Yep, I'm back on Scarborough again. And this time he's having another rant, pushing his ideas and refusing to listen or even let anyone else respond to his theory that police are totally helpless and innocent victims of the "crime data" that compels them, apparently against their will, to stop, accost, question, search, detain, arrest, assault and kill black people far more frequently than just about anyone else.
"It's just the Data..."
Rarely do they consider that looking at general characteristics that may or likely may not apply to a particular person is exactly what racism and bigotry is and how it makes it's impact in modern life.
Generalizations. Supposition. Assumption.
Sure they have "facts", but those facts aren't about the person standing in front of them because they don't know that person yet. They're jumping to a conclusion which is based on the behavior of other people who they assume are just like this person in some way.
This is the strategy of the Modern "Neo-Racist". A person who believes, perhaps desperately, that they are simply doing what logic says - what "the data" says - without any specific racist intent, yet the actions and policies they support still have a direct and clear racist result.
Apparently Joe was set-off, this time, by this segment by Chris Hayes which addressed the true concept of "Hands Up, Don't shoot".
First of course Scarborough starts by constructing his bogus straw-man.
Scarborough: Let's have a real conversation on Race though. If you're a black cop, and you see me walking down the street and you seen an 18-year-old walking down the street in the South Bronx, and you're told to Stop and Frisk, and your job is to stop crime based on data. And you're the one who brought up data...
MSNBC Contributor Dorian Warren: Yep.
JS: So I have no problem asking this question. Based on data, based on computer models. And by the way, this is a real conversation on race. What do you do as a black cop? I'm going to go across the street and I'm going to stop the white dude that looks like he lives in Connecticut wearing a Lacost T-shirt?
Actually Joe, the White Dude is probably in that neighborhood to buy drugs.
Bingo! On the nose.
Joe proclaiming that he's going "based on the data" but he's not. The data shows that the Policy of "Stop and Frisk" actually finds fewer instances of guns and drugs in the hands of latinos and blacks than it does the "white guy who looks like he's from Connecticut with the Lacost shirt".
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.
So "The Data" in fact doesn't say what Scarborough seems to claim that it says and Dorian Warren was exactly correct that the most likely offender in
that scenario was the White guy, who probably doesn't live in that neighborhood and is probably only there to "buy drugs".
So did Scarborough take this news well? What do you think?
Scarborough (in response) : Whatever!
Dorian Warren then goes on to attempt to explain
the real to Mr. Joe.
"Based on the Data". There is neighborhood, there is place, and then there's profiling in the rest of the city. So when I get stopped in Rockefeller Center subway stop...
JS: That's not the Bronx. I'm asking in the South Bronx. Because we're talking about Ferguson here. We're not talking about the best part of St. Louis, in Downtown St. Louis. It's a crime ridden neighborhood where this happened, who are you looking at? I don't want to get distracted, I want to stick to data.
Well, the true data is that it's a predominantly
black neighborhood. Yes, there's crime - but if you're only mental process is young-black-guy = criminal, and by the way the neighborhood is
filled with young black guys, then you've tarred both the innocent and the guilty with the same brush. And that's the problem. Generalized data doesn't help you accurately separate the guilty from the innocent, as shown above in the actual Stop-N-Frisk
Results Data.
And the fact is that they don't just deploy this tactic in the "high crime" areas. As Joe's guest Dorian Warren attempted to explain - twice - a well dressed, erudite, Black Man on the subway station at Rockefeller Center is far more likely to get Stopped and Frisked (aka harassed, insulted and potentially assaulted) than the grubby and grungy looking White guy standing right next to him.
Because "Data"? Not hardly.
This the data people like Bloomberg and Scarborough don't want to address. How well does this judging you know someone "based on data", before you really know anything about them really work? Did Bloomberg's increased use of Stop-n-Frisk actually bring down crime? Did reducing the number of stop lead to an immediate increase in crime rates?
No, it didn't.
“Despite the welcome decline in the overall number of stops, the NYPD last year still subjected hundreds of thousands of innocent people to humiliating, intimidating and unjustified stop-and-frisk encounters,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. “With a 90-percent failure rate, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program remains a tremendous waste of resources, sows mistrust between police and the communities of color and routinely violates fundamental rights. The city’s next mayor must make a clean break from the Bloomberg administration’s ineffective and abusive stop-and-frisk regime.”
Last year, the NYPD stopped and interrogated people 532,911 times, a 448-percent increase in street stops since 2002 – when police recorded 97,296 stops during Mayor Bloomberg’s first year in office. Nine out of 10 of people stopped were innocent, meaning they were neither arrested nor ticketed. About 87 percent were black or Latino. White people accounted for only about 10 percent of stops.
90% of the time, the person stopped, questioned and searched
didn't do anything wrong and there was no ticket or citation issued. So exactly are why they repeatedly stopping 400,000 people (and technically it's not all different people, in many cases it's the same person over and over and over) when almost every time
they find nothing?
Because it's not about finding anything, it's about establishing an atmosphere of fear. It's about keeping "those people" in a constant state of terror, since obviously they're ALL criminals, you have to keep them on their toes, knowing the PD is on their case so they stay on the straight and narrow and never think that they might actually being entitled to the protection of pesky little things like probable cause from the 4th Amendment.
This is what The Data, actually says. When you target people based on the group you associate them with without any additional specific information related to the actions of that single individual person, it doesn't produce more efficient or effective policing.
It's just the opposite.
And as you do this, you destroy the trust between the innocent people in the South Bronx and in Ferguson - who are the ones also being subjected to this treatment along with the guilty - and then you wonder, "Why they so mad?"
There's a point in the conversation where Joe refers to a New York Magazine article by former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg where he claims that he's "just following the data" an focusing policing and the areas where the most crime is reported. Dorian Warren responds...
But there's a flaw in that.
Mika: Exactly.
JS: What's the flaw?
Guest: Because if the Stop-n-Frisk were only located in the South Bronx.. or in those neighborhoods I would believe that..
JS: (Cutting him off) You keep talking about Stop-N-Frisk, I'm talking about Policing in general..
Oh really, then who was it who said this not 90 seconds ago?
...and you seen an 18-year-old walking down the street in the South Bronx, and you're told to Stop and Frisk, and your job is to stop crime based on data....
Why that would be Joe Scarborough, who began this conversation by framing it around Stop and Frisk situations. Mika then jumps in, and after this you can see why Mika doesn't jump in often.
Mika: If you're basic it on policing they both should be stopped and frisked [ED Note: Based on "reasonable suspicion of what - being both Black and White while walking?] And it should not be based on the data, it should be based on moving our society forward...and treating white and black equally
This of course, makes Joe go NU-Klear!
“A cop is not out on the street going, ‘You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to move our society forward,’” Scarborough shouted. “A cop on the street has one job and the job is to protect the people in that neighborhood. It is not to make a statement that makes primetime people on MSNBC feel better about America.”
Yeah, um, Primetime? He's talking to Mika, but me doth think he just did a bit of projection onto Chris Hayes with that rant. And in this case Mika actually had a point that was pretty viciously shouted down - the job of Police is more than just "Protect" but also to "Serve". They are the face of Government that people see and interact with most often, and they
do have a responsibility to ensure that the trust the public has in them to allow the uses of force they've been granted
by the public are not abused and turn from "protection" into systematic oppression.
In the case of Ferguson "moving society forward" would mean that a cops job should have been to protect the life and rights of Michael Brown, not blow his brains out and take them away. Unfortunately what Joe and Bloomberg are arguing for does exactly the opposite of what they claim they want.
Because to them you can't treat "black and white equally" because "the data" says they're not equal. Ignoring "the data" is ignoring "reality" - or at least their version of reality. But they are "Racist" to say that, they're just slaves to the Data".
The straw-man construction that people who support the concept of "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" are only doing that because they believe Police are randomly murdering black people in the street out of rage or hate -- is actually not the point.
They're doing it because of a flawed understanding of "the data".
Because they data ignore from the Bureau of Justice Statistics which shows that regardless of their actual guilt black people - particularly black youth - are more likely to be stopped 20% of the time, they get searched for drugs 50% more often, they're more likely to be arrested 100% of the time, they're more likely to be encounter use of force 200% more often and according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice they're nearly 7.1 Times more likely to be killed by police than other groups are.
Again, that's regardless of their likelihood of being guilty of anything.
That's why they be mad.
The answer is in the Data. If you really bother to look at it. All of it.
Vyan