The Red State Murder Problem - Why are murder rates 40% higher in Trump states?

I have to step in here. As someone who has trained in martial arts since I was a teenager, it really depends. If a trained sniper is after you you're not going to have a chance. If you're caught unawares and are in the "death zone" you're fucked when the bullets start flying. In a close up hand to hand situation, my chances might be better against someone with a gun, simply because a gun is a one dimensional threat. It has to be pointed at you for maximum danger. A knife is fast, silent, easily hidden and can easily inflict fatal injuries before you know what hit you. The biggest problem is that "knives" in various forms are everywhere...kitchen tools, box cutters, machetes. Downplaying the danger of knives does not strengthen the argument against giving guns to every idiot who's terrified of whatever boogeyman the right wing echo chamber has dreamed up.

This also applies to the argument that since you can't stop mass killings we shouldn't make the tools that make them easier to accomplish harder to get.

If the higher crime rates among black populations are due to black people having been consistently dunked on by society for centuries then them not being there probably wouldn't make a whole heap of difference, as some other group would have been given that place.

Unless you want to argue that there has been systemic racism that has specifically targeted black people?

I think the problem is poverty.

Did he ever get back with you regarding Redlining?

Are you ever going to get back to me with the questions I asked you?

Nope, it's just another in the massive list of times he runs away when asked anything.

You answer Bailey's questions from months ago and I'll consider it.

Ok, and if the problem is poverty and not black people, why are black people more likely to live in poverty?

I have answered plenty of questions posed by members here. I've even offered up information unsolicited to my own detriment.

Because we are still shaking off the last remnants of the civil war and Jim Crowe and in some cases, black people perpetuate their own problems because of the environments they grow up in such as not having father figures, a two parent household and positive male role models. We went over this when you accused me of being racist because I agreed with @Paladin over what he said about black culture.

I'll take that as a no. Your hypocrisy is noted.

I see @Diacanu reped this post fantasy. Oh really? Here's me answering a question earlier today. Now mark it tl;dr or GFY, or "dumb"or facepalm because that's your go to response for everything because you're a one trick pony. Oh and if you think you've "won" because you think I didn't put you on ignore, you'd be wrong, I can still see the reps.
http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3440666/

Your cowardice in not answering Bailey's question is noted.

Christ that started off so promisingly.

Since you decided to bring it back up to score a point it's worth clarifying that what you actually initially agreed with Paladin on was that black people were culturally and biologically unsuited to success, and when you later changed to disendorsing Paladins views described it as a racist statement.

Yes, I initially missed the biological part.

If I was trying to make a case for not being racist I wouldn't keep bringing up how I only said that black people were culturally unsuited to success.

The point was to remind you that I’ve answered your questions before since you are under the impression that I haven’t.

That's not how ignore works.
I ignored Flashy to shut his rep bombardment down.
It worked.
You're a liar.
A weaseling little liar like Ted Cruz.

Fair enough, how about we move onto something new, such as the situations like redlining that took place in the post Jim Crow world.

Sure.

Cool, to get us on the same page what sources have you been using when doing your research on it?

First and foremost , The FBI.

Did a search for FBI and don't see much of anything in regards to them and redlining. See a 2021 US Justice Department story, is that what you're referring to?

Forgive me if I don't share your "optimism" on this.

Point of order: Estimates of people on death row who have been wrongly convicted range from 1 to 5%. I have no clue as to how many folks might have been wrongly convicted of murder in states that don't have the death penalty. I doubt if we have really good data on the subject since folks probably focus on death penalty cases more than anything else. I also have to suspect that the majority of cases of unsolved murders involve victims who are persons of color.
One can infer that their killers are most likely of a similar ethnic background but that shouldn't automatically be assumed to be the case. For the past few years there's been a rash of POC trans women being murdered in the Southeast. AFAIK, there's been no discussion amongst anyone that this might be the work of a serial killer (regardless of the ethnicity of the killer). This seems odd to me. Serial killers often target marginalized groups and are often people who travel within a region. So why should folks not say that there might be a serial killer on the loose? Certainly, the murders could all be unrelated, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that there's a reason to exclude a serial killer.

This is predicated upon the fact that such things are accurately reported. It also assumes that people are charged with a crime to begin with. Remember that case some years back where a foreign exchange student got lost, stopped to ask directions, and was shot dead because the guy who lived in the house the kid stopped at thought the kid was a threat? The homeowner was found "not guilty" of having committed a crime because of the way the laws were written said that if he shot someone coming on his property he was within his rights to do so. Not officially murder, but that's exactly what it was. I believe that it happened in Louisiana and that the kid was Japanese.

Does it, though? I think that the families of Tamir Rice and Breonna Taylor might disagree with that.

Not really. Forget things like ethnicity and gender and try to dig into the details about people who die in police custody. Shit gets real sketchy, real fast. A whole lotta people die under conditions that should raise red flags while in police custody, but for some reason, the cops never seem to get prosecuted in the majority of the cases. Again, this isn't necessarily a racial issue, but one related to the fact that cops often get to operate with impunity in their jurisdiction.

Back in the mid-90s, I worked with a white guy who was in his mid-50s and had a bad limp. According to him, the reason he had the limp was because when he was drunk, some cops in Georgia (the state, not the country) broke his leg and denied him medical treatment. He was called as a witness in a trial (don't remember if it was civil or criminal) against the department that had arrested him because some kid (don't know the age or ethnicity of the kid) died because the cops beat him to death.

This assumes that such numbers are accurately reported to begin with.

You're predicating this on the idea that there are some numbers that can be considered accurate to begin with. I'm not sure that there are. Women who kill their domestic partners are more likely to be prosecuted and serve longer prison terms than men who do so. Even when you're talking about women who kill abusive partners.

And? Who says that all these killings had to be committed by cops? And again, I urge you to look into the murky circumstances of people who die while in police custody (regardless of race or ethnicity).

Does it? Do you remember this post that you gave an angry react to? You know, the one about a Black woman who escaped from a torture dungeon and disproved prior claims by the police that Black women weren't being kidnapped? The media simply repeated the police talking points that it wasn't happening, despite the fact that members of the Black community were trying to alert folks to what was going on. Does that make it a conspiracy? The media reports on any number of white women who go missing, but never seems to give the same amount of coverage to women of color who go missing. Is that a conspiracy?

Which makes it all the more strange that when such events happen they aren't more widely covered in the media. After all, as the old saw goes, "Dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is on the front page.

Again, this predicated that the stats are correct. So long as cops can murder a kid like Tamir Rice and go free, I don't think that they are. YMMV.

Wow you got me, I made a typo.

You really are East Coast Dayton because nobody since him has spent so much time up on a cross.

The cross has a few extra bits coming off it at right angles.

Optimism? LOL. Remember, your claim is that black offenders don't have higher per capita murder rates than whites. You need to come up with 10x the number of murders based on the 2020 numbers to make that claim stick. Eight times the numbers in 2017. That's a huge bar, one you haven't even come close to reaching.

Reality check, even if you expand that to all inmates convicted of homicide, you need at least 160 times that to make your case, bare minimum. Again, nowhere near the bar. Ridiculously far from it.

And that doesn't prove anything to this argument by itself. Because that doesn't mean that if the wrong person was put on death row in a small percentage of crimes that it is also follows that no one from the same racial background did. Simply the wrong person was convicted oesn't move the data point at all unless you can also show that the person who committed the crime was a different race than the person imprisoned for it.

Anectodal, and we know that victims and killers match race in known murders the overwhelming majority of times.

And you need hundreds of serial killers to make up these numbers. Serials killers don't kill thousands, the overwhelming majority don't reach a hundred.

Why, yes, murder has a legal definition. But again, all you have is anecdotes. I'm sure there's quite a bit of variabilty in the data, it's not the best data set because it's incomplete. But the data we have is very disproportionate.

This is like the election. Yes, there is some voter fraud. No, no statistician would ever suggest that there is enough voter fraud in the last presidential election to tip the balance.

You need to find many thousands of murders per year where the wrong person was convicted, and then that person would have to be from a different racial background.

Forget ethnicity and gender, OK. We are talking about race. And your goalposts are rapidly disappearing over the horizon.

I'll just take this as a concession you can't make your argument.

If you want to have a discussion about deaths in custody fine. Studies in 2007-2010 estimated about 5000 a year. But that includes disease, illness, attack from other inmates, and suicide. I'm sure there are improvements that can be made, and I'm sure that this disproportionately impacts African American males, as they are disproportionately the ones in custody in the first place.

What percentage of custodial deaths are actual police murders? I'm sure the number isn't zero, but there's virtually no data on this.

It was literally your only thesis. But I agree, there are not roving bands of cops killing thousands of African Americans and then framing these murders on blacks. At least not in the thousands necessary to impact the topic of contention.

I too can think of some anecdotal cases. Find me the thousands more needed to make your claim.

I do believe the police make mistakes. Some of them act in bad faith, to be sure. It's certain that there are even a few murderers among them. I'm sure that the number of missing people out there includes quite a few unknown homicides. But we have no idea what percentage or who were responsible for those crimes if they exist, do we?

So you go back again and again and again to anecdote and how you feel about it, because there is literally no data that supports your case.

Find me the thousands and thousands of murders it would take. No? Then why are we still discussing this? Because of the way you feel about it, regardless of what the facts say.

Strawman. I'm not saying police data is perfect, and indeed have stated several times it's not.

What I am saying is that the data set is so overwhelmingly disproportionate that the bar to achieve your statement is virtually impossible.

Not a thing that you said here has changed my opinion of that.

Even if every single police shooting was unjustified, and 100% of deaths in custody were police murdering suspects, in 2020 you still are only halfway.

And you are well into conspiracy theory territory if you think the numbers are anywhere close to that.

So two things can be true - the police need to be held accountable for their actions more often AND the number of homicides committed by black people in communities that have been intentionally destroyed by racist policies is much, much higher than other communities at this time.