KING: Can African-Americans get a little of that Ahmad Khan Rahami treatment?

[Suburban Warrior]

Police in Linden, New Jersey did something truly amazing today.

I'm not being sarcastic. After Ahmad Khan Rahami was suspected of planting bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey on Saturday, the FBI put out an APB on the 28-year-old Rahami and warned that he could be armed and dangerous. It turns out that was true.

Police located Rahami in Linden, N.J. Two officers were shot during the confrontation. One was saved because of their vest and another got grazed in the face by a bullet. In spite of all of this, those officers and others found a way to arrest Rahami without blowing his head off. It's amazing, but surely that was not an accident. Somebody somewhere wanted Rahami to be brought alive for questioning.

The last we saw him, Rahami was strapped to a stretcher — on his way to a local hospital. I'm glad they didn't kill him. Maybe they'll be able to question him and learn his motives or see if he was a part of a network of some kind. As a man with a huge family who roams this city, I'm glad Rahami is off the streets, but I just can't get one observation out of my mind.


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-african-americans-ahmad-khan-rahami-treatment-article-1.2798518

[Igel]

1. There's a lot of variation.

In the case of Rahami, we hear the details because of what happened before, not because of the circumstances of the arrest.

In many other cases, we hear a small percentage of the incidents, and those are picked because of the circumstances of the arrest. Keep in mind that more unarmed whites are shot than blacks--yes, the black shoot-rate is disproportionate, but if we heard a random sampling we'd here far more cases of whites' being shot. But we don't, because the sample isn't random. If the sampling were random, we'd hear more about blacks (and whites) killed that were clearly armed. But we don't, because the sample isn't random. Those we hear about suit our confirmation bias and fit our preconceived narratives; they serve to produce outrage in ways that most other incidents wouldn't--in fact, it would dilute the message and outrage if the sample were random, so we're given an incentive to avoid a random sample.

Yet we're convinced that what we see is representative, that is, is a random sample. Instead, we compare Rahami and Roof to numerous other examples, and miss the non-randomness of what we see.

If white deaths are baseline, then the number of excess black unarmed deaths amounts to a couple dozen per year. Now, that's an injustice, but it's one that's plausibly accounted for in fairly neutral ways (I haven't tried, but I suspect that much of that number could be dealt with in terms of fairly standard statistics). But that's not the "largest cause of black deaths" nor is it "thousands of black deaths" that I've seen claimed.

[Midnight Writer]

2. So now we bitch because cops DIDN'T kill a suspect?

Perhaps cops in Linden are stone cold professionals who handle these situations with more polish.

Is there a specific record of police violence against black folk (or anyone else) in Linden that makes this "truly amazing".

Believe it or not, tens of thousands of people are arrested every day in our country, of every race and gender, suspects in every heinous crime imaginable, and statistically few are killed. That this one was not is hardly "truly amazing".

I am totally against excessive police violence. I don't understand it and I abhor it. It is counter productive to our goals of preventing, reducing and minimizing the tragedy of crime.

But please don't complain when police act professionally. It is not productive. There are plenty of police actions to be outraged about. We don't need to create, Trump style, more chaos and hate.

[Blue_Tires]

3. k+r