#policing

[bearkunin]

Police Unions Kill

Came across this interesting study, with the headline figure being police unionisation is linked to 14% of non-White civilian deaths.

Collective Bargaining Rights, Policing, and Civilian Deaths by Jamein P. Cunningham and Rob Gillezeau. Published in volume 18, issue 3, page

Using an event-study design, we examine whether states' introduction of duty-to-bargain requirements for police unions led to meaningful changes in civilians killed by law enforcement. We find that the introduction of collective bargaining rights significantly increases the number of civilians killed by police, particularly among non-White civilians, while having limited effects on officer safety. Our results indicate that the adoption of bargaining rights for law enforcement can explain 14 percent of all non-White civilian deaths by legal intervention between 1959 and 1988. Given our findings, the idea that police unions exacerbate violence is empirically grounded.

I don't want to be construed as anti-union here (I am a dues paying member of a union!), but I think this is a decent demonstration that unions are not a sort of ideal "pro-labour" form of organisation. They are pro-member, with those members being labourers in some capacity.

What is good for the membership may not be good for society writ large. This is fairly evidently true for police unions, but can also hold true for, say, teacher unions or nursing unions. There's a decent number of examples of unions clashing with other unions due to competing interests (see longshoremen and teamster unions feuding, as an example).

On the Left there's a fairly uncritical pro-union-in-all-circumstances-except-police stance, at least outside of some of the more niche Marxist debates about the revolutionary potential of unions (which I won't go into here). This makes sense to a degree given the hostility faced by unions over the past few decades, but I do think there is a need to recognise that they are another form of special interest group that has specific interests to a select membership. This needs to be balanced against other interest groups and the interests of the public more broadly.

Good news is that there are lots of different models for how unions can operate (contrast America's with the sectoral bargaining model in many European countries, for example). So there's room to be pro-union while still finding ways to balance their special interests against broader ones.

One of the key graphs from the study: you can see that in the years following the implementation of duty to bargain (where the government has to bargain with a police union) that non-white civilian deaths gradually rise. Such a rise isn't prevalent amongst white civilian deaths or when the government isn't obligated to entertain a union.

[snapeysister]

I'm sorry you had to deal with the insufferable killjoys imposing their own political opinions on AI on you and shaming you. Kudos on your for standing up for yourself instead of bending the knee as so many people do. I am so proud of you.

These people are so damn annoying, constantly virtue signaling and policing how other engage with fandom. Worst part is, these opinions aren't even positions they organically arrived to through their own thinking. They just heard the dominant opinions wherever they hang out and started repeating them like soulless robots (ironically lmao). And these aren't even objective truths but political positions on AI they expect everyone else to follow. They're so dictatorial, eugh! Not everyone shares their POLITICAL opinions and nobody has to. The ideological policing on this site is insufferable.

Anyway, have fun. Engage with fandom however you want to. Use AI if you want. You have free will and they can never take that from you. Let them seethe.

Much love ❤️ what an odd world we live in, that such simple truths, like "live and let live", have ceased to be the mainstream opinion and basic moral standard and have become contested. People feel the need to resort to anonymity when protesting ideological railroading. What a mad world.

[creatingblackcharacters]

"Every state now maintains genetic databases that are matched to genetic samples taken from crime scenes, such as blood traces, in order to facilitate finding the person who has committed the crime. [Catherine] Crier echoed the sentiments of many present when she asked why being in the genetic database would be a problem for an innocent Black man. "If he is not guilty, what is the problem for a man in the database? He has nothing to worry about."

But he does. Multiple levels of bias feed the all-Black and Hispanic databases, and lawsuits such as the Pamela Fish case cited earlier already have verified that DNA evidence is no more immune to fraudulent or incompetent manipulation than is other evidence. Then, too, there is the collective stigmiatization: if only men of color are in the database, only men of color become suspects and only they can be convicted. Databases that exclude white men, the numerical majority group, will miss most criminals.

As the American Criminal Law Review points out, "Optimal effectiveness, however, would require a universal DNA database that contains DNA fingerprint of every citizen, otherwise potential matches would be missed." Although a universal DNA database would be more efficient than one based upon skin color, it is also ethically unacceptable because it would necessitate coercion. The DNA sweeps, from Miami to London to Truro, have met with varying levels of resistance and resentment and so cannot be described as voluntary.

Will the novel DNA fingerprinting technology lead to the imprisonment of more African-American men than have been freed because of it? This technology's benevolent face has been seen most often, but it has another, sinister, visage. This dual nature holds true for almost every application of genetic science to African American health and welfare. Historically, every boon appears to have been accompanied by a stigmatizing threat to health or freedom. For American Blacks, genetics has always been wielded as a two-edged sword."

Chapter 12- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington

[creatingblackcharacters]

"Some scientists warn that the very DNA evidence and technology that has freed hundreds of African American men like Johnson may soon be wielded by police to criminalize and convict Black and Hispanic men. From California to London, DNA data banking has allowed the collection of genetic evidence for convicted felons on the premise that those who have been convicted have sacrificed some of their rights to privacy.

But Troy Duster, a professor of sociology at Berkeley and author of Backdoor to Eugenics, warned in 2001, "The same technology that will exculpate people today is also being used to put people who have merely been stopped by the police into generic databases." He is correct.

In 2000, Miami police seeking a violent criminal described vaguely as "Black or Hispanic" stopped 2,300 Black and Hispanic men on the street and quickly took a buccal swab from each, swabbing the interior of each man's cheek. The police now had samples of their DNA, accompanied by identifying information- suspect profiles- and each man was free to go.

The samples were tested against DNA left by the rapist at the scene, but none of these men's DNA matched that of the putative assailant. Therefore, all of these men have demonstrated their innocence, but police have stored their genetic data in a database to be tapped when they next seek a perp."

Chapter 12- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington

[gravalicious]

“Evidenced in Harris et al. (2021), the propensity for police encounters to escalate towards violence is driven by historical and contemporary constructions of Black people as dangerous, risky and threatening, necessitating physical police action or passive inaction to manage or contain the racialised and imagined risks, alongside an apparent unwillingness on the part of the police to de-escalate. That ‘Blackness’ is equated with dangerousness and risk is not just experienced by Black men but can also be seen in the killing of Joy Gardner, who was killed in 1993, after police wrapped 13 feet of tape around her face during a raid on the family home (Athwal & Bourne, 2015; Erfani-Ghettani, 2018). Three police officers from the Met’s ‘Alien Deportation Group’ were tried for manslaughter but were acquitted after telling a jury that Joy Gardner was the most violent woman they had ever encountered (Erfani-Ghettani, 2014). Gilroy’s (1987, p. 84) finding that Black people are constructed as ‘lesser breeds without the law’ remains pertinent and is clearly evidenced by police institutional killings that emerge from (and maintain) racist institutionalised norms and cultures constructing Black men and women as a source of immediate threat, innately dangerous, deviant and/or ‘disordered’ and thus requiring disciplining, restraint and control (White, 2017a). Families’ testimonies subsequently shed light on the harassment, monitoring and surveillance experienced by those whose Blackness is deemed threatening to particular (white) conceptions of social order. Furthermore, through this perception of Blackness as threatening, [mostly white] police violence is cast as heroic. As Sim has shown, this all ‘exaggerates the perceived [lethal] dangerousness of police work and encourages the public to evaluate police killings in stark ‘him or me’ terms (Sim, 2010 in Linneman et al., 2014, p. 521).”

Patrick Williams, Lisa White, Scarlet Harris, and Remi Joseph-Salisbury - “Omission, Erasure and Obfuscation in the Police Institutional Killing of Black Men.” (2023) [Mortality 28 (2): 250–68]

[leptoquark3]

AI Facial Recognition Biases And Policing

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AI: The Big Lie — Part 21: Arrested by Algorithm Porcha Woodruff was seven months pregnant when Detroit police arrested her for carjacking, in front of her family, and questioned her for 11 hours. The surveillance footage showed no pregnant woman. No witness mentioned one. Facial recognition flagged her face anyway — and that was enough for police to arrest her. Police say this technology reduces human bias and error. That’s the lie. Federal testing found Black and Asian people are up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified by this software than white men. At least 13 documented wrongful arrests from facial recognition have been dismissed nationwide — almost every victim was Black. Jalil Richardson spent over 50 days in jail before proving, with timesheets, he was in another state the whole time.

source: alfredtom_nyc

[aggravating-aggregator]

Direct, clear journalism like this Syracuse Post-Standard article does sometimes get published by big national news companies. But it’s so much the exception that it’s striking when we encounter it. It should be the norm. “That is a violation of civil rights available to everyone in the United States, regardless of citizenship, according to a 2018 case won by the New York Civil Liberties Union” is not a difficult to sentence to write; it just requires understand that journalism is supposed to serve the public, not the powerful interests who prefer the truth be obscured. We should expect that kind of clarity from the journalists we rely on – and make our subscription decisions accordingly.

I grew up in a small town in the Finger Lakes region of New York, reading the Syracuse Post-Standard, Auburn Citizen, and Ithaca Journal. Th