Re: Kim Potter - What happens when good people no longer go into law enforcement?

[ZiprHead]

But what accounts for a massive and seemingly sudden increase?

I would say it's the extremely easy access to guns since the SC redefined the 2A, and the Republican led removal of buying restrictions creating an easy black market.

 

[thebeave]

It's not always the case but sometimes even a homeless person with no training can do good police work. I'm certain there will be no shortage of good people taking up the job if a homeless man with no training and not getting paid for it doesn't mind.

Glad it all ended well, but what that homeless man did was pretty dangerous. If the guy who stole the firetruck was totally batshit crazy, he probably would have just plowed right over him. My big question is what the hell was the guy going to do with the firetruck? Drive it back home, put on a fake license plate, park it in the driveway and hope the police don't notice? Maybe he just wanted to have one to take out for a spin now and then just for fun? Dress up in the gear and fullfill his childhood fantasies of putting out fires?

 

[Gospel]

Glad it all ended well, but what that homeless man did was pretty dangerous. If the guy who stole the firetruck was totally batshit crazy, he probably would have just plowed right over him.

That's the part that makes the homeless man a better policeman than some currently on the force. He understood the risk and felt not only for public safety but for the criminal's safety as well by putting himself at risk. If he was trained he'd have done it better but he damn sure doesn't need the training to understand that the most important part of policing is not yourself.

Edit: I do think Potter was one of those officers who intended to do what was right but F'd up.

 

[Jarhyn]

But what accounts for a massive and seemingly sudden increase?

I would say it's the extremely easy access to guns since the SC redefined the 2A, and the Republican led removal of buying restrictions creating an easy black market.

That's the thing though... Yes, there's availability of guns on the black market, but there has always been.

This is not a "change". Something changed, and it would have had to be BIG. The only thing I know of that happened right around the time that would have been relevant to a 2020 surge is the war in Iraq...

...lots of cant-not-be-neglectful parents not being there for their kids...

...lots of abusive parenting ala "US Army Standards"...

...lots of learning through example that violence is OK.

It means a lot of psychological time bombs, and I expect sometimes it's not only kids but the adults also have such ticking away as a consequence.

It took a lot of years for the results of the last surge from such a war to fade, and it only stopped because Roe (and possibly lead removal strategies) broke the cycle the first time.

Now we have an indoctrination spigot targeted at "patriots" that vilifies abortion, an innoculation not against a disease but against it's cure

 

[TomC]

I think it's the current culture of victimhood and entitlement.

Like how victimized and entitled many right-wingers feel? Seems to me that many of them project onto others these features of themselves.

BLM is a huge contributor to that.

Evidence: {}

Referring to the right wingers was what I meant by my second paragraph. That was very poorly written.

I do see the culture of victimhood and entitlement across the board. Trump is huge in the "victimhood and entitlement" biz. He gained his following mainly by playing to the v&e of enough blue collar/Christian folks to get sorta elected.

Talk about a master of the craft! A playboy billionaire, with notably predatory business practices, who was banging a porno star while his 3rd wife was giving birth, and gassed a church so he could do a photo-op holding a Bible, is a hero to blue collar Christians. WTF?

But I also see it many other places and people. I often hear about George Floyds victimhood from people who dismiss the drugs and violence of his last half hour or so. The culture of victimhood and entitlement is all over the place, across the spectrum of U.S. society.

Personal responsibility is declasse, blaming someone else for the results of freely made choices is becoming the norm. It's those damn Mexicans. It's those damn cops. It's those damn atheists. It's those damn sluts. It's those damn Republicans. It's those damn Democrats. It's those damn Chinese.

Tom

 

[Trausti]

It took a lot of years for the results of the last surge from such a war to fade, and it only stopped because Roe (and possibly lead removal strategies) broke the cycle the first time.

Or the bipartisan tough-on-crime approach of the early 1990's put more criminals behind bars. Since May 2020, the political establish, and big business, too, have promoted soft-on-crime approaches and hostility to law enforcement. (Essentially a repeat of the 1960's and 1970's.) The media plays down rioting (so long as it's righteous rioting) and shoplifting and many local DA's have politicized prosecutions; i.e., don't prosecute. Add in no-bail-catch-and-release, and what the fuck did we expect?

 

[lpetrich]

Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element – Mother Jones

In 1994, Rick Nevin was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.

...
That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn’t paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early ’40s through the early ’70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the ’60s through the ’80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early ’90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to “fill ‘er up with ethyl,” they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

Understanding international crime trends: The legacy of preschool lead exposure

This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the
USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. The relationship is characterized by best-fit
lags (highest R^2 and t-value for blood lead) consistent with neurobehavioral damage in the first year of life and the peak age of offending for index crime, burglary, and violent crime. The impact of blood lead is also evident in age-specific arrest and incarceration trends. Regression analysis of average 1985–1994 murder rates across USA cities suggests that murder could be especially associated with more severe cases of childhood lead poisoning.

 

[Trausti]

Does the lead-crime hypothesis explain homicide? Leaded gasoline was standard globally until the 1980s. Algeria didn't end leaded gasoline use until 2021. Yet, Algeria's homicide rate is substantially lower than the US.

 

[lpetrich]

The urban rise and fall of air lead (Pb) and the latent surge and retreat of societal violence - ScienceDirect

We evaluate air Pb emissions and latent aggravated assault behavior at the scale of the city. We accomplish this by regressing annual Federal Bureau of Investigation aggravated assault rate records against the rise and fall of annual vehicle Pb emissions in Chicago (Illinois), Indianapolis (Indiana), Minneapolis (Minnesota), San Diego (California), Atlanta (Georgia), and New Orleans (Louisiana). Other things held equal, a 1% increase in tonnages of air Pb released 22 years prior raises the present period aggravated assault rate by 0.46% (95% CI, 0.28 to 0.64). Overall our model explains 90% of the variation in aggravated assault across the cities examined. In the case of New Orleans, 85% of temporal variation in the aggravated assault rate is explained by the annual rise and fall of air Pb (total = 10,179 metric tons) released on the population of New Orleans 22 years earlier. For every metric ton of Pb released 22 years prior, a latent increase of 1.59 (95% CI, 1.36 to 1.83, p < 0.001) aggravated assaults per 100,000 were reported. Vehicles consuming fuel containing Pb additives contributed much larger quantities of Pb dust than generally recognized. Our findings along with others predict that prevention of children's lead exposure from lead dust now will realize numerous societal benefits two decades into the future, including lower rates of aggravated assault.

► Ecological associations between lead (Pb) and violence are modeled at the scale of the city.
► U.S. cities, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, San Diego, Atlanta and New Orleans were studied.
► The 1950–1985 fluctuation of Pb emissions explains 90% of the aggravated assault variation.
► Each 1% tonnage Pb increase 22 years prior raised aggravated assault by 0.46% (95% CI, 0.28 to 0.64).
► Childhood Pb prevention may yield numerous benefits in two decades, including less violence.

Back to Kevin Drum's article.

Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We’re so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation—because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn’t an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.

The gasoline lead story has another virtue too: It’s the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the ’60s and ’70s and its fall beginning in the ’90s. Two other theories—the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the ’60s—at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime.

Why have criminogists been reluctant to take the lead-crime connection seriously?

Why not? Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied promising methods of controlling crime, suggests that because criminologists are basically sociologists, they look for sociological explanations, not medical ones. My own sense is that interest groups probably play a crucial role: Political conservatives want to blame the social upheaval of the ’60s for the rise in crime that followed. Police unions have reasons for crediting its decline to an increase in the number of cops. Prison guards like the idea that increased incarceration is the answer. Drug warriors want the story to be about drug policy. If the actual answer turns out to be lead poisoning, they all lose a big pillar of support for their pet issue. And while lead abatement could be big business for contractors and builders, for some reason their trade groups have never taken it seriously.

 

[lpetrich]

This has a lot of policy implications.

Chief among these is the prison-building boom that started in the mid-’70s. As crime scholar William Spelman wrote a few years ago, states have “doubled their prison populations, then doubled them again, increasing their costs by more than $20 billion per year”—money that could have been usefully spent on a lot of other things. And while some scholars conclude that the prison boom had an effect on crime, recent research suggests that rising incarceration rates suffer from diminishing returns: Putting more criminals behind bars is useful up to a point, but beyond that we’re just locking up more people without having any real impact on crime.

Some certified right-wingers have recently talked about "rightsizing" prisons, because they require a lot of taxpayer money with not much return on investment past a certain point.

Sing it, Newt! Gingrich and Allies Promote Criminal Justice Reform | American Civil Liberties Union

Last week, Newt Gingrich and Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, the criminal justice reform division of Prison Fellowship Ministries, put out a call in The Washington Post for their Republican brethren to pave the way to reduced prison populations and costs and join their "Right on Crime" campaign (read our take on the campaign's launch here). Gingrich and Nolan boldly point out: "Our prisons might be worth the current cost if the recidivism rate were not so high, but . . . half of the prisoners released this year are expected to be back in prison within three years. If our prison policies are failing half of the time, and we know that there are more humane, effective alternatives, it is time to fundamentally rethink how we treat and rehabilitate our prisoners."

 

[lpetrich]

Does the lead-crime hypothesis explain homicide? Leaded gasoline was standard globally until the 1980s. Algeria didn't end leaded gasoline use until 2021. Yet, Algeria's homicide rate is substantially lower than the US.

A totally unevidenced claim. Should I have expected anything more?

 

[bilby]

Does the lead-crime hypothesis explain homicide? Leaded gasoline was standard globally until the 1980s. Algeria didn't end leaded gasoline use until 2021. Yet, Algeria's homicide rate is substantially lower than the US.

Algerians get in serious trouble if they are caught in possession of a gun or ammunition without a license. Just having one in your house without a license gets you jail time; Being seen with one in public in a built up area will invite a massive law enforcement response, because guns are not a normal sight. Those who do own guns are required by law to secure them when they are not in use - even if you have a licensed gun, outside the US you are going to be in serious trouble if you just keep it in your dresser drawer, or leave it unattended anywhere not behind lock and key.

As a result, violent crime tends to be dramatically less deadly. Getting enraged typically results in someone with a bloody nose or missing a couple of teeth.

American homicide rates are fucking insane, because when Americans become enraged they are far more likely than residents in other countries to have access to easily deployed lethal force.

 

[laughing dog]

I think it's the current culture of victimhood and entitlement.

Like how victimized and entitled many right-wingers feel? Seems to me that many of them project onto others these features of themselves.

BLM is a huge contributor to that.

Evidence: {}

Referring to the right wingers was what I meant by my second paragraph. That was very poorly written.

I do see the culture of victimhood and entitlement across the board. Trump is huge in the "victimhood and entitlement" biz. He gained his following mainly by playing to the v&e of enough blue collar/Christian folks to get sorta elected.

Talk about a master of the craft! A playboy billionaire, with notably predatory business practices, who was banging a porno star while his 3rd wife was giving birth, and gassed a church so he could do a photo-op holding a Bible, is a hero to blue collar Christians. WTF?

But I also see it many other places and people. I often hear about George Floyds victimhood from people who dismiss the drugs and violence of his last half hour or so. The culture of victimhood and entitlement is all over the place, across the spectrum of U.S. society.

Personal responsibility is declasse, blaming someone else for the results of freely made choices is becoming the norm. It's those damn Mexicans. It's those damn cops. It's those damn atheists. It's those damn sluts. It's those damn Republicans. It's those damn Democrats. It's those damn Chinese.

Tom

You have no evidence that anyone (let alone Mr. Floyd) would choose or expect to be restrained by having a knee placed on their neck. Mr. Floyd was not violent. Nor do you have any evidence that his drug use led to his choices or his arrest. There is disputed evidence that it contributed to his death, but the jury weighed that along with all of the other evidence and found that it did not.

Mr. Floyd was non-violent. Mr. Floyd allegedly passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Mr. Floyd ended up dead because a police officer who knew Mr. Floyd choose to restrain him using an unapproved technique. While Mr. Chauvin was restraining Mr. Floyd with his chosen method of a knee to the neck. Even when Mr. Floyd was not laying still, Mr. Chauvin chose to continue his knee to the neck. Even when Mr. Floyd complained about having difficulty breathing, Mr. Chauvin chose to continue his knee to the neck.

One can argue that Mr. Floyd's choices put him in the position to become a victim of a sadistic police officer. But Mr. Chauvin is responsible for his choices. His choices made Mr. Floyd a victim. Mr. Floyd was a victim. It is counterfactual to deny it. Stating that Mr. Floyd was a victim is stating a fact.

I agree that there are way too many people falsely claiming "victimhood", but that is not the Mr. Floyd situation.

 

[Trausti]

Does the lead-crime hypothesis explain homicide? Leaded gasoline was standard globally until the 1980s. Algeria didn't end leaded gasoline use until 2021. Yet, Algeria's homicide rate is substantially lower than the US.

A totally unevidenced claim. Should I have expected anything more?

Da fuq.

Finally, the end of leaded gas

Really. What. The. Fuck.

 

[Trausti]

American homicide rates are fucking insane, because when Americans become enraged they are far more likely than residents in other countries to have access to easily deployed lethal force.

That explains the high gun-homicide rate in Coeur d'Alene.

 

[ZiprHead]

American homicide rates are fucking insane, because when Americans become enraged they are far more likely than residents in other countries to have access to easily deployed lethal force.

That explains the high gun-homicide rate in Coeur d'Alene.

Classic goalpost move.

 

[Trausti]

American homicide rates are fucking insane, because when Americans become enraged they are far more likely than residents in other countries to have access to easily deployed lethal force.

That explains the high gun-homicide rate in Coeur d'Alene.

Classic goalpost move.

Heh. I'll wait your explanation on why Couer d'Alene - in that red state with all those guns - has a much lower gun homicide rate than, say, Chicago or Philadelphia.

 

[ZiprHead]

Actually Couer d'Alene is higher in both violent crime and property crime than the national averages.

	Couer d'Alene	National Avg
Violent crime	24.8	22.7
Property crime	44.7	35.4

The Crime Indices range from 1 (low crime) to 100 (high crime). Crime rates are based on FBI data.

 

[laughing dog]

Does the lead-crime hypothesis explain homicide? Leaded gasoline was standard globally until the 1980s. Algeria didn't end leaded gasoline use until 2021. Yet, Algeria's homicide rate is substantially lower than the US.

A totally unevidenced claim. Should I have expected anything more?

Da fuq.

Finally, the end of leaded gas

Really. What. The. Fuck.

As usual, you missed the point. You gave no reason why anyone should expect a comparison between the homicide rate between Algeria and the US should somehow be connected to the use/disuse of leaded gasoline. It could be that Algeria's homicide rate has always been substantially lower than the US's.

Really, What. The. Fuck.

 

[lpetrich]

Algeria has a much lower rate of vehicle ownership than the US:  List of countries by vehicles per capita -- meaning breathing in much less car exhaust.

Algeria's murder rate is roughly comparable to the murder rates of many European countries, and also of Canada:  List of countries by intentional homicide rate

Since right-wingers pride themselves on their superior work ethic, I expected to see something comparable to what I did. I didn't.