Police

“Excited Delirium” is not a real medical condition

Best I can figure, it was invented (or at least inspired by) the Taser corporation (correct me if I’m wrong here). But it’s not a real cause of death. That being said, it’s usually used to get cops off the hood when someone dies after being Tased. But now some high guy dies and the police officer might (but probably…

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Police

“Unarmed” man not shot by police

One of the things that keeps coming out of the Ferguson shooting is that Michael Brown was “unarmed.” As if “unarmed” people cannot be a threat to cop. That’s bullshit. Now I’m not talking about whether Michael Brown was or was not a threat. I do not know. But the fact that he was “unarmed” does not mean he wasn’t…

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Police

Bad cops

OK, my cop friends: please tell me what I’m missing here or how any of this (from February) is defensible. It’s so rare I can watch a video and not understand or at least empathize with the police. These Bloomfield, New Jersey cops are going to end up in jail right? And is the salary range really $57K starting up…

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Police

Race and justifiable police homicides (VII): hispanics

Fact 7: What about hispanics? Hard to tell because many police departments don’t keep track. Half of all homicides (justifiable police homicides) have no “ethic origin” listed. When it is listed, 1/3 of those killed are hispanic, which strikes me as very high. Overall, including all the missing data, hispanics come out at 16 percent. So the real number of…

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Police

Race and justifiable police homicides (V): black police

Fact 5: Black officers are disproportionately more likely than white police to kill black people. But this should come as little surprise since black officers are much more likely to work in black areas and in cities where there are more blacks. Again, given the bad data, take all this with a huge grain of salt, but according to the…

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Police

Race and justifiable police homicides (IV): On the increase

Fact 4: Police-involved killings are going up. This one surprised me. Because police-involved shootings are generally correlated with overall homicides. But homicides are more or less steady right now, and down 10,000 since 1998 (14,000 in 1998, 13,000 in 2012). The trend is about five more killings a year, for the past 15 years. Keep in mind this is based…

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Police

Race and justifiable police homicides (III): one a day

[Update: Using better data, the number is more like three a day.] Fact 3: UCR data on justified police-homicides are notorious incomplete. These numbers are an undercount. But given the data we have, as reported (or not) to the DOJ by local police departments, police kill at least one person a day (426 in 2012, to be exact, 30 percent…

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Police

Race and justifiable police homicides (II): white and black

Fact 2: Blacks are more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, but probably less so than you’d suspect. 34 percent of those killed by police are African American. But put another way, 62 percent of those killed by police are white. (Actual numbers provided in next post.) What you want to make of these data probably…

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Police

Race and justifiable police homicides (I): Over time

Back in 2008 I posted about what I called the “Al Sharpton effect”: cops shooting white people doesn’t generally make the news. That post has gotten a lot of hits recently (roughly 2,000 page views a day, when normally my whole blog gets about 700). So I’ve re-crunched these numbers, both to make them more current and to look at…

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