Responding to the Right by Nathan J. Robinson

Author:Nathan J. Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

This sort of stuff occurs all around the country every day,9 and it is not because individual officers are especially heinous people. It is, in part, as the DOJ report on Ferguson lays out, because officers can have little training, little accountability, biases, and perverse incentives. The reports show that for many people, the local police department is not a source of comfort but instead terrorizes them. Black people, especially, report in overwhelming numbers that they have experienced police misconduct, including nearly half who felt their life was in danger after encounters with the police,10 and over 40 percent of encounters Black people have with police are not positive.11

The Black Lives Matter movement has arisen as a response to the racially unfair consequences of the existing system. BLM is not exclusively about police and prisons—in fact, the Movement for Black Lives agenda offers a comprehensive set of proposals for improving the lives of Black people.12 But it tends to focus on police and prisons, in part because these are some of the most obviously tangible and harsh forms of injustice, and because they are perpetrated by the state. There is very clear evidence that the criminal punishment system is racist—that police brutalize Black people more often and that Black people receive longer sentences for the same crime.13 “Stop and frisk” searches subject people of color to an invasive surveillance regime that makes ordinary life miserable for young Black men, who must constantly fear being stopped and harassed by police.14 The horrifying killings of Eric Garner, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others are only part of the problems in the criminal punishment system.

Conservatives tend to argue, in response to Black Lives Matter, that police are not racist, and that the left ignores the evidence. Here is Coleman Hughes, writing in City Journal, that Black Lives Matter is based on an empirical falsehood:

The basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false.… I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.… To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias … you must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect’s race on a cop’s decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this—one by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, one by a group of public-health researchers, one by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and one by David Johnson, et al. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists.… The core premise of the movement is false. And if not for the dissemination of this falsehood, social relations between

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.