Death should be the great equalizer. It should be the one issue, the one place where all differences between us from class to background, to race and circumstances should be entirely irrelevant. We should all be fully equal, at the very least in death.
Unfortunately, that simply isn’t the case.
The death of some is often considered more important, and more tragic than the death of others. The young are considered more valuable, with more untapped potential than the elderly. Women are mourned often with greater and deeper sadness than men. The handsome and the pretty tend to pull at our heartstrings as more empathetic. Our sense of the relative innocence or guilt of the people involved changes our emotional involvement.
The loss of someone white is more dearly missed, and certainly more passionately covered by the media, than the passing of someone brown or black.
For example I’m talking about Jon Bonet Ramsey, Jennifer Willbanks the so-called Runaway Bride, Lisa Nowak the diaper driving ex-astronaut, Chandra Levy, Princess Diana, Caylee Anthony, and Nicole Brown-Simpson the loss of all of them and (apparently for some) death, for a time, completely captivated the nation to the point of neurotic distraction. Now we have a new tragedy to grab our attention, Mollie Tibbetts.
It’s not supposed to be like this, one tragedy is not supposed to matter more than anything and anyone else — but we all know quite well that it does.
Chris Cuomo addressed this issue, particularly the murder of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbets in response to comments about the case by Trump.
In this segment Chris Cuomo asks the question, would we be seeing videos from Trump if her killer had been a white person? If it had been anyone but an undocumented immigrant? Or a Muslim?
Specifically when a white person picks up a gun and shoots dozens of people, be it Dylann Storm Roof in Charleston, Nikolas Cruz in Parkland FL or Stephan Paddock in Las Vegas we are constantly told not to “politicize” the tragedy. We’re told — this is not the time to talk about the root and common cause of the shootings — the guns. We’re told we have to wait, that we can’t make any rash decisions, that we don’t want to impact any one’s fundamental rights by going off half-cocked.
We don’t want to do more harm in a desperate effort to do some good.
We’re told that basically, all we have to offer these victims and families are our thoughts and prayers and that the real solutions to our gun murder problem, is having more guns ready and available to frighten and fight off all the “madmen.”
That was how Trump responded to the Parkland FL shooting last February.
Trump: I want to speak now to America’s children, especially those who feel lost, alone or even scared. You have people who care about you, who love you, and who will do anything they can to protect you. If you need help turn to a teacher, a family member a local police officer or a family member. Answer hate with love, answer cruelty with kindness. We must also work together to create a culture in our country that embraces the dignity of life that creates deep and meaningful human connections, and that turns classmates and colleagues into friends and neighbors.
Our administration is working closely with local authorities to investigate the shooting and learn everything we can. We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.
That was not exactly how he responded to the Pulse Nightclub shooting a year previously.
Trump: If we had, if we had people where the bullets were going in the opposite direction. right smack between the eyes of this maniac. If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right to their waist, or right to their ankle, and this son-of-a-bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in that room happened to have it, and goes boom [holds up fingers to his own foreead] boom. Y’know what that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight folks.
As usual, Trump is wrong because there was someone there at the club who was armed and did engage the shooter in gunfire. He just didn't win so easily, and now he and other officers on the scene are being sued by the victims.
As the first officer to exchange gunfire with the mass shooter who terrorized Orlando’s Pulse nightclub on the morning of June 12, 2016, Adam Gruler was quickly hailed a hero. For his actions, the Orlando Police Department honored him with a “Pulse Valor Award,” and Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) invited him to be her guest at President Trump’s State of the Union address.
But nearly two years later, some of the victims and the families of those who died are telling a different story.
In a federal lawsuit filed in Orlando on Thursday, the victims and families claim that Gruler, who was working an extra job as Pulse’s security guard that night, remained outside “to ensure his own safety” while the gunman shot and killed 49 people and injured 68 others inside Pulse.
[...]
“It pains me to think my brother might still be alive if the defendants in the lawsuit acted differently,” said Berto Capo, who lost his brother Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo in the shooting. “What if the Pulse security guard stopped the shooter from ever coming inside Pulse? Would my brother still be alive? What if the Orlando police officers who responded to the shooting were aggressive with the plan to rescue hostages and victims and killed the shooter? Would my brother still be alive?
“We believe the answer is yes,” Capo said. “[My brother] would still be alive if their actions would have been faster.”
When over 50 people were killed in Las Vegas, we heard the same song and dance again.
In moments of tragedy and horror, America comes together as one — and it always has. We call upon the bonds that unite us — our faith, our family, and our shared values. We call upon the bonds of citizenship, the ties of community, and the comfort of our common humanity.
Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence. And though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is our love that defines us today — and always will, forever.
In times such as these, I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness. The answers do not come easy. But we can take solace knowing that even the darkest space can be brightened by a single light, and even the most terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.
So did we hear any policy solutions here? Did we get any concrete legislative suggestions? Did we decide that we were going to completely upend parts of our constitution, rip apart personal freedoms, toss due process and international treaty responsibilities out the window to impose incredible burdens on members of the public in a desperate effort to ensure that massive tragedies like all the above don’t ever happen again?
I didn’t hear any of that, did you?
But now one pretty girl is horribly killed, and it just so happens that the alleged killer and primary suspect doesn’t have all his immigration documentation, so of course, that means all hell has to bust loose.
Trump: Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family. A person came in, from Mexico, illegally, and killed her.
Cristhian Rivera’s lawyer disputes this claim.
A document filed just before 9:30 a.m. Wednesday by Rivera’s attorney calls into question Rivera's immigration status.
Rivera has lived in Iowa for four to seven years, working at Yarrabee Farms, a Brooklyn-area farm owned by several family members, including brothers Eric, Dane and Craig Lang. Craig Lang, a prominent Republican, has verified that Rivera is in Iowa legally, according to Richards’ motion.
"Craig Lang supports Cristhian’s right to be in this jurisdiction and for the government to support any other idea of status publicly flies in the face of such statement," Richard wrote.
"Cristhian deserves the court’s protection as to his characterization before a jury pool."
His lawyer also filed a motion in court to bar the government from calling his client an “illegal immigrant.”
On the “permanent separation” tip, Trump didn't just casually mention that — it’s been a theme as shown in this heart string tugging video.
This “temporarily separated” vs “permanently separated” idea would be valid if the administration had clearly made any actual plans for any of the separations that they deliberately implemented as a matter of policy to be “temporary.” They were not.
As a result of this practice, at least 2,300 children were taken from their parents, without a hearing or due process of any kind. Many of those children were shipped hundreds of miles away. Some of them are in New York, for instance, where they were brought, some under cover of night, and where they are being housed in various facilities. They are heartbreakingly alone in institutions that haven’t been prepared to handle them. On Thursday night, reports surfaced that children had been treated for illness and depression—one child was reportedly suicidal—in city hospitals.
…
There is no comprehensive database, and the administration has clearly stated that reunification may not be in the cards. Even parents released on bond may try fruitlessly to find children who have been sent across the country. In New York, where the children are entitled to immigration hearings, lawyers are finding it hard to get them onto any docket. More and more they appear to be in some kind of procedural and legal limbo, with counselors and lawyers trying to craft systems to protect them as the policies shift on the ground. On Saturday night, DHS put out a fact sheet about reunification plans, but the toll-free numbers apparently still do not work, and many children have not yet spoken to a family member. On Monday, Vox reported that the government would only promise to attempt to reunite families who gave up their asylum requests and voluntarily agreed to be deported.
As had been made quite clear in Judge Sabraw’s court the government never had any intention of reuniting any of the 2,400 families that they tore apart on purpose. Sabraw has had to force them step by step to abide by the Constitution and existing asylum law, none of that was intended to be “temporary” their plan was for it all to be permanent — so even though I can sympathize with their loss, the argument these people are being used by Trump’s White House to make is simply put; bullshit. Their pain and suffering is not greater than that of other families, this strategy is unlikely to help them or prevent these tragedies in any way, nor does it justify causing unnecessary and deliberate pain and suffering for thousands of other families. This is sad cynical manipulative crap, much worse than the constant argument we hear about how comprehensive background checks, gun locks and red flag laws are a waste of time and won’t save any lives.
All of those options are far less intrusive and traumatizing than what Trump is doing at the border.
Trump continued.
We need the wall. We need our immigration laws changed. We need our border laws changed. We need Republicans to do it because the Democrats aren’t going to do it. This is one instance of many. We have tremendous crime trying to come through the borders.
No, we don't. Not the way he’s claiming.
Further — and I’m going to digress on this because it needs some focus — Trump has claimed that crimes by undocumented immigrants has led to the killing of 63,000 people since 9/11, a point which Cuomo states is completely bunk. But it’s even worse than that, it’s a deliberate and racist statistical lie created by Steve King years ago as noted by the Washington Post.
We traced that number back to its source. On May 5, 2006, [Steve] King posted an article on his official website in response to national pro-immigration protests held that month. The post is a catalogue of anti-immigrant scaremongering. Here’s the key paragraph, with emphasis added:
“What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”
It was an expansion of an argument he had made from the House floor two days after the May Day protests. (In that speech, the abused American children were “at least eight little girls.”)
There, he explained the math behind his numbers.
“The crimes that are committed by those who enter this country illegally are in significantly greater numbers than the crimes that are committed by American citizens,” King said, “to the extent that 28 percent of the inmates in our prisons in the United States are criminal aliens, 28 percent.”
That figure he got from a Government Accountability Office report issued in April 2005. It read:
“At the federal level, the number of criminal aliens incarcerated increased from about 42,000 at the end of calendar year 2001 to about 49,000 at the end of calendar year 2004 — a 15 percent increase. The percentage of all federal prisoners who are criminal aliens has remained the same over the last 3 years — about 27 percent.”
So, King figured (admitting that the number would go up or down a percentage point or two):
” That means then that criminal aliens are committing 28 percent of the crimes in the United States. And so that means 28 percent of the murders, 28 percent of the rapes, 28 percent of the violence and the assaults and battery, first- and second-degree murder and also manslaughter attacks are committed by criminal aliens.”
In other words, since 28 percent of the prisoners were immigrants in the country illegally, they must also therefore have committed 28 percent of each and every crime!
There are more problems with this than even the WaPo pointed out, first of all the original 28 percent of criminal aliens he started with are only those in Federal Prison. Half of those happened to be immigrants who are there on actual immigration charges, and half of them are not — meaning they are likely in the country with valid legal documentation. Secondly, Murder isn’t a Federal Crime, it’s a State crime so almost none of that original 28 percent are likely murderers at all.
Thirdly the homicide conviction rate for just the “illegal immigrants” as shown by the Texas-based example above — not assuming that it is the same for every state — is just 2.6 per 100,000 residents in that category. With an estimate of 11 Million undocumented people in the country that’s a total of 286 per year.
Yes, I said two hundred and eighty six.
Realistically this is not a comprehensive number because it’s an estimate based on convictions and not all murder cases get closed or end in convictions, generally it’s about 60% so we may be really dealing with about 360 murders per year, but for the sake of discussion I’m leaving that guesstimate alone right now because the larger number involves unsolved cases. Either way, it’s still a lot of lives and each one counts for that individual and for the family it impacts.
Specifically when it comes to gangs like MS-13 there is a lot of talk about how brutal and violent they have killed people, which is true, but there isn’t that much talk from Trump about how many actual victims that are involved. That may be because the actual numbers are not really that high.
In the United States, MS-13 cliques similarly seek to extort recent immigrants fleeing the very violence the gang has wrecked at home. Yet facing a much more effective police response, their efforts to organize anything approaching a unified structure have met with infighting and arrests. MS-13’s reputation for violence drives lurid headlines and enhances its brand, but these headlines obscure its marginal status in the world of organized crime: Of the 114,434 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s gang unit last year, just 429 were MS-13 members. As the head of the Northern Virginia Gang Task Force has stated, “the vast majority of their crimes are gang-on-gang,” echoing Senate testimony by Montgomery County, Md.’s police chief that most of their violence is motivated by “perceived or actual rival gang affiliations,” as well as members turning informant, or potential members resisting recruitment efforts.
For all the hype in the governor’s race, MS-13 has been associated with three murders in Virginia this year, and two of the victims were MS-13 members themselves. To put that into perspective, there were 480 homicides in Virginia in 2016, and nine Virginians died in traffic accidents over Fourth of July weekend alone.
Taking our base of estimate of 286 murders per year for undocumented immigrants — which would include all MS-13 murders easily — all the way back 17 years to 9/11 the way Steve King did and you get a total of 4,862. That’s not something to ignore, that’s not insignificant, but it’s also not 63,000 which is 13 times greater.
63,000 is such a gross exaggeration it only serves the purpose of fueling an unreasonable and unjustified outrage. All it does is feed racial and xenophobic resentment, which obviously was the goal and the point of using a number that is just so completely out of whack.
So is minimizing a number that happens to be politically inconvenient.
When NFL players choose to kneel during the National Anthem they all said that’s it’s a gesture of protest against the police killing of innocent and unarmed black men. Recently, Pro-Life Christian Evangelical Charles Kirk argued that those players aren’t really protesting injustice because there’s been “only” 13 unarmed black men killed by police so far this year.
Who in the world could possibly get so upset about only 13 innocent, unarmed black guys getting killed by the agents of a government that we all pay for? I mean, it’s not like those guys lives were as valuable as a pretty white size #2 co-ed with long brown locks, amirite?
The 13 unarmed black men killed figure comes from the latest data available from the Washington Post Police shootings database for 2018 which actually include 34 unarmed people who were killed by police [which means that the unarmed black persons killed were 38 percent of the all that were unarmed, which I think is a problem for just 13 percent of the population] out a grand total of 666 so far this year. In each year since 2015 when they started this database the totals were 995, 962 and 987 for each full year.
All of those are greater than 286.
For 2015-2017 the unarmed counts were 94, 51 and 68.
The Counted project by the Guardian resulted in a total of 1146 for 2015, and 1093 for 2016 from public reports of police killings. Those who were unarmed were 235 and 170, and for those who unarmed were also black were 79 and 46 respectively for those years. As a percentage of the total in each case the rate of unarmed black men killed tended to be three to four times higher than unarmed white men, and nine times greater for young black men than everyone else.
Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year.
Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.
That’s why it’s an issue, that’s why people are taking a knee in protest. But another problem is that’s not all of them.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics using methodology similar to the WaPo and Guardian plus also specifically doing surveys directly of local police stations found that this is still a significant gap in our data because so many departments simply don’t report their arrest related death cases either to the media or to the DOJ — even though they’re required by Federal Law to do the latter.
Between June 1, 2015, and March 31, 2016, media reviews identified 1,348 potential arrest-related deaths. During this period, the number of deaths consistently ranged from 87 to 156 arrest-related deaths per month, with an average of 135 deaths per month. To confirm and collect more information about the 379 deaths identified through open sources from June to August 2015, BJS conducted a survey of law enforcement agencies and ME/C offices.
The survey findings identified 425 arrest-related deaths during this 3-month period—12% more than the number of deaths identified through the open source review. Extrapolated to a full calendar year, an estimated 1,900 arrest-related deaths occurred in 2015. Nearly two-third (64%) of the deaths that occurred from June to August 2015 were homicides, about a fifth (18%) were suicides, and another tenth (11%) were accidents.
1,900 police caused deaths are twice what the WaPo and Guardian were tracking and it’s still a bit more than 286 from undocumented immigrants.
If you were to do a Steve King and reverse extrapolate this back to 9/11 — which I have, although I only included the “homicides” which is 64% of the 1,900 total -— and compared it to the number of Americans actually killed by Al Qaeda, The Taliban and ISIS both domestically and abroad, police killings are still in the lead by over 2 to 1.
Let’s say just for the sake of discussion we only include the 1,216 “homicides” (64 percent of the 1,900 from the BJS estimate) by police per year, excluding the accidents and suicides (which for some reason both ex-sheriffs Arpaio and Clark seemed to pile up by the hundreds) and contrast that not only with battlefield losses, but also all the people we lost on 9/11 both in New York and Washington. Adding another 2,996 deaths, that brings fatalities from al-Qaida, the Taliban, and ISIS combined to 9,683, while those killed by police homicide remain at 20,624, which is still two times greater.
Obviously, we all oppose terrorism, but for some reason we don’t all oppose police killings even when the victims are unarmed and even though it’s happened to twice as many of us than those who have been victims of terrorism.
20,624 isn’t nearly as bad as 63,000 but it’s certainly not good. Also, it shows that It’s likely that Kirk’s “only 13” number is similarly off by 100% just like the Wapo and Guardian’s figures — so it’s not quick as “minor and meager” an issue as he would try to make it — as if anyone's death is minor or meager.
Based on the 2015 FBI Expanded Homicide Data — which admittedly as noted above is incomplete due to spotty reporting — the kind of stranger based killings like that of Tibbetts (1,375 that year) aren’t nearly common as compared to killings of Acquaintances (2,801) or Family members (1,721) but are greater than the killing of Girlfriends (496), or Boyfriends (192) but then again since all murders aren't solved there were still 6,422 cases where the relationship remained unknown that year — so all these numbers could radically change if we did know everything about every case, but we don’t.
The bottom line here is that all of these are significant issues. They really shouldn’t be competing with each other, and even if you were to play that particular game the absolute winner above all others is the number of suicides that occur every year in this nation which in 2016 was 44,965.
And the majority of those, over 20,000 per year, are accomplished using a firearm.
Every day in America, 93 people die from gun violence. Fifty-eight of those deaths, or nearly two-thirds, are suicides with guns. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows suicide with a gun is the most common and by farthe most deadly suicide method. Just the availability and presence of a gun in the home is a strong predictor of gun suicide.
If we truly wanted to have the largest possible impact on tragic deaths in America, we could start in the
areas of depression and disassociation where there are the greatest number of tragic deaths but for some reason, maybe because we’re distracted by other false issues being hyped all out of reasonable and factual proportion, we don’t. 45,000 suicides every year should be ample motivation for a nation-wide movement to fight against depression, but we’d rather make up false bigoted stats about fake dangerous immigrants and attack them viciously instead.
Trump: We have the worse laws anywhere in the world. Nobody has laws like the United States. They are strictly pathetic.
Our immigration laws are controlled by our Constitution and due process. Our asylum laws are the result of an international treaty that the U.S. ratified in 1968 and are largely the same the other 145 countries who have also ratified it.
We need new immigration laws, we need new border laws, the Democrats will never give them and the wall is being built, we've started it.
No, we haven't.
When President Trump signed the $1.3 trillion omnibus appropriations bill in March, he was especially grumpy about the fact that it did not fund his $25 billion request for his long-promised wall along the southern border. (We’ll ignore the fact that during the 2016 campaign, he insisted that Mexico would be forced to pay for the wall.)
But since then, the president had been proclaiming that the wall is being built. On March 28, he even tweeted photographs:
The pictures that Trump tweeted were of construction in Calexico, Calif. But here’s the rub: On Feb. 28 — a month before Trump tweeted — the Desert Sun headlined an article about the construction titled: “In Calexico, Border Patrol starts constructing a border wall. No, not that border wall.”
The article said that the Border Patrol had identified the project as a priority in 2009, and that funding for bollard fencing — hollow steel beams spaced several inches apart — had been appropriated in 2017. (If you look closely at Trump’s photos, they show 30-foot-high fencing, not a wall.)
“We just wanted to get out in front of it and let everybody know that this is a local tactical infrastructure project that was planned for quite some time,” David Kim, assistant chief patrol agent for the Border Patrol’s El Centro sector, told reporters.
Here’s the last of Trump’s blather — which is impressive because he only spoke for 60 seconds.
Trump: But we also need the funding for this year's building of the wall.
So, to the family of Mollie Tibbetts all I can say is God bless you. God bless you.
Well, as it turns out not all of Tibbetts family are necessarily on board with all this.
“Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color,” her aunt Billie Jo Calderwood wrote on Facebook. “Our family has been blessed to be surrounded by love, friendship and support throughout this entire ordeal by friends from all different nations and races. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.”
Tibbetts’ cousin sparred with conservative activist Candace Owens on Twitter, slamming her for putting a political spin on her family’s tragedy.
“hey i’m a member of mollie’s family and we are not so f---ing small-minded that we generalize a whole population based on some bad individuals,” she wrote directly to Owens. “now stop being a f---ing snake and using my cousins death as political propaganda.”
Yes, we actually do have a problem in the country of violence against women. It would be nice if the GOP who are currently in control wouldn’t let the Violence Against Women act lapse at the end of next month.
The Violence Against Women Act — which directs the national response to crimes of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking — will expire at the end of September if lawmakers don’t act fast.
In late July, House Democrats introduced a measure to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA. Then House lawmakers went on recess. When they return on Sept. 4, they will have only a few weeks before the law expires.
VAWA has “ushered in a seismic transformation on how society perceives violence against women,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “Nonetheless, much work remains to address unmet needs and to enhance access to protections and services for all victims.”
If we're going to have some quick policy solutions focused on the death of Mollie Tibbetts, it seems that it should be something actually focused on the circumstances of her case, or the cases that are truly far more prevalent rather just focusing on whether the alleged immigration paperwork status of the person who had been accused — but not yet tried or convicted — of her killing.
Immigration policy does need to be addressed, from the Dreamers issue and establishing better security and vetting while meeting our humanitarian obligations to refugees who are trying to escape the violence of gangs and terrorism to how we're going to handle the existing undocumented and update our Visa application process, but cynically exploiting the death of this young woman to push forth Trump’s paranoid, cowardly, draconian and xenophobic policies is despicable.
In fact, I would say that this is an evil effort that seeks exactly to shatter the bonds of unity at seeking the America dream between natives and all immigrants. This is dividing us for political gain, not problem solving or bringing us together with common purpose.
It’s grandstand over the death of a girl who was barely beyond being a teenager.
It's fucking deplorable.