Eric Garner death / Officer Daniel Pantaleo case in NY

[Mori Chu]

This is all over the news sites today. A grand jury decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo after the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY. I don't know the situation in detail yet, but it sounds like Garner, a black man, died from lack of oxygen while in a choke hold by Pantaleo after he resisted arrest. Garner apparently cried out that he couldn't breathe several times but remained in the choke hold. Some people are upset and feel that it's another example of police misconduct and/or racism among police, similar to the Mike Brown / Darren Wilson case.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/04/justice/n ... ?hpt=hp_t1

According to this link on BBC News, the US government is launching a probe/investigation into the situation led by the Attorney General.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30323750

I don't know what I think of this story yet because I haven't read much about it presently. What do you folks think? My Facebook is exploding with people complaining about this, but due to where I live and who I interact with, a lot of my FB friends are young'uns, college students, Democrats, and so on. So I don't know what the general public is saying, thinking, reading about it.

[SwingMan]

The two cases have very little to do with each other besides the fact that both cases involve black people dying at the hands of white cops. Brown was a thug who attacked an officer - Garner was out selling cigarettes by the singles.

In this case, the DOJ is right to investigate - in Ferguson, hell no, but here definitely. There's some ignoramuses that blindly attach this with the Brown case and think the non-indictment is totally correct, but, from what I've seen thus far, there's a whole lot of folks spanning the political spectrum that feel that the Garner protesters are the ones who have a right to go nuclear as opposed to the Brown protesters. And I'm one of them.

[Dan H]

Another difference between this and Ferguson is that there's video.

I wonder if there will be any calls to lessen the regulation and onerous taxation on cigarettes. Mr Garner's crime was one borne out of the fact that taxation on cigarettes makes them cost north of $10 a pack in New York City. Who knows, in five years maybe someone will be assaulted by police for walking around with a Big Gulp, LOL.

In a sense this kind of ties into one of my other threads about the escalation of the role of police in American society. But rather than look at the root causes, I'm sure this will be painted as simple racism.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... death.html

Why were the cops so hell-bent on stamping out the sales of loosies, which typically sell for 75 cents a pop in Staten Island (and two times or more that in Manhattan)? New York City boasts the highest cost for cigarettes in the nation, with a pack ranging anywhere from $12 and up. The city lays its own taxes on top of the state’s, in an effort both to raise revenue and discourage use of tobacco.

The result is a thriving market in sales of loosies and black-market cigarettes more generally (for a fascinating look of how the market in loosies operates, check out this 2007 study published by the National Institutes for Health). Since 2006, the tax on cigarettes in New York have risen 190 percent and cigarette smuggling has risen by 59 percent, writes Lawrence J. McQuillan of the Independent Institute. Whether it’s liquor, drugs, or cigarettes, when you try to stamp out something consenting adults want, you cause as many or more problems as you ameliorate.

Oh, BTW . . . Google the names Bryan Spradlin, Eugene Mallory, Samantha Ramsey, and Dillon Taylor.

Excessive force by police is not a racial issue, it's a policy issue.

[Mori Chu]

I don't think taxing cigarettes is a horrible thing. I think assaulting and killing a man for selling individual cigarettes is a problem, though. How one enforces a law matters.

Excessive force by police is not a racial issue, it's a policy issue.

It is a racial issue if police are more likely to use that excessive force against certain races.

[Dan H]

Three times as many whites were killed as blacks by police per the most recently available FBI data (326 vs. 123). Of course, that data is suspect due to poor reporting standards:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/john ... -1.2030545

[SwingMan]

I don't think taxing cigarettes is a horrible thing. I think assaulting and killing a man for selling individual cigarettes is a problem, though. How one enforces a law matters.

Excessive force by police is not a racial issue, it's a policy issue.

It is a racial issue if police are more likely to use that excessive force against certain races.

If, if, if - where's the facts like Dan attempted to provide, Mori?

See, that's the problem with basing everything on race - nothing but speculation and emotion while ignoring facts just because they don't fit the current narrative being pushed.

You want to know why race relations have been set back 50 years in the last 5-6 years? Exhibit A.

[Dan H]

http://www.kmbc.com/news/no-charges-pla ... h/29993232

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/us/georgi ... ndictment/

Wanna fix it? Public employee union reform would be a good start. The left will never touch that, though.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... et/383258/

Policy issue, not racial: http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/02/four- ... 5ab2fc8d2c

[Mori Chu]

Swing, you are being rude again. There is no need to say that I am "Exhibit A" in setting back race relations by 50 years. That is a disrespectful exaggeration. There is plenty of supporting data to suggest that minorities (specifically blacks) receive unequal treatment by police. I'm happy to link to some of it. Here:

==================================================================

"Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings."

http://www.propublica.org/article/deadl ... -and-white

""Unfortunately, the patterns that we've been seeing recently are consistent: The police don't show as much care when they are handling incidents that involve young black men and women, and so they do shoot and kill," says Jones-Brown, a former assistant prosecutor in Monmouth County, New Jersey. "And then for whatever reason, juries and prosecutor's offices are much less likely to indict or convict.""

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -black-men

"In 2007, ColorLines and the Chicago Reporter investigated fatal police shootings in 10 major cities, and found that there were a disproportionately high number of African Americans among police shooting victims in every one, particularly in New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas."

http://www.colorlines.com/archives/2007 ... _cops.html

"Police stops in New York City have climbed steadily to more than 685,000 last year from nearly 161,000 in 2003. Only 12 percent of those stopped were arrested or ticketed. More than 85 percent were Black or Hispanic, while they make up 51 percent of the city’s population."

...

"A Reuters analysis of more than 3 million stops from 2006 through 2011 shows that by far the densest concentrations fell in areas of public housing, home to many of the city’s poorest families and where 90 percent of residents are Black or Hispanic."

http://newsone.com/2023676/police-bruta ... st-blacks/

This paper has lots of data showing that blacks in North Carolina are statistically treated very differently by the police than non-blacks. "Overall, just over 6 percent of searches in Durham lead to a search of the driver or the vehicle. Just under 4 percent of White drivers are searched, and almost 8 percent of
Black drivers. This ratio: the percent of Blacks searched divided by the percent of Whites searched, equals 2.05 overall, and, as the table shows, is higher or lower than this number for various types of traffic stop."

http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/TrafficStops/ ... st2014.pdf

US Bureau of Justice Statistics: "Blacks were more likely than whites or Hispanics to experience use or threat of force."

http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=703

==================================================================

Closing comment: Swing, I will never censor your opinion, but please try to give your opinions in a more respectful way. I know that you can talk about these sensitive issues without cursing me out, without calling me names and phrases like "leftist", "race baiter", "liberal bull****", accusing me of setting back race relations, and so on. We don't have to agree with each other to respect each other. Dan H, Nodack, Indy, and others are able to post strongly differing opinions without things getting ugly. I think it's awesome if we can talk about important issues of the day and hear differing opinions because that's how we learn and grow and potentially change our minds in the future.

[SwingMan]

Never said *you* were Exhibit A, Mori - only the mindset - apologies for not being clear on that. Unfortunately, there's a hell of a lot more than just yourself who think like that. And I never cursed you out - just because I use curse words, it doesn't mean they're directed at you (though that "Thug is the new N-word" statement is indeed 100% pure bullshit).

But, speaking of incomplete, as that "propubica" article says, how's about showing the other half for a change, shall we? :

Crime Rates

Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.

When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.

Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate.

The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.

Interracial Crime

Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Gangs

Only 10 percent of youth gang members are white.

Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs. Blacks are 15 times more likely, and Asians are nine times more likely.

Incarceration

Between 1980 and 2003 the US incarceration rate more than tripled, from 139 to 482 per 100,000, and the number of prisoners increased from 320,000 to 1.39 million.

Blacks are seven times more likely to be in prison than whites. Hispanics are three times more likely.

http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.html

What about interracial crime, white-on-black attacks and the reverse?

After researching the FBI numbers for “Suicide of a Superpower,” this writer concluded: “An analysis of ‘single offender victimization figures’ from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white — with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. Not one case of a white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.”

Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

http://humanevents.com/2013/07/19/black ... te-racism/

As with their foolish notion that men and women were totally alike in all respects, the MSM can ride an untruth only so far. Time magazine had to abandon that particular falsehood back in 1992. It took a lot longer for New York Times to fall off its political-correctness bandwagon enough to point out that minorities commit more crimes than whites do:

Blacks are only 23 percent of the city’s population. Whites ... make up 35 percent of the city’s population. ...

Based on reports filed by victims, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in New York in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults. And the vast majority of the victims of violent crime were also members of minority groups. [emphasis added]

Non-Hispanic whites, on the other hand, committed 5 percent of the city’s violent crimes in 2009, 1.4 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.

Blacks are 23% of the population but commit 66% of the violent crimes; whites are 35% of the population and commit 5% of the violent crimes. Let's see how that works out.

Suppose there were 100 people in the city and 100 crimes were committed in the city. The 23 blacks would commit 66 crimes, or 2.8 crimes per black. This is an average, of course - almost all of the crimes would be committed by a handful of habitual offenders, but the cops don't know who they are.

The 35 whites would commit 5 crimes or .14 crimes per white. The Times is saying that, on average, any given black is twenty times (2.8/.14) more likely to commit a violent crime than any given white person.

We've known this for a long time. Even the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who's as black as anyone, said

"I hate to admit it, but I've reached the stage in my life that if I am walking down a dark street late at night and I see that the person behind me is white, I subconsciously feel relieved."

http://www.scragged.com/articles/minori ... minorities

Please keep it real, Mori - that's not cursing, name calling or any type of general disrespect. That's just bottom line. Half-truths just don't fly outside of echo chambers.

[Indy]

Three times as many whites were killed as blacks by police per the most recently available FBI data (326 vs. 123). Of course, that data is suspect due to poor reporting standards:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/john ... -1.2030545

But blacks only make up 14% of the population and whites +75%. The article points out that even if you account for the higher percentage of blacks involved in violent crimes, cops kill blacks 2.3 times as many as whites. It is definitely a racial issue, even if the cops are not "racists."

[Dan H]

If you further read the article it points out that even that number is skewed by the larger number of rural areas that don't report police shootings compared to urban areas that do. There's no unified reporting system so it's nigh impossible to get apples to apples comparisons.

Another example for the file:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -cop-trev/

[Indy]

If you further read the article it points out that even that number is skewed by the larger number of rural areas that don't report police shootings compared to urban areas that do. There's no unified reporting system so it's nigh impossible to get apples to apples comparisons.

Another example for the file:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -cop-trev/

Are you saying rural departments are failing to report the killing of hundreds of whites and no blacks each year? In order for things to even out it would have to be.

[Dan H]

Among blacks, teenage crime is much more prevalent. Based on the most recent available FBI crime numbers, black male teenagers were nine times more likely to commit murder than were their white counterparts. That’s right, nine times, and the gap in these urban areas is undoubtedly even larger.

After adjusting for murder rates, black male teenagers are still killed by the police 2.3 times as often as whites. This is a considerable difference — but again, over-representation of urban areas in the data set could be a big part of the explanation.

And Indy, not necessarily, we've already seen that we're only talking about ~500 shootings total per the FBI stats. Could that be under-reported by a third, a half? I think that'd be a reasonable assumption. How that would breakdown by race, I don't know. I think it'd be beneficial to know the demographic breakdown of population in the areas that actually DID report shootings. Without that data the overall population breakdown isn't useful.

[Indy]

Right, that 2.3 times more shootings account for the 9x more violent crimes.

And I do think that assuming the rural reports are that much more than what is currently reported, and all whites, isn't very logical.

[SwingMan]

The DOJ is going to investigate and there's probably a good chance Garner's family will win a hefty city civil suit/settlement, but there's this little development (appropriate cites are on the page linked to) :

BREAKING: BLACK FEMALE Police Sergeant Supervised Eric Garner’s Deadly Arrest

She “believed she heard” Garner say he was having difficulty breathing. Adoni also said “The perpetrator’s condition did not seem serious and he did not appear to get worse.”

“Pantaleo who applied the lethal chokehold on Eric Garner was supervised by an African-American female NYPD sergeant.

“Having that black sergeant in charge of that crime scene takes race out of the equation. As awful as Pantaleo’s actions appear on that video, at no time does that black sergeant order Pantaleo to stop choking Garner.

…”Any chance of a federal civil rights case will be hampered by that African-American police sergeant’s presence.”

With Eric "my people" Holder heading it up, there's legitimate cause for concern about how he'll handle the case.

[Dan H]

Fact remains, the law restricting selling individual sales of cigarettes is a stupid, freedom-restricting law. This guy died because of omnipotent moral busybodies*.


* C.S. Lewis, if you're interested.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

[Mori Chu]

A moral busybody did not choke this man until he died.

[SwingMan]

A moral busybody did not choke this man until he died.

No, but the moral busybodies called the one who did.

I had to sit down and take a rare laugh when I ultimately read what Garner was originally under arrest for. Back when I lived in a funky rathole on Hardy in Tempe back in the summer of 1994, there was a point one day when I ran short and I had to make a decision - gas money, or smokes? Well, payday was the next day, so gas money won out and I shot up to the Mobil station that was (is?) on, I believe, the southwest corner of University & Mill. I walked in to pay up front at the counter for the gas and lo, I couldn't believe what I saw - a coffee cup on said counter filled with individual Marlboro Reds with a tag on the front that said :

"Cigarettes
15 cents"

So, I put a buck less in the tank, grabbed half a dozen smokes and stretched 'em until the next day - it was a broke nicotine slave's dream to get out of a jam of jonesing.

Hadn't seen or heard of anyone or anyplace since that day that sold single cigarettes until reading up on this case, but, from my lone experience, I had absolutely no idea that it was ever illegal.

[Dan H]

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/12 ... -sergeant/

[SwingMan]

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/12 ... -sergeant/

Posted that here, Dan.