered a no-no by both members of minorities and white “progressives.”

Below: Rachel Dolezal (photo taken from Wikipedia), speaking at a civil rights rally before being outed:

Aaron Robert Kathman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

 

h/t: Jez

The brutal police beating of Tyre Nichols

January 28, 2023 • 8:45 am

This case has not yet been tried, so we can’t yet say that the five police officers indicted for second-degree murder of Tyre Nichols, 29, were guilty. But if you look at the video linked to the NYT article below, it sure looks as if they were whaling on him without any valid cause.  In the video (click screenshot below), Nichols was stopped for reckless driving, forced to the ground by the cops, and then cried that he didn’t do anything and just wanted to go home. That was enough to make the cops pepper-spray him in the face repeatedly.

Nichols manages to get up and start running toward home, at which point they taze him, which doesn’t seem to be improper procedure.

He’s chased, taken down again, and then gets hit and repeatedly pepper-sprayed as he calls “Mom!” (This is heartbreaking.) Then he’s beaten with a baton, punched and kicked—all without appearing to offer any resistance. Even when he’s forced to stand up by the cops, and probably unconscious, they still keep beating him. Nichols is then dragged to the car and the cops stand around, not doing anything to assist Nichols until an ambulance arrives.

Nichols died three days later in the hospital. The autopsy said he died from “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating.” That’s no surprise given the video.

If you want to watch, and do so only if you can tolerate extreme brutality, I recommend the NYT video (be sure to turn the sound on), as it shows the entire event from Nichols being forced out of the car to being beaten and kicked until the ambulance arrives, but I’ve put the NBC News report on the event, which shows the apparent police brutality, at the bottom.

The video was released last night, and there have been demonstrations, but they were peaceful, as Nichols’s family requested.

To me it sure looks like manslaughter, and there is no obvious reason save police anger and desire for revenge that warrants such brutal treatment. Nichols put up no resistance except, before the beaten, when he broke free and tried to run home.  How a police officer can beat, kick, and pepper-spray someone who gave up and is calling for his mom is beyond belief—and it’s the police, not a personal altercation.

The indictment seems to be n the mark, and it’s a good thing there was a “skycam” nearby and the bodycams were turned on. Who knows what the cops might have made up had this not been the case? My heart goes out to Nichols’s family—especially his mom, for whom he called as he was beaten within an inch of his life. They had to watch their son’s slaughter before the video was release to the public yesteeray.

The NYT article below has more details, but you can read them for yourself. It’s unspeakably sad.

Here are details from the NYT if you can’t bear to watch:

Mr. Nichols was stopped on the evening of Jan. 7 in the southeastern corner of the city. Officers forced him out of his car and wrestled him to the ground, according to the videos. He dropped to the ground and laid on his side, imploring the officers to stop and saying, “I’m just trying to get home,” as they held down different parts of his body.

Though he appeared to show no resistance, the police threatened to hurt him further and continued to order him to get on the ground, apparently wanting him to roll onto his stomach. About two minutes into the encounter, an officer directed pepper spray at his face. At that point, Mr. Nichols got up from the ground and ran from the officers, one of whom fired a stun gun at him.

About eight minutes later, officers caught up with him again in a residential area near his family’s home. After tackling him, they beat him severely, as Mr. Nichols screamed in agony.

A body-worn camera and a surveillance camera captured police officers continuing their assault on Mr. Nichols, with one kicking him so hard in the face that the officer nearly fell down. Throughout the beating, which lasted about three minutes, Mr. Nichols did not appear to ever strike back. Several times, he moved his hands to cover his face, seeming to cower from the officers’ blows.

An independent autopsy commissioned by his family found that Mr. Nichols “suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to preliminary findings released this week.

The video below (it’s here as well) shows the bit where Nichols is assaulted, and it’s narrated by the NBC broadcasters and analyzed after a few minutes of video. Click on the “Watch on YouTube” line.

Among student calls to defund and abolish the U of C police, three students are murdered

November 21, 2021 • 12:15 pm

Over the last year we’ve heard many calls to “Defund the Police”, which varied in intent from simply reforming the police and perhaps diverting money to ancillary law-enforcement operation (some of which sound good, like psychiatric social workers going along on domestic violence calls) to asking for a complete abolition of the police department and a replacement with. . . what? Vigilante neighborhood police enforcement? Somehow, despite the problems of police departments, I’ve never seen an adequate substitute.  And now the movement is largely dead, thanks to two factors: a rise in crime rates throughout the U.S., and especially a rise in homicides, as well as Joe Biden’s election under his promise that he’d increase police funding.

Combined with the calls for defunding is a complete demonization of the police, epitomized by the acronym “ACAB”, meaning “all cops are bastards”.  That is of course ridiculous. While everyone admits that some cops are racist, or authoritarian, or hateful, this is simply not true of the majority of them. My interactions with the police, whether I’ve called them or have been stopped for speeding, have been polite and formal, though of course I will be told that as a white person I don’t experience the full racism of the cops. So if you want to characterize “all” cops as bastards, be my guest, but I think you’re way off. But defund them? No way.

In fact, no city has voted to get rid of or defund its police departments, and the American public has consistently asked—and this includes black communities—for more policing.

Except at the University of Chicago.

While all the sensible people here are grateful for the University of Chicago Police force, which has 24 hour policing over a wide swath of the community (not just the University grounds), as well as full police powers and good communication with the Chicago City Police, the students, who take the “ACAB” attitude, want the University cops gone, banished, singing in the Choir Invisible.

Submitted for your approval: an editorial from the Chicago student newspaper’s editorial team calling for the abolition of our large campus police. Click on the screenshot to read:

An excerpt:

The University of Chicago should abolish the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) and replace it with an unarmed emergency response service better trained and equipped to handle particular, commonly occurring University-related situations. The UCPD has been, and continues to be, one of the main agents of the University of Chicago’s history of racial injustice on the South Side. Community members at UChicago and its surrounding neighborhoods have been aware of this for many years, and the University can take action on police brutality by disarming and disbanding the UCPD. Disbanding and replacing the University’s private police force would place the area currently patrolled by UCPD under the jurisdiction of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), and will not by itself solve the numerous problems endemic to the CPD. However, by disbanding the UCPD, the University can begin to make right its numerous historical wrongs perpetrated against South Siders.

As with many issues of social justice at UChicago, students have demanded better from administrators for years. #CareNotCops, a joint campaign run by Students Working Against Prisons and UC United, has been leading the charge to abolish UCPD, and organizers recently released a list of demands to defund and eventually disband the UCPD. In response to administrators’ refusal to engage with students and community members about policing, activists demanding a public meeting with Michelle Rasmussen and Kenton Rainey occupied UCPD headquarters for 20 hours on June 12. Organizers have been demanding substantial changes to UCPD for years, and we encourage students to get involved with these long running police abolition efforts—and administrators to break their habit of rebuffing students.

. . . By disarming and disbanding the UCPD, the University of Chicago can take an active stance against police violence and institutional racism, and work toward providing campus services that meet the specific needs of the University community.

The rationale hinges largely on racism: that most of police stops involve black suspects or people. But the ambit of the Chicago police force includes more black than white residents, and there’s the issue that the crime rate among blacks is higher than among whites, particularly on the South Side of Chicago (an area where blacks far outnumber whites—except in Hyde Park). Then there’s the issue of the cops shooting a mentally ill student experiencing a psychotic break when he charged the cops with a steel rod (he was shot in the shoulder). This was pure self-defense by the campus cops, but the students see it as racism (the student, Charles Thomas, is partly a person of color), and of police going willy nilly with violence.

So far the administration has held firm, refusing to “defund” or reduce the police force, leading to a student group occupying the police station (they left after they weren’t allowed to use the police bathrooms or order out for pizza), and camping in the street in front of the Provost’s house, painting rude slogans in Chinese in the street (our Provost is a woman of Asian descent).

Now the dilemma of the “defund the policers” has increased as three students have been killed via shooting in the last few weeks (see the links below), as well as an increase in other crimes in the area, like robbery and carjacking. Will the students now see the wisdom of increasing the police presence? Don’t bet on it. Even after three murders, the misguided #CareNotCops organization put out this Facebook notice for a rally:

No more cops! No more cameras! In fact, the murderer of the latest dead student was caught with the help of the new cameras. Apparently, the group doesn’t want crime to decrease, nor do they want justice for crimes committed.

Read the “questions” the newspaper is asking about the shootings (click on screenshot below):

Now they’re beefing about the fact that the students got killed. Where were the cops? Why haven’t they done anything?

What countermeasures has the University taken to keep students safe after the first fatal shooting? The second? The third? Why have they in each case been insufficient at preventing additional student deaths?

and

It’s possible that the measures I’ve mentioned and other ones that the University has taken, such as increasing police presence, may well have prevented even more violence. So, I hesitate to say that the University’s responses have been totally ineffective. But, as this third fatal shooting has demonstrated, they have been insufficient.

Does this student think that police can completely eliminate crime here—or anywhere? That’s insane. But yes, the three shootings are a big concern, and are mirrored by the big increase in shooting deaths in Chicago this year compared to last, even in the ritzy downtown area.  But what I’d like to ask these students is this: “Where were you when you should have been defending rather than defunding the cops?”  Do you think violence will abate if we get rid of our campus police? How would that work?

There’s more in the article:

In the four quarters since January, three current or recent students—Yiran Fan, Max Solomon Lewis, and Shaoxiong Zheng—have been shot and killed. At this rate, before I graduate, eight more of my classmates will die.

Or I will die.

I no longer buy the “random acts of violence” argument. Students are clearly in imminent mortal danger—even in the daytime, even close to campus, even when we act safely.

What will the University do to protect us?

In fact, the University, in response to these incidents, is doing a lot more to protect not just people associated with the school, but with a residents of huge area north and south of the University. Five days ago our Provost and new President, after some public forums and Zoom discussions, issued an official University statement outlining changes in policing. Here’s what is going to happen (a quote from the report).

  • Increase in police patrols: UCPD and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) have coordinated to increase enforcement of traffic safety in the extended patrol area and increase foot and vehicular patrols on and near campus and throughout Hyde Park. This includes joint robbery-directed patrols as well as increasing enforcement of traffic safety violations. In addition to reducing the likelihood of traffic accidents, the visibility of traffic safety enforcement can help deter criminals. The University has also expanded its Safety Ambassador program into nearby communities.
  • Additional use of security technology: CPD is temporarily adding more Police Observation Device (POD) camera technology to the Hyde Park area. The University is working with CPD and local aldermen to develop a long-term strategy for adding permanent technology solutions to the areas surrounding campus. The University already operates many security cameras and fixed license plate readers and is working to add more. The University is also exploring how to use the current technology more effectively to inform the deployment of our officers.
  • Expansion of Lyft program: The Lyft Ride Smart program, which offers students free Lyft rides in the Hyde Park/Kenwood/Woodlawn area, has been temporarily extended from Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights to seven nights a week. This is in addition to the University’s extensive and recently expanded shuttle program, available to all members of the campus community.
  • Planning with city and community: The University has been in close contact on safety issues with Mayor Lightfoot, local aldermen, and other Chicago public leaders, and UCPD is working closely with CPD on these issues. The City is formalizing, with the University’s involvement, a number of short and longer-term public safety strategies that will help Hyde Park and surrounding communities. We will share specifics soon.
  • Gathering input: The University is gathering input on public safety from all parts of the University community, with faculty and other academic appointees being major constituents in this effort. We will communicate soon about additional opportunities to discuss these important issues.

What is not going to happen is a reduction in the police budget or staff. In addition, in a University safety webinar with the President, the Chicago Police Superintendent, and the director of safety, the Superintendent announced that they’re putting 26 new beat cops in Area 2: the area around Hyde Park and the University.

Those who want the cops defunded become far less credible when crime shoots up. Their “demands” are not only ridiculous, but make the Left look ridiculous as well. If anything plays into the hands of the Republicans and Trump, it’s the claim that the Left, including woke students, are soft on crime, and in fact want to get rid of cops.  If there was an actual reason to get rid of cops, then we could think about that. But right now, the defunders should simply zip it: there’s no justification for their demand and they are driving centrists toward the Right.

Ivy League librarians call for an end to all policing

December 4, 2020 • 1:00 pm

My impression of librarians is that they are sensible and anti-woke, at least in terms of their stand on free speech and free expression. After all, they are the guardians and disseminators of all knowledge, the opponents of censoring books, and I have respected them immensely. They’ve also been a huge help to me in my academic work as well as in writing my popular books.  I guess I thought this admiring view would hold for their other opinions as well. But I was sorely disabused this week when I read two screeds by high-class librarians.

The first one, below, is from a group of 13 “Ivy League+” librarians—including one from the University of Chicago—who have signed a document calling for major changes in universities and libraries. The most important of these is a call for the complete elimination of the police. Not just campus police, but all police.  This document, in fact, doesn’t materially differ from the unhinged manifestos and lists of “demands” regularly issued by students at American colleges. I am disappointed.

The Ivy+ manifesto begins with the requisite invocation of George Floyd as well as the required (but unevidenced) claim that their institutions are not only structurally racist, but complicit in sustaining that racism (emphases in the following are mine):

In early June, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd in Minnesota, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, library organizations and directors issued statements condemning racism and racial violence. A statement from the Association of Research Libraries [JAC: see below] implored that “[i]t is incumbent upon leaders of libraries and archives to examine our institutions’ role in sustaining systems of inequity that have left Black communities and other people of color in the margins of every aspect of our profession.”

. . . We recognize that librarianship, an overwhelmingly white profession, has systematically marginalized BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and librarians with disabilities. The conceptualization of our demands would not be possible without the labor and leadership of these very librarians, theorists, activists, and communities. We also recognize the privilege and power held by Ivy+ and other major research libraries, and thus, it is imperative that we use our privilege to speak out against library practices that cause harm. We build from and stand in solidarity with abolitionist movements happening in all library spaces. We believe in order to fully embody the ethics of librarianship it is necessary to align with the practices and aims of abolition. We hope many more voices will join us in signing onto these demands and in this bold and beautiful work of dreaming, demanding, and being in a better world. Reckoning with our own histories of and complicity in white supremacy and anti-Black racism is in the best interest not only of our institutions and patrons but our profession at large. Libraries are not neutral, nor should they be silent — but we’ve heard, seen, and spoken enough — solidarity is not found in statements, but in actions, and the time to act is now.

Have libraries really been this bigoted and nefarious?

And they’re also said to also sustain the police. The group says that they—the librarians themselves—have internalized their bigotry:

. . . we believe libraries have not gone far enough in this examination by refusing to fully consider our relationships with policing, surveillance, and the prison–industrial complex. These library statements do not explicitly name policing itself as the problem — an expression and exacerbation of racial capitalism and violence — despite it being a very real and dire existential threat to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC), as well as those in the LGBTQIA+ community. Therefore, we find these statements morally and politically insufficient responses. Without naming the specific problem of policing, these statements not only let libraries off the hook for the many ways in which we have internalized the practices of the carceral state in our profession, but also leave the door open for “both sides’’ arguments or appeals to “law and order,” and encourage dangerous and ineffective reforms.

I won’t waste my time attacking this, for, according to Hitchen’s Razor, claims unsustained by evidence don’t need to be refuted by evidence. Perhaps these statements  just constitute the necessary self-flagellation and moral preening needed before they call for the elimination of both campus and regular police . They never, of course, say what will replace the police.

The solution to police violence is not reform but an abolition of policing in all its forms. Therefore, we call on the leadership of our institutions and all of our colleagues to embrace an abolitionist vision of a hopeful, life-affirming future and to immediately begin the work of divesting from police and prisons with the ultimate goal of the complete abolition of law enforcement and surveillance from library spaces, campuses, communities — in short, everywhere.

No more cops! They’re not just talking about campus police, for they want the abolition of law enforcement and surveillance from EVERYWHERE. Who will enforce the law, then? Apparently, nobody.  The attempt of students to disband the campus police at the U of C have already failed, but the librarians’ feeble attempt to adduce “evidence” for the ineffectiveness of campus policing is risible.

Many people will acknowledge the harm done by police and law enforcement but question the safety implications of defunding and divesting from policing on campus. But reporting from police forces shows that law enforcement and surveillance do not keep campuses safe. As Black organizers across the country have been declaring in the streets, “We keep us safe.” Therefore, we demand that library leadership remove any reliance on law enforcement as a means of addressing conflicts that arise in all library spaces by 2022.

I invite you to look at the link they give above. It goes to a Twitter thread from an associate professor at our University’s Harris School of Public Policy, a thread that uses our campus police database to show that black people get stopped disproportionately often by the campus cops, both in person and in traffic, compared to their frequency in the Hyde Park as well as in the University of Chicago student population.

That’s it: those data say nothing about the inability of campus police to keep the campus safe. And the disproportionality doesn’t point to any one cause; there could be more incidents involving black people, it could be genuine bigotry and racism, or it could reflect the fact that we’re surrounded by black communities and the campus police patrol a much larger area of the South Side than just Hyde Park. (Hyde Park extends south for 8 blocks, from 51st street to 59th Street, while the campus cops patrol 27 blocks—from 37th to 64th Street: more than 3 times the area of Hyde Park proper, with almost all of the additional area comprising black residents.)

Is this the best that librarians can do to support their claim? Librarians? They have all the research in the world at their fingertips, and this is what they do?

There are many other demands, of course, including eliminating video surveillance in libraries, divesting from companies that use prison labor, and so on, but I’ll let you read the document itself. (I myself happen to agree that prisons should not be privatized.)

And there’s a similar list of demands representing a much more extensive group of librarians—the Association of Research Libraries:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries at comprehensive, research institutions in Canada and the United States. ARL member libraries make up a large portion of the academic and research library marketplace, spending more than $1.4 billion every year on information resources and actively engaging in the development of new models of scholarly communications.

You can read their statement below. It’s mercifully shorter than the Ivy+ document, but still makes the unevidenced claim that libraries “sustain systems of inequity”. Some of the “demands” are reasonable, like ensuring that there be an equitable proportion of employees of color, but others, like “highlighting the work of theorists, educators, and other scholars who have been studying about these phenomena for decades,” represent an ideological position that is unseemly for librarians. They want to emphasize Critical Theory. (That alone has taken this group down a notch.)

But that’s just my view. It’s Friday, and I’d rather be walking along Lake Michigan (which I will) than calling out these endlessly circulating manifestos of self-flagellation and insupportable demands. So you can read this one for yourself:

It’s not, of course, that I’m in favor of racism. Rather, I’m against extreme and histrionic statements that included unfounded claims, and against proposals that restrict speech and action but do nothing to help solve the problem of racial inequality in America. And I can tell you one thing: eliminating all police, both campus and public ones, is not going to do what the proponents think it will do.

Cornell’s student assembly votes against disarming campus police; outraged students vow to remove from office those who voted the wrong way

November 22, 2020 • 1:00 pm

It’s possible that Cornell University doesn’t need a campus police department, much less one with armed officers, but the University itself clearly decided they needed one (parents like to know that their kids have their own “security guard force”). This isn’t my call, though I would maintain that, due to my own school’s location on the crime-ridden South Side, the University of Chicago does need cops with guns.

But, as we know, students at almost every campus with its own police have called for defunding them or for disarming those cops who carry weapons. (This includes the University of Chicago.)  What’s unusual is what happened at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where the student government voted down a resolution to disarm the cops. Click below to see the article in the student paper, the Cornell Daily Sun:

You can see the long resolution below that decries the cops for three pages with “wheras”s concentrating on racism, and then proposes the short resolution:

Be it therefore resolved,

Supporting data and trends overwhelmingly show that police on college campuses should not have access to lethal weapons as it is unnecessary and proves to increase the likelihood of danger/use of lethal force rather than decrease;

Be it finally resolved,Cornell University must take action by immediately disarming the Cornell University Police department of all lethal weapons.

There is no data that convincingly show that disarmed campus police reduce crime (or harm) more than armed police, though the resolution adduces data showing that unarmed security patrols reduce crime compared to no patrols.  The way to deal with this issue, if you want a good study, is simply to disarm the Cornell Police for several years and see if there is less crime or less harm. That is not going to happen, though, as the students have no say in whether the police are armed or not. While it is possible to do a sort-of-controlled study, that one would be polluted by possible temporal changes in crime. All it would take to settle the issue, though, is one school shooting to which campus police couldn’t respond in kind.

After a fractious three-hour meeting, the student assembly, the SA, voted down the resolution 14-15-1. I’m stupefied not only that the vote was against disarming, but was such a close vote (these things are usually lopsided on the Woke side).

Immediately, a group of protesting students accused the SA of racism. From the Daily Sun:

While the protest occurred at the CUPD headquarters, the other target of organizers was clear: Recalling the 15 Student Assembly voting members who voted against the resolution.

The complications of assessing racism in police departments

June 26, 2020 • 9:45 am

In a few previous posts (e.g., here and here), prompted by claims of African-American linguist John McWhorter, I examined the various biases and difficulties that plague attempts to see if police kill black suspects at a higher rate than whites. This new article in FiveThirtyEight, though not providing an answer to the problem, shows further complications in the attempt to get answers, so that at present we have no idea if there are racial disparities in who becomes the object of police violence.

Click on the screenshot to read:

There are three ways to compare racial disparities:

1.) Proportion of racial populations who are victims of police violence.  As is well known, about 0.096% of black men and boys will be killed by the cops during their lifetime. That compares to 0.039%  among whites: a 2.5-fold difference. But this doesn’t mean that blacks are more likely to be killed in police encounters, because they may encounter police more often, even if the “kill rate” is the same among races. Which brings us to the second calculation.:

2.) Proportion of racial populations who are victims of police violence, normalized by the proportion of encounters with police. As McWhorter pointed out, blacks encounter police more than whites, so even if both races experience violence at the same rate per encounter, there could still be a differential mortality of blacks at the hands of the cops, but one that wouldn’t necessarily denote racism. There are some data on this, as the article notes:

One example of an encounter denominator approach is a 2019 study by Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard. He found that police shoot white, Black and Hispanic Americans whom they’ve stopped at equal rates.3 At first blush, that would seem like evidence that the police are not racially biased — every demographic is being treated equally, after all.

As I pointed out, though, this statistic is not perfect because the types of encounters and their dynamics may differ among races, and you need to control for that, which hasn’t been done But the FiveThirtyEight article adds another complication:

3.) Members of racial groups might be stopped at different rates because of racial bias itself. This is called “collider bias.” There  are in fact data suggesting that although the frequency deaths per encounter may not differ among races, blacks and whites may be stopped at different rates. And that, in fact, seems to be the case, as we knew from traffic tickets, a disparity (blacks stopped more often) that disappears after dark when race becomes less evident. And, as the article says, it seems as if blacks are stopped when there is less evidence for stopping them than there is for whites, a difference that would reflect racism:

But we know that police officers are more likely to stop Black and Hispanic people than white ones — and that more of those stops are unfounded. Researchers measure this with something called the “hit rate,” or the rate at which contraband is actually found on the people who were stopped. A lower hit rate implies bias because it means that the decision to search someone was made with less evidence. White people stopped in New York City, for example, were more likely to be carrying a weapon than Black and Hispanic people who were stopped. White drivers stopped by the police were more likely to have contraband than Black and Hispanic drivers nationally.

As political scientists Knox, Will Lowe and Jonathan Mummolo, among others, have pointed out, that complicates Fryer’s findings. All of a sudden, what at first appeared to be equal treatment actually suggests unequal treatment. Because of the initial discrimination in who gets stopped, the sample of stopped people isn’t the same across races. The different hit rate indicates that stopped white people are actually more likely to have contraband, on average, than stopped Black people. In other words, in a world without discrimination in who was stopped — if the Black and white people who were stopped were equally likely to be engaged in criminal activity — you’d see an even bigger disparity in outcomes.

In other words, black people stopped by cops may be less likely to be engaged in criminal activity. To control for this, we need the data about the proportion of blacks versus whites who were observed and stopped or not stopped by police. To get this data seems impossible (you can be stopped for acting suspiciously, or just because you’re black), but the differential “hit rate” suggests that cops are targeting blacks at a higher rate than whites without good reason. And that suggests racial bias.  Curiously, I think this is pretty evident when explained in words, but FiveThirtyEight presents the same results graphically—to my mind, not clarifying matters much.

And even if bias doesn’t emerge in the rate of killings, it does come out in other aspects of the justice system, for an encounter with a cop is only the first step in a long chain of events that might culminate in jail. The article gives evidence of bias in the subsequent steps of the process:

Across the U.S., demonstrators have spent the past few weeks protesting against racial disparities in the country’s criminal justice system. There’s plenty of data to back them up: Black and Hispanic people are stopped more frequently, including traffic stops, and are more likely to be arrested. Once stopped, police are more likely to use force against, shoot and kill Black citizens. And then once in jail, Black defendants are more likely to be denied bail, which in turn makes conviction more likely. And when convicted, sentencing is also biased against Black defendants, with Black defendants more likely to be incarcerated.

I haven’t read the links in the previous paragraph, which of course could be themselves biased (for example, is race the only reason why black defendants are more likely to be denied bail, or are there other factors like criminal records or the nature of the crime?). But I think there are enough data to conclude one thing: there is evidence for racism in police practices and in the judicial system, and this must be remedied.

On the main issue of whether black deaths at the hands of police reflect racism, at least in part, we don’t yet know the answer. To rephrase Hitchens’s Razor, what can be asserted without evidence must be buttressed with evidence before it can be accepted.

h/t: Ken