Gibson's Bakery sues Oberlin College over racial profiling accusations, Oberlin cuts business ties

Gibson's Bakery sues Oberlin College over racial profiling accusations, Oberlin cuts business ties

The folks at Gibson's Bakery caught some Oberlin College students shoplifting. They turned them over to the police, and all three subsequently plead guilty.

Because of this, they're accused of racial profiling.
So I'm guessing the students were not white. Or Asian, for that matter.

Kidnapping and Torture of White Male by 4 Black Gang Bangers is Savage and Racist (UPDATED) | PUMABydesign001's Blog

Kidnapping and Torture of White Male by 4 Black Gang Bangers is Savage and Racist (UPDATED) | PUMABydesign001's Blog

Chicago PD has arrested the four gang bangers responsible for the two-day kidnapping and torture of a mentally disabled white male.

The gang of four who live streamed their acts of depravity which has left their victim traumatized have been charged with committing a hate crime among other charges.

Brittany and Tanishia Covington, Jordan Hill and Tesfaye Cooper are all charged with kidnapping, aggravated battery and aggravated unlawful restraint. Three of the four thugs detained were also charged with burglary.

Be sure to watch CPD press release below breaking down the string of events which lead to the arrest of these thugs. Talk about insanity.
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What are the odds that the court will throw the book at these thugs? Don’t hold your breath.
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With any luck, Jeff Sessions once confirmed, will not allow this case to be swept under the rug. Black on white violence must for once be reigned in.

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The Chicago Police Department, so politically correct, can’t find the words, are either afraid or just refuse t0 call this attack by its name. Instead, after decades of the inmates running the asylum, Chicago PD is attributing the kidnapping to boys being boys, correction, “kids will be kids.”

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There are those who refuse to call this racist attack by its name. Who are they? The same race baiters who by no fluke are profiteers of the grievance industry. You see, while there is money to be made in what is ordained “white on Black violence,” it has been officially declared that there is no money to be made or crime in “Black on white violence.”

Those dismissing this attack by refusing to call it by its name have a vested interest in dismissing the act because it does not fit their narrative and they see no profit.

Comments across social media and so-called new reports by government sanctioned propaganda machines continue to reflect as much.

The end of the university f*** buddy

The defence lawyer for a Durham University student who walked free after being charged with rape has warned that young men should never have sex with drunk women.

Alastair Cooke, 23, said last night that he was ‘delighted this nightmare is over’ after the case against him was dropped.

Speaking outside Durham Crown Court, Mr Cooke's barrister Cathy McCulloch warned that attitudes to sex and alcohol must change in universities.

'What happened to Alastair Cooke is every young man's nightmare and we need a campaign to educate them.

'Young men need to learn that if a woman presents as drunk but gives all the signs, as they see it, of consenting, she can still say later that she was not fit to consent,' Mrs McCulloch said.

'Young men know you cannot put roofies [date rape drugs] in a girl's drink, you can't spike a girl's drink, but we now need to take things a step further.

'Even if they have not given the woman the alcohol, if they have watched them take their own alcohol, if that woman appears to be drunk they must not go there.

'You cannot have a f*** buddy. It is about whether or not someone can give consent to have their body used in the most intimate act between two human beings.'

Mrs McCulloch added: ‘It is every mother’s nightmare, I have a 25-year-old son and it’s my nightmare.’

Mr Cooke, a third-year geology and geophysics student, was weeks away from an expected first class degree when he was arrested in 2015 on suspicion of raping a 23-year-old student in her home when she drunk.

But jurors could not agree on a verdict, and yesterday Durham Crown Court was told that the prosecution would not seek a retrial on the three rape charges faced by Mr Cooke and that his accuser agreed with that decision.

‘We therefore offer no evidence on these counts,’ said prosecutor Paul Cleasby.

The student was the third undergraduate to be cleared of rape in the past 12 months. Last January Louis Richardson, then 21, the former secretary of the Durham Union debating society, was cleared by a jury in less than three hours.

The history student, from St Helier, Jersey, and his family said they had been put through ‘15 months of absolute hell’.

Engineering student George Worrall, 22, from Cromer in Norfolk, faced three counts of rape, but last July after he had been under suspicion for 18 months the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case before it went to trial, citing ‘inconsistencies of the victim’s account’.

Mr Cooke, who denied the charges, did not attend court yesterday and was at his family home in Truro, Cornwall, when he heard the news.

He said: ‘This has been a really difficult time for all those involved on all sides. I am delighted this nightmare is now over. I am looking forward to trying to piece my life back together.’

Mr Cooke, who now plans to complete his degree, was accused of raping the woman at her student house in June 2015 when she was very drunk and unresponsive.

He had known the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, for two years. It was alleged that he stalked her back to her home from a house party, let himself in and raped her three times in her bedroom.

But his barrister, Mrs McCulloch, told the court last month that the allegation arose from ‘regret which got out of hand’.

Jurors were also told that the woman had a tendency to exaggerate and that the ‘willowy’ Mr Cooke was too weak to throw her around ‘like a rag doll’ as she claimed.

It was alleged during his trial that the woman’s friends were a ‘mob’ who knew ‘exactly what it took to get a rape conviction’. Mrs McCulloch said: ‘They were all working together to help their friend.’

At the trial, the court heard that Mr Cooke was a volunteer with the Nightline student advice service and during his training he had role-played being accused of raping a drunken woman after following her home.

The scenario he had invented previously matched the alleged real-life events in June 2015, the jury was told.

#DearBetsy: kangaroo courts won’t solve campus sexual assault problem - The Boston Globe

#DearBetsy: kangaroo courts won’t solve campus sexual assault problem - The Boston Globe

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Meanwhile, the American Association of University Women, among other organizations, has zeroed in on the $10,000 that DeVos gave to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an ACLU-like outfit that, among other things, supports due-process rules.

You might not like DeVos’s financial conflicts or her family’s record on LGBT issues — I don’t — but the #DearBetsy campaign and the controversy over her FIRE donations show how ideological and unmoored the campus rape debate has become.

Let’s be clear: Cases of horrific sexual violence occur in college communities. Last year, Stanford swimmer Brock Turner received a prison sentence, albeit a lenient one, for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster.

More recently, 10 University of Minnesota football players were suspended after a confidential investigator’s report detailed numerous acts of sexual aggression against a female student and specific evidence of players’ culpability. The rest of the team threatened to boycott a looming bowl game — until the report leaked and they saw what was in it.

In 2011, in an effort to protect women’s right to learn without fear of harassment or discrimination, President Obama’s Department of Education sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter seeking tougher action against sexual violence, while leaving many of the details up to individual schools. In response, well-meaning campus administrators have responded by erasing due-process protections for suspected offenders.

That erosion becomes evident in the public paper trail left by a contentious case at Brandeis. In 2011, the student handbook there gave those accused of serious misconduct the right to be informed of the charges in detail, to confront them at a hearing, and to review “all evidence and reports” presented there. The burden of proof, the handbook said, rested with the accuser.

The next year, the university gutted those protections in sexual misconduct cases. It lowered the standard of evidence that it used to assess guilt, as the government’s “Dear Colleague” letter had specifically demanded.

The university went further. In the 2012 handbook, “there was no requirement that copies of any ‘substantiating materials’ submitted by the accuser, or the names of any witnesses, be shown or provided to the accused any time,” wrote Judge F. Dennis Saylor, who reviewed Brandeis’s procedures in connection with a lawsuit in federal court. Saylor went on, “The accused had no right to confront or cross-examine the accuser, no right to call witnesses, and no right to confront or cross-examine the accuser’s witnesses. The accused had no right to review all the evidence.”

In the context of American legal culture, this is crazy. When corporate polluters get sued, not even the most passionate environmentalist would deny them details of the accusations against them. While violent crime devastates a community, progressives in particular would be aghast at efforts to repeal the Fourth and Fifth Amendments for suspected armed robbers.

Campus disciplinary proceedings aren’t court cases, but the underlying principle is the same: Standard rules of evidence and other protections for the accused keep things like false accusations or mistakes by authorities from hurting innocent people.

Instead, tales of murky, Kafkaesque proceedings have proliferated.

In the Brandeis case, a student identified as “John Doe” had sued Brandeis in federal court after being deemed guilty of sexual misconduct. (Saylor made a significant initial procedural ruling in Doe’s favor, though the suit was ultimately withdrawn.) His ex-boyfriend, “J.C.,” had filed a complaint against him more than six months after the end of a 21-month relationship.

A special examiner prepared a report, which, according to Saylor’s summary, wasn’t provided to Doe at any point in the investigation. Brandeis found him responsible for supposed misdeeds such as kissing J.C. while he was asleep, looking at his private areas when they showered together, and, at one point, sought to initiate a sexual act without formally asking permission. In other words, Doe behaved like normal, nonpredatory adults sometimes do when they’re dating.

The examiner treated their relationship as irrelevant. Instead of just dismissing a patently flimsy sexual-assault complaint, Brandeis seemed to split the difference: It held John Doe responsible for some minor sexual infractions but stopped short of expelling him.

Then the outrage-amplification machine kicked in. “Brandeis University Punishes Sexual Assault With Sensitivity Training,” a Huffington Post headline declared, after J.C. publicly decried John Doe’s penalty as overly lax. The case was one of two mentioned on the influential liberal website ThinkProgress in a piece entitled “Universities Keep Failing To Actually Punish Rapists.”

In an information vacuum, all sexual assault cases look the same. As Harvard Law School professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk Gersen declared in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month, “In essence, the federal government has created a sex bureaucracy that has in turn conscripted officials at colleges as bureaucrats of desire, responsible for defining healthy, permissible sex and disciplining deviations from those supposed norms.”

Any backtracking by Trump’s administration will be greeted by suspicion at liberal colleges.

Yet those of us who generally believe in governmental activism, and think public and private schools alike should look after their students to the best of their abilities, should also recognize the limits of a university’s omniscience.

In the Stanford and Minnesota cases, the involvement of local law enforcement was crucial in establishing facts — and the gravity of the situation. Far more often, universities handle accusations of sexual assault on their own, in opaque proceedings that take the place of criminal investigations, rather than complementing them.

On their own, schools have never done this job well. While the Minnesota investigator did thorough work, most schools lack expertise in collecting evidence and evaluating witnesses. To avoid adverse publicity, schools have an incentive to keep all proceedings quiet, which means it’s impossible to tell from the outside whether they’re adjudicating cases fairly.

When students like John Doe are labeled as sexual assailants, while many victims of serious crimes still feel ignored, the problem is that colleges and universities are being pushed to do a job they’re not cut out to do. Sexual violence is a crime. Federal policy should press students and schools to involve law enforcement in every case. It shouldn’t just make harried college bureaucracies take on more investigations — only with ever more draconian rules.

A Window Into a Depraved Culture | City Journal

A Window Into a Depraved Culture | Heather Mac Donald

Anti-police activists and the mainstream media are incensed at the suggestion that the Black Lives Matter movement could have influenced the behavior of the four individuals in Chicago who tortured a disabled white man for hours last week while yelling “Fuck white people” and “Fuck Donald Trump.” In one sense, the activists and media are right: The influences were broader than that. They include the reign of racial victimology, inner-city gang culture, and black anti-white animus.

We live in Ta-Nehesi Coates’s America, characterized by the assumption that blacks are the eternal targets of lethal white oppression. Coates’s central thesis in Between the World and Me, his acclaimed phantasmagoria of racial victimology, is that America continuously aspires to the “shackling” and “destruction” of “black bodies.”

Chicago’s four torturers certainly have not read Between the World and Me. But the book’s worldview echoes throughout our society, including in the inner city. Michelle Alexander’s equally publicized book, The New Jim Crow, argues that the U.S. seeks to reimpose de facto segregation on blacks via the criminal justice system. Alexander has been a staple on black media, among many other outlets. President Obama has insisted, even up to his last days in office, that blacks are the victims of a racist criminal-justice system. The press routinely disseminates phony statistics that purport to demonstrate a police war on blacks. These ideas matter.

Black Lives Matter ideology is just a more in-your-face manifestation of the Coatesian conceit that blacks are living in a system determined to destroy them. The Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter embraces the motto “Stop killing us,” aimed at the Chicago Police Department. It chants: “CPD, KKK: How many children did you kill today?” (The answer is: Virtually none. Last year, over 3,400 people in Chicago were shot, overwhelmingly black. Victims included 24 children 12 years of age or younger. The Chicago cops shot 25 people, virtually all armed and dangerous, or .6 percent of the total.) The Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter disseminates inflammatory lies about the Chicago police, such as that BLM activist Ja’Mal Green was beaten for 30 hours following an arrest for battery against an officer and trying to disarm an officer. Increasing the size of the Chicago Police department, per the Chicago BLM, will simply result in “more killings by police, more police torture and violence.”

These anti-law enforcement claims reinforce existing anti-white animus in the inner city. The notion that the dominant or exclusive racism in America today is white anti-black racism is absurd. Though many urban residents harbor no racial animosity, the recurrent “Fuck Whitey” and “Kill the cops” themes in rap music are not accidental. (Sample: “Kill the White people; we gonna make them hurt; kill the White people; but buy my record first,” by Apache, adopting without obvious irony lines from an Eddie Murphy parody; “The White man is the devil… Drive-by shooting on this White genetic mutant,” by Menace Clan.) I have been warned by residents of one East Harlem housing project not to go to a neighboring project because “they really hate whites there.”

Even if there weren’t already a strain of racial hostility in inner-city culture, the constant establishment refrain that whites oppress blacks at every opportunity would create it. Every highly publicized cop assassination in the last two years has triggered gloating on social media. Ja’Mal Green told the New York Times that the assassination of five Dallas police officers was “not a setback at all” for Black Lives Matter. The Dallas gunman had said he wanted to kill white people and white cops. Though Green insisted that he was not encouraging violence, he said that the assassination showed “the people of this country that black people are getting to a boiling point. We are tired of watching police kill our brothers and sisters. We are tired of being tired.” At some point, there “comes a time when black people will snap,” he said. While one is grateful for Green’s avowal not to be encouraging violence, such sentiments come close to rationalizing it.

The establishment typically looks the other way at manifestations of black anti-white animus. Racism in rap music is usually ignored. The Associated Press excluded any reference to the race of the victim and assailants in its initial report on the Chicago torture episode, as John Hinderaker observed at Powerline, and merely noted that police were investigating a “beating” captured on social media. The AP’s follow-up report acknowledged that someone in the video appeared to use profanities about “white people” and that the victim “appeared to be white,” while “others shown in the video appeared to be black.”

Radley Balko rushed to tweet out that the Chicago kidnapping is not a trend because since 2001, 80–85 percent of white murder victims were killed by whites. True, but the percentage of blacks killed by blacks is higher. From 1980 to 2008, 93 percent of black victims were killed by blacks. White-on-black homicides are much rarer than black-on-white homicides. The vast bulk of interracial violence is committed by blacks. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites, and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author:

Distribution of violent victimizations, by race/Hispanic origin of victim and perceived race/Hispanic origin of offender, 2012–2013

Blacks, in other words, committed 85% of the interracial crimes between blacks and whites, even though they are 13 percent of the population. This data accords with the last published report on interracial crime from the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the Bureau stopped publishing its table on interracial crime after 2008, the first year of the Obama presidency.

Some portion of those black-on-white crimes may be driven by the same racial hostility that gives rise to urban flash mobs and the knockout game. As Dead Prez rapped: “We gonna order take out and when we see the driver/We gonna stick the 25 up in his face . . . White boy in the wrong place at the right time.” Even if the higher rate of black-on-white violence is simply a product of blacks’ higher rate of violence generally, that violent crime rate is another fact suppressed by the mainstream media whenever possible. In response to the Chicago torture video, Callum Borchers of the Washington Post sneered at conservatives’ supposed delusions, such as that “Chicago is a war zone.” This idea struck Borchers as so preposterous that he repeated it later in his column: “Oh, and by the way, Chicago (the part inhabited mostly by black people, anyway) is a super-dangerous place, just like Trump said.”

One wonders how quickly Collum would move his family out of the allegedly pacific South and West Sides of Chicago if he actually had to live there. The following is a partial sampling of crime headlines from Chicago papers over the last few weeks, in reverse chronological order:

FAMILY SINGALONG ENDS AS BULLETS FLY THROUGH CAR WINDOW ON PULASKI ROAD

SHOOTINGS KILL 4 PEOPLE, WOUND 24 SINCE SATURDAY, POLICE SAY [referring to the 24-hour period from December 31, 2016 to January 1, 2017]

TWO BOYS, 16, KILLED IN SHOOTING THAT ALSO WOUNDED 65-YEAR-OLD WOMAN

A VIOLENT CHRISTMAS IN A VIOLENT YEAR FOR CHICAGO: 11 KILLED, 50 WOUNDED

BROTHERS KILLED, 5 OTHER PEOPLE WOUNDED IN CHRISTMAS SHOOTING

3 KILLED, 17 WOUNDED IN CITY SHOOTINGS

4 DEAD IN FERNWOOD ATTACK, 15 OTHERS WOUNDED IN SHOOTINGS

3 WOUNDED IN PARTY BUS SHOOTING NEAR LAKE SHORE DRIVE

WOMAN RAPED BY ARMED MEN AFTER ROBBERY IN HUMBOLDT PARK

MAN WHO ATTACKED, ROBBED 94-YEAR-OLD GARFIELD RIDGE WOMAN SOUGHT BY POLICE

47 SHOOTINGS SO FAR ON EXPRESSWAYS IN CHICAGO, 10 ABOVE ALL OF LAST YEAR

BOY, 16, SHOT ON HIS WAY TO SCHOOL — BUT WENT TO CLASS ANYWAY

INBOUND EISENHOWER SHUT DOWN AFTER SHOOTOUT BETWEEN CARS

MEN CHARGED WITH ROBBING WOMEN WALKING ALONE IN LAKEVIEW, POLICE SAY

SHOOTINGS KILL 9, WOUND 66 OVER THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY, POLICE SAY

Or maybe Borchers is only interested in the white areas of Chicago, which are not yet a “war zone.”

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, responding to the Chicago torture, rejected the idea of speaking out “on crimes committed by black folk because nobody in this country is held more responsible for the crimes they commit, and even the crimes they don’t commit, than black folk in America. . . . American prisons are full of black folk who are being held responsible for every mistake they’ve ever made.” Try telling that to Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. Johnson regularly bemoans the fact that convicted gun felons in Chicago have little to fear from the criminal-justice system, because they are so quickly back on the streets following a shooting. The Illinois Black Caucus has blocked stiffer penalties for gun crime.

The victims of a November 2016 robbery spree in Chicago may also disagree with King that the criminal-justice system is vindictive against black criminals. Isaiah Scaife had already been convicted of theft, attempted theft, criminal trespass, and possession of a stolen motor vehicle before he turned 18, according to DNAInfo. He continued to commit gun crimes as a young adult. At age 19, after a conviction for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, Scaife was already out on parole. That’s when he began his five-day crime spree on November 18, robbing a Subway store’s customers after sticking his gun in a baby’s face and trying to manhandle his way behind the restaurant’s counter. A few minutes later, he robbed a man leaving a Citgo gas station, beating the victim unconscious with his gun before shooting him in the face. The next day, Scaife returned to the same Subway, where he robbed and choked a man while a juvenile accomplice pointed a gun at the victim. A few days later, Scaife pulled a gun on a man at another gas station and stole his possessions and car. At his arraignment, he yelled at the court deputies: “I’m going to spit on your ass.”

Scaife is hardly unique. A huge percentage of violent crime is committed by people with serious criminal histories who are free to continue terrorizing the innocent. And, pace King, if you commit a drug crime, you’ll get more leniency in a large urban jurisdiction than in a rural county, where sentences for white drug dealers dwarf those of inner-city traffickers, according to the New York Times.

At least one of the Facebook torture assailants belonged to the gang culture that produces Chicago’s violent crime. Tesfaye Cooper posted a video on his YouTube channel in October in which he points a rifle at the camera and says: “I’ll put a bullet in your ass,” reports DNAInfo Chicago. Cooper’s Facebook page glorifies him posing with guns and paying homage to local murderers. His raps threaten to kill people who disrespect him and his crew.

The violence in the Chicago torture video does not arise in a vacuum. Most residents of inner-city areas are hardworking bourgeois citizens longing to live in safety and in racial harmony. But the video opens a window into a culture that America would prefer to turn its eyes away from—and which it has helped create.

Chicago Death Toll -- Passive Policing Begets Aggressive Criminals | National Review

Chicago Death Toll -- Passive Policing Begets Aggressive Criminals | National Review

The city of Chicago is conducting a long, bloody experiment in what happens to a gang-ridden municipality in the absence of effective policing.

It is keeping the morgue depressingly busy. Seven hundred sixty-two people were murdered in the city in 2016, a nearly unheard of 50 percent increase over the year before. This is more than New York and Los Angeles — both larger cities — combined, and the worst figure in 20 years.

While everyone on the left pays obeisance to the slogan Black Lives Matter, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel runs a jurisdiction where black lives have been getting cheaper almost by the day, especially in its poorest areas. The lion’s share of Chicago’s spike of violence has occurred in five of Chicago’s 22 police districts. Eighty percent of the victims were rated by the police department as likely to be involved in gun violence, which means that the city is adept at identifying people as potential victims — just not at keeping them from getting shot.

Holiday weekends in Chicago reliably provide fodder for cable TV in the astonishing tallies of shootings and murders (a dozen people killed and 27 shootings over the Christmas weekend). Overall, more than 4,300 people were shot in the city last year. A woman told CNN she told her kids from a very young age what to do when they hear gunshots, a grim maternal duty in a city where gunplay is so routine.

The equation that accounts for the rising body count is simple: As the Chicago police have become less aggressive, the gangs have become more aggressive and more people have been killed. Chicago demonstrates that in swathes of inner-city America, you can have a chastened, passive police department, or a modicum of public order, but not both.

Chicago’s authorities courted the anti-police agitation of the past few years with their desperate mishandling of the controversial shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, killed by an officer in 2014. The city avoided releasing the dash-cam video of the incident for a year, until after Rahm Emanuel’s reelection. When it finally did, the police representations about the threat represented by McDonald looked to be false (the cop who shot him is now awaiting trial on murder charges).

With the police on their back heels, the city further hamstrung them. It discouraged minor drug arrests. It required the police to fill out two-page contact cards (with 70 different fields) whenever stopping anyone. These forms are then forwarded on to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The city would have been much better served by forthrightness in the McDonald case from the beginning, coupled with vigorous support of tough-minded, forward-leaning policing. Instead, it got the worst of both worlds.

Fearful of becoming the next “viral video,” harassed and mocked when out doing their job in tough neighborhoods, beleaguered by paperwork, the police have suffered a crisis in morale and clearly pulled back. Documents obtained by 60 Minutes show an 80 percent drop in stops from almost 50,000 in August 2015 to under 9,000 a year later, and arrests dropping from roughly 10,000 to 7,000.

This reduced police presence on the streets has been a boon only to anti-police ideologues (the ACLU welcomes it) and the city’s myriad gangs. Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson says that the surge in violence has been driven by “emboldened offenders who acted without a fear of penalty from the criminal-justice system.”

There is much about Chicago that can’t be readily fixed, but it is fully within the city’s power to make its criminal offenders feel less emboldened. Chicago simply needs to stop, arrest, and jail more dangerous people. The only alternative is the continuation of the city’s current experiment in chaos that is making the city unlivable for the people unfortunate enough to inhabit its most violent precincts.

It goes without saying that their lives matter. Chicago should begin to act like it.

Black Lives Matter’s Supporters Have to Grapple With This Chart

One of the most frustrating aspects of our so-called “national dialog” on race is the presumption that disparate impact equals racism. In other words, if any negative action falls disproportionately on people of color, then that difference itself is evidence of racial bias. Take the police shooting debate. Though police kill far more whites, they do use deadly force on a higher proportion of African-Americans. All other things being equal, wouldn’t that be evidence of racism? But all other things aren’t equal — violent crime rates simply aren’t proportionate. Look at this Guardian chart of murder rates, taken from the most current FBI crime statistics:



In other words, black men were roughly “nine times more likely” to be murdered than white men, and the overwhelming majority of those murders were committed by other black men. Black men were far more likely to murder white victims than vice versa. That’s a horrifying racial disparity — one that indicates that a segment (a thankfully small segment) of the black community has a terrible problem with violent crime. Given the undeniable reality that people don’t commit crime on a proportionate basis, why would any rational person believe that law enforcement shootings would follow population percentages more than crime statistics? Heather Mac Donald makes this point better than anyone, but it’s worth repeating just as often as the Left repeats its disparate impact mantra.

One final note, this year’s 10.8 percent increase in the national murder rate — the largest increase since 1971 — meant that “at least 900 more black men were killed in 2015 than in 2014.” Dear Black Lives Matter, black lives matter — so please stop your relentless efforts to “reform” American law enforcement into impotence.

What the Media, Academics Get Wrong When They Blame Crime Rate on Poverty, Discrimination

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character, and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don’t bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let’s look at it.

“A Clash of Police Policies,” a column written by Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics:

Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice [Earl] Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.

Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today’s crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.

The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit’s deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.

Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts.

In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it’s close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today, over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the “legacy of slavery” argument.

Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing.

Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support “a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.”

It’s easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves.

In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, “One thing for thee and another for me.”

UNC Rape Case Reveals Race Double Standard

While there should never be a rush to judgment, what I find curious about this case is the hypocrisy, not only relating to an athlete (many of whom, historically, have been protected because of their status as a valued player), but regarding the impact of race on this case -- or the lack thereof.

‘Toxic environment’ for sons accused of campus sex offenses turns mothers into militants - The Washington Post

‘Toxic environment’ for sons accused of campus sex offenses turns mothers into militants - The Washington Post

In the course of a year, Sherry Warner-Seefeld went from high school teacher to activist promoting fairness for students accused of sexual misconduct. Explaining why, for her, means revisiting a night of shock and a phone call she will never forget.

She was grading social science papers on a cold, late January evening in Fargo, N.D., when her cellphone rang, she told The Washington Post.

It was her son, Caleb Warner, calling to tell her he had heard from a dean at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. A woman with whom he had had a short sexual relationship, the dean told him, had accused him of sexual misconduct, of nonconsensual sex, that she alleged had occurred on the night of Dec. 13, 2009.

The charge was filed after the winter break in January 2010, his mother said, after he had “made it clear to her that he was not interested in having a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.” Then out of the blue this notice arrives, with its intimidating legal language.

...

It was in this context that Caleb Warner’s case played out, after his mother got that phone call.

“Three days later they get to this hearing. They found him guilty that night and he’s immediately expelled. He’s not to set foot on campus. He falls to the floor and starts crying. That’s what he did for hours, lay on the floor and sob, fall on the floor and sob.”

The case of Caleb Warner might have ended then and there and never become public but for what happened next.

The family learned that the young woman had repeated her complaint against Caleb to the Fargo police, which assigned a detective to interview her.

The police investigator found so many holes and contradictions in the woman’s version of events that the police and a prosecutor concluded she was lying and charged her with filing a false complaint. She failed to show up for a hearing, however, left town and has not been heard from again, according to Warner-Seefeld.

Surely this would save her son from expulsion, the family thought.

But when the university was informed of the woman’s alleged lies, it refused to reopen Caleb’s case, saying, among other things, that the fact that she was accused of lying to the police did not mean she did. Besides, Caleb’s deadline for appeal or rehearing had passed.

...snip...

The experience inspired her to co-found, with other aggrieved mothers, an organization called FACE (Families Advocating for Campus Equality) designed to assist other parents who received similar phone calls and, bewildered and scared, don’t know where to turn.

Private Prisons: Justice Department Ban Is a Bad Idea | National Review

Private Prisons: Justice Department Ban Is a Bad Idea | National Review

The Department of Justice’s recent decision that the federal Bureau of Prisons should wind down its private-prison contracting was apparently based on private prisons’ bad record of safety and security violations relative to their public counterparts. It turns out, though, that the DOJ’s understanding of private prisons’ record is informed by a serious over-reading of faulty comparative studies, in particular a recent study by the Office of the Inspector General.

As a result of this over-reading, the federal government — and any states that follow the federal government’s lead — may not be able to take advantage of the power of contracting to provide incentives for good behavior.

* * *

First, let’s look at how the IG’s report compared public and private prisons. The report took the 14 private federal prisons and matched them with “14 comparable BOP institutions.” What made the public prisons “comparable” was that they housed male inmates with “the same security level (low), similar population sizes, and similar geographical locations.”

Early on in the IG’s report, the IG compares “annual per capita costs” for public and private prisons. Over fiscal years 2011–14, these costs range from $23,780 to $25,251 for public prisons, and from $21,838 to $23,003 for private prisons — an apparent savings of about 3 percent to 12 percent for private prisons. Wisely, though, the IG’s report cautions against drawing any conclusions from these numbers. There are many reasons a direct price comparison is problematic, but the report stresses one important reason in particular:

We were unable to compare the overall costs of incarceration between BOP institutions and contract prisons in part because of the different nature of the inmate populations and programs offered in those facilities.

How different were the inmate populations? Elsewhere, the IG explains:

As of January 2014, inmates incarcerated in private facilities were primarily non-U.S. citizens with 72.1 percent from Mexico, while the selected BOP institutions had an average of 11.8 percent non-U.S. citizens.

Every prison researcher understands that the demographic makeup of a prison is important, especially in a prison environment where gangs based on ethnic or racial affiliation play an important role. This is why the best empirical studies try to compare prisons that are matched in terms of demographic makeup. The IG report didn’t control for demographics, and it recognized that this made cost comparisons inadvisable.

The report goes on to compare how the public sector stacked up against the private sector based on eight measures of “safety and security.” Private prisons did better in two of those measures: urinalysis drug testing and sexual misconduct (both inmate-to-inmate and inmate-to-staff). But in the other six areas — contraband, reports of incidents, lockdowns, inmate discipline, grievances, and telephone monitoring — “the contract prisons had more incidents per capita than the BOP institutions.”

Remember, though, that the report was “unable to evaluate all of the factors that contributed to the underlying data, including the effect of inmate demographics.” So perhaps we should refrain from drawing any conclusions from this simple comparison of raw numbers?

Moreover, some of these measures wouldn’t really tell us much even if they did lend themselves more readily to direct comparison.

Consider, for instance, the contraband measures — cell phones, weapons, tobacco, and drugs confiscated. Private prisons had more contraband confiscations than the public prisons, but that can be interpreted both ways: Are the private prisons worse because more contraband was found? Or are the private prisons better because they try harder to find contraband? The trouble is that we don’t know the true amount of contraband; we just know about contraband confiscation, and that’s something that’s particularly manipulable by prison officials. In fact, I know one great way to keep your contraband numbers down: just stop searching for it.

Same goes for grievances: If private prisons have more grievances filed than public prisons, does it mean there’s more to complain about in private prisons? Or does it mean that private prisons make grievance forms more available or that inmates at private prisons are less concerned about retaliation if they complain? Again, we don’t know the true numbers of things to be aggrieved about; we just know the numbers of grievances filed.

* * *

On balance, though, one might think that the IG report is fairly harmless. Yes, it compares prisons that probably aren’t comparable, and some of what it measures has no obvious relationship to actual quality of confinement. No, we shouldn’t take it terribly seriously as a comparative study, since there already are better studies out there. But overall it does an okay job of not overstating its results; its basic recommendation is a call for further study.

Even a harmless study can lead to harmful changes, however. The Justice Department, not sharing the IG report’s caution, went ahead and read too much into its results. Where the IG’s office hedged its conclusions with caveats about comparability and merely called for greater investigation, the DOJ memo made broad claims:

Private prisons . . . compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities. They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.

Based on this slim reed, Deputy AG Sally Yates ordered the BOP to “either decline to renew” contracts as they expired “or substantially reduce [their] scope.” It’s not clear whether the DOJ was relying on studies other than the IG report, but if it was, I’d like to see those studies: All available evidence does little to suggest that private prisons are worse than public prisons overall, or that they cost more.

* * *

What will the result of this be? Let’s assume that (probable future) President Clinton maintains the DOJ’s new policy, and that BOP private-prison contracting winds down. This will affect roughly 25,000 inmates — about 15 percent of the total number of federal prisoners — who will have to be moved to BOP facilities. Of course, the DOJ’s policy is limited to the federal system — the states’ privatization policies are unaffected, except to the extent they want to follow the federal example. On average, states keep only 7 percent of their prisoners in private prisons, or 90,000 private state prisoners in all.

Will this be harmless? If private and public prisons don’t differ much on quality, that means the quality of confinement shouldn’t change much. If private prisons save some money, the cost of confinement should go up, though maybe not by much. It’s not clear whether either sector has an edge in reducing recidivism, so who knows what difference this will make on rates of re-offense.

The far greater problem is what might have been. Prisons have begun experimenting with performance measures and performance-based contracting — which, surprisingly, is almost unprecedented. These new metrics could offer substantial possibilities for improvement in prison conditions in the future. Monetary incentives could work in the public sector — think of performance-based bonuses for public-prison wardens — but the private sector is probably best positioned to take advantage of them: If there’s one thing the private sector is good at, it’s trying to make money in any way it can. The DOJ could have directed the BOP to take a “mend it, don’t end it” approach by truly making an effort to encourage higher quality through better contracting. The BOP could have taken the lead in developing state-of-the-art prison-contracting practices and helping to spread good performance measures nationwide. But that’s unlikely to happen now.

Thoughts from the ammo line | Power Line

Thoughts from the ammo line | Power Line

About 15 years ago, when the “Driving While Black” meme was just finding purchase in the public mind, ultra-liberal Twin Cities columnist Nick Coleman, son of a Democrat pol, no friend to Power Line, was invited to go on a ride-along with the police. I knew Nick personally, not as a close friend, but more than an acquaintance. I’m sure that Nick badly wanted to support the notion that the cops were engaging in racial profiling. But Nick was honest enough to make several very telling observations that I remember to this day.

Here are several observations to the best of my recollection. One: that with tinted windows and the cover of darkness, he failed to guess the race of the occupants in cars the majority of the time. It can’t be profiling if you can’t even SEE the occupants of the car.

Two: Nick noticed that after midnight the vast majority of people who were out and about were not white people. Now, it’s theoretically possible that such people are coming from Bible study or even getting off swing shift, but long sad experience has taught cops that most people roaming about very late at night are looking for trouble in some form. Drugs, “dates” with ladies named “Krystal,” weaving home from a bar, whatever.

Three: that a large percentage of black people stopped for speeding, running stoplights and other clear dangers became abusive to the officers, accusing them of “profiling.” They were not polite; they were not cooperative. And often they were also drunk and combative. Nick found the officers very patient and not looking for escalation. Yes, it certainly could have been, in part, because he was a witness.

He came away not willing to dismiss the notion of “Driving While Black” completely, but with a whole lot of questions about its validity. He called ’em as he saw ’em. You know, like an actual journalist.

You add in the wild disparity in criminal activity by race, and the slight disparities in arrests and stops for suspicious behavior become even more understandable. Yet from the President on down, we see tremendous pressure on officers of the law to make sure that stops are noted by race and do not vary by one whit from that race’s percentage of the population. Never mind the difference between criminal behavior in young black males and, say, white women of late, late middle age.

In fact, it has made me rethink an incident I referred to in a previous column that happened on a Texas highway. Unlike every other driver in the great state of Texas, I had not been speeding. Scout’s honor. There was absolutely nobody behind me for a thousand yards. Flashing lights from nowhere. And the patrolman said I had failed to signal a lane change. I eventually just got a warning and the admonition to drive “the friendly Texas way,” but I wonder now if they didn’t need a “white” stop to balance out too many minority ones?

Are you a firm believer that the police unfairly target minorities? You can trust the great Heather Mac Donald, magnificent researcher and definitive writer on the subject, but she is pretty conservative. Mr. Coleman is not. Or look for yourself. Ask for a ride-along and see if you change your mind.

The article referenced

The Crucible: Redux (or College Campuses Lack Due Process for the Accused) — Lone Conservative

The Crucible: Redux (or College Campuses Lack Due Process for the Accused) — Lone Conservative

The problems don’t end with the falsely accused, though, or even their families. Real victims find themselves at the end of the gun, as well. Though these practices are surely designed to help women, the opposite ends up becoming true. Recently, a Stanford student was charged with sexual assault, and convicted. This case serves as a bright line standard. The man was found on top of the victim, who was unconscious. Regardless of alcohol, drugs, family history, or any other mitigating or aggravating circumstance, this is a clear case. Unfortunately (though this is only my opinion), there has not been enough outrage over such a despicable act. It seems that this is a direct consequence of campus feminists calling everything from rape, to an unwanted hand hold, sexual assault.

The “1 in 4” statistic has been paraded around by everyone, from the President to Tumblr blogs the world over. The problem – it’s a complete fabrication. In her book Who Stole Feminism, Christina Hoff Sommers delves into the study which created the numbers. She found that:

The one-in-four statistic was derived from a survey of 3,000 college women in 1982. Researchers used three questions to determine if respondents had been raped: Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs? Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force... to make you? And, have you had sexual acts...when you didn't want to because a man threatened to use some degree of physical force... to make you?

The questions used to complete this survey are incredibly vague, which allow for leagues of interpretation and personal spin to be put onto them. It is an an impossibly poor practice of the scientific method. These numbers were derived by the CDC, which on the surface gives them a certain authoritative credence. The FBI, however, reports a vastly different set of numbers. Even with a (needed) expansion of the term, campuses are nowhere near 1 in 4. Troy University in Alabama, for example, reported one rape. Its student population that year was over twenty-two thousand. Never has it been more true that “There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.”

Due process does not just exist as an idea to attain, though. It is put into action hundreds of thousands of times each day. I work as an intern for a district judge in my county, who often presides over juvenile cases. I recently had a chance to witness due process in action regarding a campus sexual assault case. A young man was charged with first degree rape by the accuser, which in my state means there was forced intercourse, against the will of the victim, through means of intimidation or duress. In other words, the person has to be shown to have had non-consensual sex, and the victim must have been in fear of imminent harm or danger: a textbook case of back-alley rape, for example. The accused was not a student on the same campus as the alleged victim, so the college could not handle it internally. The parents of the young woman pressed charges, and it went to a bench trial before the judge. Over the course of over five hours, I listened to both sides examine and cross-examine witnesses, including the accused himself. As would be expected, the stories of the accused and the accuser did not quite match up; as the adages goes, “there’s your side, there’s my side, and there’s the truth.” The judge came to the same conclusion I had throughout the course of the testimonies: that the defendant, beyond a reasonable doubt, did have sex with the accuser without her consent. In fact, she verbally said no. Nevertheless, the facts of the case trend toward a story less reminiscent of a predator roaming the streets, and more toward a young man who got caught up in sexual desire, and made a mistake. This distinction – between a violent, premeditated rape, and a rash, consequential mistake – is something that has been lost in our culture of demonizing every offender the same way. At the end of the day, the accused was found not guilty of the charge, but was found guilty of a lesser, more appropriate charge.

To be clear, I do not mean to gloss over the fact that the accused violated the woman’s right to her body. I am also not one to pretend this case is at all the same as someone being violently attacked and taken against their will. There is a very clear difference, and to suggest otherwise is a total insult to those who really can be called rape survivors. It is a sad case, undoubtedly. Two people had parts of their lives taken because of a mistake the defendant made. More importantly, however, this case also shows exactly how important, indeed vital, the system of due process is to justice. It would not be justice had the defendant been acquitted entirely because the charge was too great for the crime. Nor would it be justice for a young man to have his entire life ruined due to a non-violent mistake.

This is the reason so many of these campus tribunals fail. They fail to allow for the truth be found out, and opt, instead, for emotions to dictate the day. Some would claim that all accounts of rape, or sexual assault, must be believed. That would be a dangerous world, at best. The fact is, everyone must be considered innocent until found guilty. To be fair, no accusation of rape should ever be taken lightly. That would be an equal disservice. It’s crazy, though, to think that no one would ever lie about something so serious. We must stop conflating cat calls with sexual assault, and stop dismantling the lives of the innocent in the interest of making sure no guilty person ever goes free. Oberlin sophomore, Emily Lloyd, said that, “So many women get their lives totally ruined by being assaulted and not saying anything, so if one guy gets his life ruined, maybe it balances out.”

Asche Schow is a prolific contributor to the Washington Examiner. A high rate of her recent articles have dealt with the myth of rape culture, false assault accusations, and the lack of due process on campuses. In one article, she wrote about yet another case of due process being denied to the accused. Yet, in a turn of undeniable karma to campus feminists, and of incredible injustice to everyone else, this same lack of due process recently claimed the college career of a young woman. The young woman in question was drinking, as was the accuser. It was the male, though, who felt as though he’d been taken advantage of, and filed the complaint. According to the young man, the next day he felt regretful, and as though he had been taken advantage of by the young woman. Without any sort of due process, the woman was expelled for sexual assault. Yet again, sans due process, a student was booted from school for what amounted to a drunken mistake.

As C.W.E Bigsby wrote in his analysis of The Crucible, “John Proctor’s flaw is his failure, until the last moment, to distinguish guilt from responsibility; America’s is to believe that it is at the same time both guilty and without flaw.” The modern American collegiate culture has fostered a generation who operate only in the court of public opinion, and no longer recognize the necessity of due process and a fair trial.In Salem, twenty people were put to death, only because they were accused. There was no proof, there was no benefit of the doubt, and there was no due process. We are seeing similar occurrences, today, when people are accused of sexual assault. The public deems them guilty, and they are metaphorically killed. Due process must be brought to college campuses, if justice is really what we want.

At no point would I, nor have I, suggested that those who are guilty should not be punished. Rather, only the guilty should be punished. We are so consumed with making sure every woman is protected, that we fail to appreciate the damage false accusations can do to everyone. If it’s a witch hunt we want, though, don’t change anything. I’ll meet you out back with the torches and a pitchfork. Though, we may find ourselves hunting different monsters.

African American Shooting Statistics | National Review

African American Shooting Statistics | National Review

I have heard many educated people acknowledge the disparity and claim that it just proves racism in the justice system, which is the same as saying that the statistics are misleading, and all things being equal the tendency to commit violent crime is spread uniformly throughout the population. If that’s what you think, you are living in a fantasy world, where urban blight and broken families either don’t exist or don’t make any difference. Racism in the justice system may explain disparate results in marginal cases, but it obviously can’t explain the astonishing disparity in crime — victims, suspects, and arrestees — by racial category in the U.S. The disparity is beyond astonishing. Here are the NYPD crime statistics for 2014, take a look, and while you do, consider that in NYC whites outnumber blacks something like 1.6 to 1.

As you consider the statistics, recall that the night the grand jury’s decision was announced in the Michael Brown case, blacks protested “no justice no peace” and rioted in Ferguson, notwithstanding the grand jury’s conclusion that Michael Brown was not an innocent “unarmed teenager” but in fact had committed multiple violent felonies without provocation, including strong-arm robbery in a convenience store and then the assault (and attempted murder) of officer Darren Wilson in his car.

Amazingly, these facts didn’t make any difference at all to the protesters, and make no difference at all to Black Lives Matter. Why is that? As far as I can tell, Black Lives Matter would have it so people would be able to break the law, defy police, assault police, run away, etc. — and not risk getting harassed or injured by the police. Here’s why that’s a problem: 
When America is ready for a real conversation about race, it will start here. It will ask honestly what the causes are. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that race has absolutely nothing to do with crime rates, and that government policies such as welfare are the real culprit, creating the urban blight and broken families that lead directly to crime. Until then, however, our national conversation on race will remain a source of much agitation and little progress, focused on matters that are secondary or completely irrelevant, such as loose gun laws in areas of the country where the crime isn’t. Obama thinks that “what’s ultimately going to make the job of being a cop a lot safer” is for cops to acknowledge the problem of police brutality. Maybe that’s one problem that needs acknowledging. But a more basic problem looms vastly larger, and until that one is acknowledged by all sides, none of this will be solved.

About That Harvard Study on Police Use of Force. . . | Power Line

About That Harvard Study on Police Use of Force. . . | Power Line

I was struck by dramatic differences in odds ratio for use of force for “compliant” vs. “all” encounters in the NYT article on the recently publicized Harvard study on police use of force (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html). In looking at that data I realized that you could use it to estimate the fraction of stops in which a black person was compliant. I understand that the datasets are different and thus can’t be compared directly, but unless the data are badly flawed, the results are astonishing. Specifically, looking at the 3rd (compliant) and 4th (all) forest plots and selecting the “handcuffed” data (since it is least likely to be reported disparately between officers and civilians) you can derive the following,

(1) Bc*Wt / Wc*Bt = 1.13 (Bc=black compliant, Wt=white total, etc.)

(2) ((Bc+Bu)*Wt) / ((Wc+Wu)*Bt) = 3.17 (Bu = black uncompliant)

Dividing Equation 2 by Equation 1 and a little algebra yields:

Bu/Bc = 1.81 + 2.81*Wu/Wc.

Since Wu/Wc has to be a positive number, that means that black people are uncompliant > 1.81/(1+1.81) = 64% of the time! Unless I’ve made a mistake in my analysis, it seems that if most black parents are really having “the talk” with their kids, other signals overwhelm its efficacy.

Ignorance of Facts Fuels the Anti-Cop 'Movement' - Larry Elder

Ignorance of Facts Fuels the Anti-Cop 'Movement' - Larry Elder

A new study by a Harvard economist, who happens to be black, finds cops less likely to use deadly force on black suspects vs. white.

Angered by the deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, black men in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, respectively, who died at the hands of the police, professor Roland Fryer Jr. said, "You know, protesting is not my thing. But data is my thing." So he sought to answer the question. Do the police, in fact, use lethal force against black suspects more than they do against whites?

Fryer examined 1,332 police shootings -- including fatal and non-fatal shootings -- in the police departments of 10 large cities in Texas, California and Florida. He said his findings surprised him. In an article about the study, The New York Times wrote:

"In shootings in these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force."

But the question remained, when the suspect is black, are officers more likely to use deadly force? The Times wrote:

"What about situations in which an officer might be expected to fire, but doesn't? To answer this, Mr. Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The police department there let the researchers look at reports not only for shootings but also for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. Mr. Fryer defined this group to include encounters with suspects the police subsequently charged with serious offenses like attempting to murder an officer, or evading or resisting arrest. He also considered suspects shocked with Tasers.

"Mr. Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were black. This estimate was not precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But in various models controlling for different factors and using different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites."

Yes, the study found cops were more likely to put their hands on a black suspect vs. a white suspect -- also to cuff, push to the ground or pepper-spray -- but probably because cops don't want the encounter to escalate to a shooting. This use-of-deadly-force study proves that Black Lives Matter, Obama's sympathy with the group and media's obsession with white-cop-black-suspect stories are built on lies. And Fryer's study confirms similar findings in "The Reverse Racism Effect," a study by researchers at Washington State University.

Recall actor Jesse Williams, who in a rant during a BET awards ceremony said, "What we've been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people everyday." Will Mr. Williams now man up and apologize for helping to perpetuate this phony narrative that cops are out to get blacks? Will Time magazine -- one among many media outlets that slobbered over Jesse Williams' rant -- apologize for calling it "powerful"?

After the shooting deaths of black suspects at the hands of the police in Minnesota and Louisiana, Hillary Clinton said, "White people ... have to start listening to the legitimate cries" of black people. This is the usual kind of condescending pap we always hear from Democrats. But in their case, the reason is votes. In order for the Democratic Party to maintain the 95 percent monolithic hold they have with black voters, they need to create scenarios of anger and fear against so-called "structural" or "institutional" or "systemic" racism. We know their motive.

As to the media, one can only conclude that it's about ratings. When a black officer shoots a black suspect, it does not generate the same level of outrage as when a white officer shoots a black suspect, especially when he is unarmed. But of the nearly 1,000 people killed by cops last year -- according The Washington Post's own tally -- the Post reported that less than 4 percent were instances of white cops shooting and killing an unarmed black man.

And there's this. What's hard about complying with a cop's order so you don't get shot? There is no right to defy a lawful order. That a cop may be rude does not make an order any less lawful. Hillary Clinton, showing how she feels blacks' pain, says black parents tell her that they have what is called "the talk" with their children on how to comport themselves when engaged in an encounter with the police. But in almost every recent case of an officer shooting a black person, the black person resisted arrest. So much for "the talk."

How about, "Comply -- you won't die"?

Time for a Temperance Movement » John C. Wright's Journal

Time for a Temperance Movement » John C. Wright's Journal

In the course of my career, I have responded to the hospital to investigate a report of sexual assault hundreds of times. Here is the down and dirty bottom line regarding 90%+ of reported adult sexual assaults: It’s the alcohol. Period. Full stop.

Of all of those hundreds of reported sexual assaults that I have responded to over the years, I can count the number of substantiated incidents of what Whoopi Goldberg so inartfully once termed “rape- rape” on both hands without taking off my shoes. I’m talking about the full on stranger rapes, the “Jack the Ripper drags a helpless woman into an alley” type of scenario that pops in most peoples’ minds when they hear the word “rape.”

Section wide, we probably average less than ten of those “nightmare” rapes a year in a city of 300,000 people. The rest of them, the overwhelming rest of them, are acquaintance rapes. And alcohol is at the bottom of the vast majority of those.

People who are removed from the social scene of young adults today can’t really comprehend how out of control alcohol abuse is among college students and other young people looking to party. I went to a “party school” myself and there was a lot of drinking in the mid- nineties. Thursday night was the big party night and I had a lot of classes on Friday mornings that were mostly empty.

But these kids today don’t want to just drink to get buzzed and have a good time. They drink with the goal of a black out. It starts with the “pregame.” Prior to going out to hit the bars with your fraternity bros or sorority sisters, you meet at someone’s house and have a couple of drinks there before you even leave. The idea is that you get a little buzzed before you leave, so you won’t spend as much money on overpriced drinks at the bars.

Of course, it doesn’t actually work out that way. They have two beers at home and then three, five, seven more at the bars. Plus the two shots that somebody bought them.

So by last call, they’ve had anywhere from five to God only knows how many drinks in about a four hour period. In a 115 pound sorority sister, that’s a hell of a lot of alcohol.

Oh, and did I mention how many of them are on medications that are contraindicated for alcohol? Given our pill-popping culture in general, I’ll just round up and say that all of them are. Especially mood altering medications and most especially Ambien.

RTWT

The Truth Behind the Run-Hide-Fight Debate | Psychology Today

The Truth Behind the Run-Hide-Fight Debate | Psychology Today

Critics of the Run-Hide-Fight concept, and there are a vocal few, suggest that each of the three steps has its flaws.  They say, “Don’t leave a safe place in the building to run into harm’s way!  You could be much safer staying where you are and not encountering the shooter in a hallway as you try to evacuate.”  Or they say, “Don’t run and hurt yourself as you flee!  That would only make it easier for the shooter to get you.”  They don’t like the shelter-in-place idea either, “Don’t stay in one room like sitting duck!  You could get killed in there!  Get out of the building!”  Finally, they say, “Most people aren’t trained in self-defense techniques.  Fighting back could get you killed!”
To all this I say, “Run when it’s safe to run.  Hide where it’s safe to hide.  Fight if you or others around you have no other options.”  It ain’t a perfect world and under the stress of these intensely frightening events, would you be able to remember to do ten things or only three?

Until active shooters stop their attacks (not likely, especially as we consider the increasing movements of international terrorists back to our shores) or someone comes up with a better plan that doesn’t involve eleven steps and issuing everyone ballistic vests, I vote for Run-Hide-Fight.

Punishment Without Evidence on Campus - WSJ

Punishment Without Evidence on Campus - WSJ

This academic year will be remembered for its psychological crack-ups over Halloween costumes (Yale), faculty intimidation of student journalists covering protesters (the University of Missouri) and purges of single-sex social clubs (Harvard). But the dishonor roll isn’t complete without documenting how the Obama Administration is further eroding due process on campus.

The Education and Justice Departments have already gone far to subvert the norm that students accused of sexual assault retain individual rights. Now they are targeting the few rights that are left. Under new standards promulgated this spring, students can be punished before any disciplinary hearing has been held, and sometimes after anonymous allegations.

Starting with a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department has reinterpreted the Title IX law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions, creating legal obligations that do not exist in federal statutes. Schools can now lose taxpayer funds if they use a “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard for adjudicating assaults instead of the less rigorous “preponderance of the evidence.”

A new round of federal letters appeared starting in April. The one that expanded the definition of sexual harassment the most—and how schools must respond—was the finding of a Justice Department investigation into the University of New Mexico’s grievance protocol.

Justice said UNM violated Title IX in part because of a “failure to provide effective interim safety measures.” Interim measures are imposed on an accused student before any official ruling on guilt. They can include provisional suspensions for the accused; no-contact instructions akin to a restraining order; restrictions on when students can use libraries, dining halls and athletic facilities; evictions from dorms; and bans on extracurricular activities.

Some of this may be appropriate if someone poses an immediate threat to public safety, but UNM was sanctioned for being insufficiently punitive. “For example,” Justice writes, “a respondent was suspended during the pendency of a sexual assault investigation but applied for graduate school at UNM and was granted admission prior to the time OEO completed the investigation.” OEO is UNM’s Title IX enforcement office.

In another case, UNM suspended a student during an investigation as an interim measure. He was exonerated and returned to UNM. But Justice rebukes the school because when “the complainant became aware of the respondent’s return to campus through third parties, she felt ‘powerless and destroyed.’”

In other words, students should have their academic careers or economic futures derailed before any adult has examined the evidence, assessed the credibility of the witnesses, or provided a fair and impartial inquiry. False accusations are not unknown, especially among immature or unstable young people.

For the first time, the Justice Department has also explicitly introduced a “responsibility to investigate complaints of sexual harassment to determine whether a hostile environment exists that requires further action,” even if accusers remain anonymous.

This matters because a hostile environment can exist independently of the details of a specific case, and thus can be established by complaints that haven’t been corroborated and don’t qualify as traditional proof. Justice invokes “perceptions” as much as facts.

“Indeed, some complainants reported that the OEO process was more upsetting and traumatizing than the initial sexual harassment that was the subject of their complaint,” Justice observes. The department faults UNM for failing to “issue a no-contact order because the complainant had requested that her name not be revealed.”

The White House has encouraged the incognito reporting. Vice President Joe Biden even sponsored a funding competition for third-party software developers to create smartphone apps that make sending anonymous Title IX allegations—or gossip overheard at the gym, or whatever—as easy as sending a Snapchat.
***
One problem is that Justice and Education are supposedly offering mere “guidance,” not specific regulations, so schools will have to infer what they must do from letters like the one to the University of New Mexico. But they’ll get the message. Some 228 colleges and universities are under investigation for Title IX violations, and complaints to the Education Department’s Title IX office have increased 502% over four years.

Either the Vikings are invading U.S. campuses or Title IX has become a political weapon. Maybe the liberal professors and administrators cheering on this campaign can’t be expected to notice they’re supporting disciplinary standards they’d never accept in criminal justice or policing.

But maybe they’ll eventually move to defend their own interests, if not their supposed ideals. One of U. of New Mexico’s Title IX errors, according to the Justice Department, was not stripping a professor accused of sexual harassment of his teaching duties, as an “interim measure.”

Freddie Gray and Jihad: Narrative v. Fact | PJ Media

Freddie Gray and Jihad: Narrative v. Fact | PJ Media

I’ve been fortunate to have had two professional careers, the first one in the courtroom as a trial lawyer and the second in journalism. I did not need the latter experience, though, to notice the stark difference between these two worlds.

When I prosecuted the “Blind Sheikh” (Omar Abdel Rahman) and the jihadist cell that bombed the World Trade Center and then plotted a simultaneous attack on several New York City landmarks, the organs of government that speak to the public through the media were making like irresponsible journalists. That is, they were eschewing facts and evidence, obsessively peddling a counterfactual narrative, to wit:

There is only one “true” Islam, and it is resolutely peaceful (indeed, being a “religion of peace” is apparently its only identifiable attribute). Therefore, the terrorist acts plotted and committed by a cabal of men who just happened to be Muslim had utterly nothing to do with Islam, notwithstanding the jihadists’ proclamations to the contrary.

By contrast, in the courtroom, criminal allegations cannot be proved absent convincing factual evidence -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- that unanimously persuades jurors of the suspects’ guilt.

Thus, though we prosecutors were formally part of the government, it was as if we were inhabiting a cocoon insulated from the fictional government narrative. Indeed, the judge repeatedly reminded the jurors of their oath to decide the case solely based on the facts proved and the controlling law, not bias, fear or favor -- which was a 1990s way of saying “not narrative.”

The upshot of all this? No matter what “religion of peace” blather was coming out of Main Justice in Washington or the White House press apparatus, in our New York City federal courtroom a short distance from the Twin Towers, we were not only permitted but obliged as government attorneys to prove the truth:

1. There are mainstream interpretations of Islam that endorse war against non-Muslims to establish Allah’s law (sharia);
2. these are literalist interpretations that draw directly on Islamic scripture;
3. the interpretations (Salafism, Wahhabism, Islamic supremacism -- collectively, what we hopefully refer to as “radical” Islam) are urged on young Muslims (mostly men) by influential sharia scholars like the Blind Sheikh, whose powerful influence owes solely and only to their mastery of the doctrine;
4. based on those incitements, these young men are radicalized into jihadism, plotting and committing acts of terrorism.

Those were the facts. Our evidence proved them incontestably. That is the only way we were able to convict jihadists -- not only in my prosecution, but in case after terrorism case.

While the government’s skewed media narrative continued undeterred, those prosecutions, based on real facts, became the national-security part of government’s best source of intelligence on how jihadist organizations actually function.

I recall all this today because it explains what we are now seeing in the travesty that is Baltimore’s prosecution of six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray.

In Baltimore, the municipal government -- working hand in glove with Obama’s federal government -- has its narrative: the “Black Lives Matter” storyline which holds that Gray’s death in police custody was a cold-blooded murder caused by pervasive racism.

As was the case in the 1990s terrorism cases, the official government media narrative had nothing to do with the actual facts of the case. Gray’s death was an accident. Baltimore’s criminal justice system is among the most thoroughly integrated in the country.

The critical difference between then and now, though, is that in the absence of evidence, the prosecutors are trying to sell their propaganda as proof.

Not surprisingly, it is a rout so far. Prosecutors have been unable to convict the first two police officers, most recently officer Edward Nero, who was acquitted on all charges Monday.

Not surprisingly, the only way the prosecution stands any chance of winning is to incite an atmosphere of intimidation.

Jurors must be made to fear that unless they convict -- regardless of the dearth of evidence -- there may well be rioting and blood in the streets.

If I may try to offer some common sense that distinguishes actual justice from “social justice,” let’s consider both the case of Mr. Gray and the purpose of the criminal justice system.

Gray’s death is a tragedy. It was clearly an accident, one with a catastrophic outcome. But think for a moment: What is it that makes a tragedy a tragedy?

It is that something disproportionately horrific occurs absent any intent to cause it -- a terrible accident, an earthquake, etc.

Now consider: What is the criminal justice system for? It is our society’s means of addressing situations in which people have cause intentional harm -- often, lethal harm -- to other people.

It is not about tragedy; it is about willful wrongdoing. Yes, crimes have tragic fallout for victims and their families; but a crime is not a tragedy, just like an act of war is not a tragedy -- it is quite intentional egregious behavior, not mistake or accident.

This is not to say that the absence of criminal intent equates to the absence of impeachable behavior. It is simply to point out that the criminal justice system is not the fitting way to address all behavior that results in bad outcomes.

When there is no criminal intent, there is no crime, but that does not mean there was no wrong done. That is why police can and should be subjected to internal disciplinary measures when their performance is shoddy. It is why the civil courts are available to address damages caused by negligence.

In sum, the criminal justice system is no place for narrative. It is the place for adjudicating intentional wrongs that cause specific, usually premeditated harm. If a prosecutor tries to prove a case based on an emotionally driven narrative rather than evidence-based fact, the prosecution is sure to fail miserably unless the prosecutor succeeds in corrupting the system.

By contrast, when the justice system is working properly, it is the place where we acquaint ourselves with reality. It is the place that puts the lie to a narrative.