Justice is removing the conditions that allow cops to kill

Over the last two evenings I watched the nominees for Oscars in the category of Animated Short Films. The whole show is 95 minutes. I needed two evenings because the video didn’t start and I needed help through a very slow live chat. The shorts was available as one long video through Detroit Film Theater. I could also watch the live action short films, though in the last few years those have tended to include a couple that are brutal. So I didn’t this year. Also available are the documentary shorts, which I don’t bothered with. Here are the nominated short animated films: Burrow – USA. Rabbit can't build his burrow because of all the other underground critters and their burrows. Genius Loci – France. More abstract. I wasn’t sure there is an actual plot. Opera – from South Korea. A large pyramid shape showing dozens of little repeating scenes. It was hard to know where to look. If Anything Happens I love You – USA, A couple tries to heal after a tragedy. Yes-People – Iceland. Simple scenes of life, though all they say is yes (and occasionally no). This video also included honorable mentions, though they were not nominated. Kapaemahu – USA. A legend of Hawaii about healers who were both male and female. The Snail and the Whale – UK/Germany. A snail hitches a ride on the tail of a whale to explore the wide ocean. This one would be a delight for children. To Gerard – USA. A young boy helps a magician and is given a coin. He finds a way to pass it on. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Zack Stanton of Politico, who wrote about the growing rift between corporate America and the GOP:

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a legendary business professor and associate dean at the Yale School of Management, has watched this split grow in recent years, and has heard it from CEOs he knows and works with. What the GOP cares about and what major businesses care about are, increasingly incompatible, he says. “The political desire to use wedge issues to divide—which used to be fringe in the GOP—has become mainstream,” Sonnenfeld says. “That is 100 percent at variance with what the business community wants. And that is a million times more important to them than how many dollars of taxes are paid here or there.”

Dworkin quoted a bit of another article that I thought I should read in full. It is Republicans and the Great Replacement by Noah Smith. Over the last few years there is increasing talk of American conservatives being “replaced.” It seems to increasingly be a central idea of their beliefs. But what is actually being replaced? Smith has a few ideas. The obvious answer is white people are being replaced. By 2042 whites will no longer be a majority in America. A second answer is political replacement. This is discussed as “Every time they import a new voter ... I have less political power.” Both of those are quite old. The first had a role in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. The worry of being outvoted extends back into the 19th century. Smith suggests a third answer, one that extends back just a couple decades. There are broad declines in the percent of people identifying as Christian. That strong pillar of American society is not so strong these days. All three of those reasons mean conservatives are saying they are the one dispossessed, and thus oppressed. I think they only thing they are dispossessed from is commanding the top spot in the social hierarchy. Many of us function quite well in lower rungs of the hierarchy and want the whole concept of social hierarchy abolished. In another pundit roundup, Georgia Logothetis quoted Ibram Kendi writing for The Atlantic. One of the refrains from the defense in Derek Chauvin’s trial was that George Floyd would be alive if he had complied with officers. Kendi wrote:

Police officers do risk their lives. But do I risk my life every time I pull over for an armed police officer? When I don’t have my documents in my hand on the steering wheel and I comply and reach for them, an officer can shoot me dead like one did Philando Castile. Compliance is not a lifesaver. When I comply completely, like Toledo did, I feel lucky to survive police encounters.

Too many black people are killed even when they do comply. I’ve written a few times about one should not confuse correlation with causation. As a reminder, correlation is when two things that are measured tend to rise and fall together. The higher the correlation value the more closely they move together. No correlation means the two values do not rise and fall together at all. There is a mathematical formula that can determine a number for correlation. I’m about to make a statement that logic tells me must be true (though I’ll hear from my friend and debate partner if I’m wrong). While high correlation one might want to claim causation (though one shouldn’t), but with low correlation one definitely can’t claim causation. With that in mind AntifacistF12 tweeted a chart that compared police killing rates and violent crime rates. The two values do not at all move together. AntifacistF12 wrote:

There is no correlation to violent crime rates, and police killings. It's a far-right pro-police talking point.

The two items above is from before the verdict was announced this afternoon – Chauvin was declared guilty on all three charges in the death of George Floyd. Here are a couple things written after the announcement. Olayemi Olurin, a public defender, tweeted:

If the police still have the power to kill us, nothing has changed. Justice isn’t whether we convict a cop, it’s removing the conditions that allows cops to kill. The system that killed George Floyd is the same system that killed Daunte Wright, we need to end it.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

PLEASE TAKE CARE OUT THERE. Police all across the country are going to be feeling aggrieved and looking to lash out.