Smoking weed makes you murder people. I saw a documentary about it.
The twin cities are not terribly happy :/
Yes, Yanez actually said, “if he has the, the guts and audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and her life by giving her secondhand smoke . . . what care does he give about me.” While it’s an explanation for his fear, it’s not remotely reasonable.
Basically if they’re “afraid” regardless of how unreasonable it is, they can kill anyone or do nearly anything.
Protip: They’re all afraid of everything.
That cop who shot the dude and planted his tazer on him eventually got convicted, didn’t he?
Likely only cause he planted the taser.
This “unwritten rule” gives extraordinary powers of life and death to not just the officers, but also those who train and inform them and influence their mood. If a newscaster makes a policeman more frightened that day, he legalizes a potential manslaughter. If a trainer teaches officers to beware a specific ‘perp’ behavior, and an innocent person happens to do it that day, they will die. If an officer knows there are BLM protesters in the area and may be plotting to ambush police, then he may shoot someone at any time because he’s ‘reasonably’ afraid. Isn’t this why conflict de-escalation and mediation is taught?
You could say the written law that helps them go free is the convoluted bureaucratic mess that some committee comes up with, which informs police training and gives them an out for every situation. Citizens can’t cite that.
In the end, though, we’re to blame. We let our irrational fear of crime–irrational because it was based on both an unreasonable expectation of norms (no crime at all) and on race and class prejudice (“they” are out to get us)–convince us to give nearly unlimited power to law enforcement, on the expectation that “we” would be safe because “we” were the good guys; only “they” would be at risk, and “they” were the bad guys.
Now, some of this was certainly encouraged by those who stood to gain from a divided, scared society that became increasingly tolerant of immense abuses of power as long as they were directed against the poor, the non-white, or folks otherwise seen as non-normative. Law enforcement entities gained funding, power, and status. Conservative (in the new, not the old sense) politicians got the justification for social and cultural repression they wanted. Racists got another chance to hammer home their race-baiting agenda. But we didn’t have to listen. But we did.
To be halfway fair (to ourselves), the crime in the 80s and early 90s was crazy-high compared to basically the previous 70 years in the US. Like a 300% to 500% increase from just 30 years previous (1960). Most of our silly sentencing laws, three-strikes, police militarization, etc. can be traced back to that non-imaginary increase in violent crime.
Of course, 9/11 didn’t help, and the “war on drugs” was either arguably part of the escalation or simply an extension of it.
Regardless, what’s happening now is a marked decrease in violent crime and a huge industry that is casting about for a reason to continue to exist at its previous heightened levels.
Quite possibly. Though, again to be fair as you say, it seems quite probable that a lot of the increase in reported crime in the eighties and nineties was manufactured by the war on drugs. If you control for the portion of crimes that are attributable to bogus crackdowns on marginalized populations due to the draconian drug laws, I wonder if the crime rate really increased at all, or if so, how much.
I’m not sure about crime overall (or what methodology you’d use for that), but here’s the murder rate:
Interesting plateau, if you average out early seventies to mid nineties.
It would also be interesting see a plot of where these murders were. My guess is that it’s not evenly distributed, but as I remember from those days, the news pretty much laser focused on violent crime so that even if you lived in a region with negligible risk, you felt like you were under siege because Comtpon or south Chicago or Bed-Stuy were dangerous. And if a chunk of the killings were, say, gang on gang violence, that generally posed little danger to average folks, though it all got put on TV as part of the nation under siege mantra.
It would also be interesting to try to figure out why crime decreased like it did. The increase is potentially easier, given the turmoil of the late sixties, but while I’m sure there are those who would credit aggressive policing for the decline in the nineties, there may well be other reasons as well.
While difficult to do, this could help undermine the reflexive turn towards more aggressive and more violent policing, if you could show that what really brings crime down is something else.
And of course, the data is what we have, not what we want, in terms of quality. Murder rate is pretty clear–you have dead people. Other stuff kind of depends on whether you going by convictions, arrests, or what-not.
https://twitter.com/ScottGreenfield/status/878024150597509120
https://twitter.com/JoshCornfield/status/877963983231229953
The murders were (as you might expect) more common in large cities, but violent crime was up almost across the country and to a lesser extent the developed world.
One of the more commonly-held theories is that the increase in crime coincided with a resurgence in the popularity of lead-based paint and especially with leaded gasoline, offset by ~18 years. In other word, low-grade lead poisoning of US children may have increased the aggressive behavior of an entire cohort of Americans.
Similar trends are seen in other developed countries:
There are very similar graphs for Canada, Finland, etc.
Hmm, I had heard that before, but had not seen those graphs. Certainly an interesting correlation.
The correlation also seems to work across different countries, and different states within the US. Of course, the Trump EPA is getting rid of those wasteful lead-abatement programs. Need to save money to build more prisons!
Because, bullets kill, not the people that pull the trigger that causes the bullet to be shot. Evil, evil bullets that don’t get with the program.
Maybe we should ban bullets.
BULLETS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE. Except cops.