A Tale of Two Snowballs

Not for nothing, but I grew up throwing snowballs at cars in Pleasantville.

I can’t stop thinking about John Crawford, shot in an Ohio Walmart for caring a Walmart BB gun while talking on the phone in the store. And I cannot stop thinking about Tamir Rice, shot dead at 12-years-old for brandishing a toy gun in the park.

And then I think about Elf, where the snowball fight was a funny bit in the story.

I don’t know what the hell is going on.

Just out of curiosity, what is the crime victimization rate in Chappaqua? In New Rochelle? And do you think it’s possible that the different rates influence police behavior, or is “Pigs hate the darkies” the only possible explanation for differing responses?

New Rochelle still has an awfully high median income.

I grew up in Durham in England. It has one of the oldest university’s in the UK and the stereotypical student is a rich kid who couldn’t get into Oxford or Cambridge. The outlying areas are working class and some are very deprived and it is surrounded by ex-mining villages. My dad was a policemen there and through the police he gained a scholarship at the university in the late 70s early 80s. One of his colleagues wouldn’t talk to him for the three years he was a student because he hated the way the university would try and keep minor crimes in-house while local kids were labelled has hooligans for the same things.

The video doesn’t show the kids having a snowball fight and the kids being frisked are already on their knees when they come into shot, to me it doesn’t really show if the cop was out of order without knowing more of the context. But cassander do you think affluent white areas are policed differently to poorer less white areas, and also this can affect crime detection and reporting statistics, or is the only explanation that the kids were asking for it?

Off topic but this is like a Corey Robin bat signal: http://larrysummers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/AcademicFreedomAndAntiSemitism_FINAL1-2.pdf

Cassander, Corey should have a good idea about the difference in policing in the two towns having grown up there. He gives statistics on race and wealth and either could be a reason for the difference but the only way the cop’s behaviour is justified is if he had some specific information about the actual kids that make his actions reasonable and not general crime statistics relative to other areas.

None at all Eszter. :-(

Bang on Peter.

Eszter,

Bryan Stevenson who wrote a book about his work Just Mercy is visiting Australia this month I think , he founded the Equal Justice Initiative which would take donations I think. It says on the website that the U.S. prison population in the 1970s was around 300,000 and is now 2,300,000 – that is a really scary increase. There was an article in the Guardian about his work with a black youth who at 13 was sentenced to life improsonment and put in solitary confinement at an adult gaol for a non-homicide conviction http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/01/just-mercy-extract-bryan-stevenson-ian-manuel?CMP=share_btn_tw

“The Equal Justice Initiative is a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair and just treatment in the legal system.

We litigate on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged with violent crimes, poor people denied effective representation, and others whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct. EJI works with communities that have been marginalized by poverty and discouraged by unequal treatment.

EJI also prepares reports, newsletters, and manuals to assist advocates and policymakers in the critically important work of reforming the administration of criminal justice”

@10
cassander:
” Pigs hate the darkies” ; ” Racism! (TM) ”

This really is quite obnoxious. Please stop. If you want to push back against the OP’s suggestion that these events were motivated by racial factors, feel free to do so, just try better to use positive arguments. The whole ‘just raising questions’ routine, followed by your pithy mockery, contributes nothing to the discussion, other than signalling that you are a crank.

The New Rochelle Police Department says that they sent several patrol cars in response to a 911 call concerning a firearm. One of the group fled on foot, pursued by the officers responding, while the others were held by the officer you see in the video.

In the video, no snowball fight is shown. Instead you see one cop holding several individuals at gunpoint, and you see two police vehicles in the background.

The New Rochelle Police Department says that they will release a transcript of the 911 call.

Unless you think two separate patrol vehicles pulled up from separate directions and blocked streets, as displayed in the video, for a snowball fight, and that the New Rochelle Police Department would be foolish enough to create as a cover-up a fairly detailed and easily falsified narrative about events involving lots of different people with the need to fabricate additional evidence, I’d say the voice-over at the very best presents an incomplete account of events. If you listen carefully, the voice-over actually sounds deceptive and lacks conviction.

My only objection to the OP is that as written it gives the impression (as one is reading it) that the video captures the snowball fight and a cop arriving (notwithstanding the last paragraph), and that these matters are facts, when in fact the video shows neither of these matters.

It’s possible that the group was having a snowball fight, and that a 911 call was received, and that one of the group tucked something into his waistband and fled when the police arrived, and that the narrator truly believed that the group was just having a snowball fight. But the presentation in the video seems deliberately inflammatory. Even if based on an honest set of beliefs of events, it was reckless to create and post this without including qualifications about what the narrator actually knows and doesn’t know.

While we’re not talking about the Superbowl, I thought I would share this little anecdote: George Steiner won his Rhodes scholarship because he could explain offensive patterns.

From his interview with the Paris Review:

“They interviewed you until deep into the night at a country club. It was like the foreign service. They called me in, with the other finalist, who had the gold star on his West Point collar and was a double-varsity man, and they said it’s going to be “one of you two. You have ten minutes to prepare a brief statement to this committee about your views on the Hiss case.” (This was December 1950, between the first trial and the second.) That lovely gentleman went in and more or less came to attention and said, “Excuse me, I’d rather not answer this question as a future commissioned officer since it’s still under legal review.” They called me in, and without any such scruple I developed my long answer: I was passionately convinced that she was the guilty party and that he was exercising his paradoxical right of perjury to shield her. I developed this far beyond any knowledge, but they were absolutely intrigued.

Then they said to me, “Now we want to give it to you, but because of your physical handicap, there are no sports. Does any sport interest you?” “Apart from chess,” I said, “American football fascinates me.” They gave me a piece of chalk — this is all true — and asked if I could show them the difference between a split-T, a T, and a single-wing formation. I said, “That’s too easy,” and I immediately began, and they said, “All right, you’ve got the Rhodes.” That’s a totally true story.”

It seems to me that part of what’s happened is that law enforcement, as an institution, has arrived at the view that the first priority is to prevent any harm to law enforcement officials. Thus police officers pull their guns before anyone else does, and even trivial offenses are met with brandished weapons, frisking, and arrest. Because police officers must be protected from harm, they meet citizens wearing body armor. Arrests are carried out in military fashion, and the standard for use of deadly force has evolved from self- or bystander- defence, to whether or not the officer felt fear of potential harm. This can’t help but end with cops shooting citizens, because the standard of what passes for proper behavior is so skewed in that direction.

And Andrew F shows up, as predicted, saying what was predicted. Last name Baggins, maybe?

@RJL #25: Thanks for that anecdote, though I wish you had also provided the link to the article. One thing about it confuses me: who is the “she” to whom Steiner is referring here? Elizabeth Bentley? Hede Massing? Is it possible he is confusing the Hiss trial with the Rosenberg trial? I’m thinking it’s the last one, since otherwise this story makes little sense …

Watson

I am not a lawyer, but my lawyer friends tell me that all the words are important when it comes to the law.

“When necessarily committed in attempting, by lawful ways and means, to apprehend any person for any felony committed”.

“Necessarily” includes breaking up a snowball fight?

On the 1% mentality, the Police Federation (effectively the British trade union for police officers) is now calling for all officers to be given tasers because of a supposed threat to them by terrorists. What’s the betting if this happens that an increasing number of non-terrorists will be tasered and some of them die as a result?

This “car-toon”, of the sort the youth enjoy, teaches a relevant lesson.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/tom-the-dancing-bug-survival.html

Corey, just to be clear (since my comment wasn’t on this point), when I wrote Even if based on an honest set of beliefs of events, it was reckless to create and post this without including qualifications about what the narrator actually knows and doesn’t know, I was referring to the person who created and posted the video, not to your post. The OP wasn’t reckless at all.

My very limited criticism of it is that, as one is reading it for the first time, one transitions from your personal story to the narrative of New Rochelle without any sense that the New Rochelle narrative is in question. One transitions from your story, to “[l]ast Wednesday a group of kids…were having a snowball fight…. A snowball fight with each other.” For someone reading your post for the first time, this is stated as a fact, in the same tone with which you told the story of your childhood.

It was not until I hit the last paragraph that I understood there might be some question as to what actually happened – and by this point I already had the image of an angry, vicious cop arriving to harass and threaten a group of kids having a snowball fight, all captured on video.

The experience of reading it a second time, or no doubt the experience of reading it after having written it, is different, since one knows there’s more to the story and the post even while one is just at the point where the post transitions from your snowball fight as a kid to the contemporary snowball fight.

As I said, it’s a very limited criticism.

Watson Ladd @ 32

To be clear, I’m suggesting a shift in the view of policing, from ‘recognition that policing is dangerous and acceptance that some cops will be harmed in the course of protecting citizens’, to ‘determination to making policing harm-free to policeman by endangering citizens instead’.

By way of analogy, the avowed trade-off in the legal process is supposed to be to err on the side of not punishing the innocent. Every system has a failure rate, and failing by allowing criminals to walk is better than failing by incarcerating innocent people. Now, before someone objects that the criminal justice system doesn’t seem to work this way, I’m talking about its stated goal, not whether it achieves that goal. Because jailing the innocent is anti-freedom, the goal must be to avoid jailing the innocent.

I’d argue that the public view of policing was once quite similar. The police exist to ‘serve and protect’ the public, and shooting members of the public is antithetical to that purpose. When the system fails, it should fail at the expense of the cop, not at the expense of an innocent party. The system should err on the side of protecting the innocent, even if that endangers the cop. Thus cops don’t pull guns on citizens absent a genuine threat, e.g. The production of a weapon by the citizen. Cops don’t escalate altercations. Cops don’t shoot fleeing strangers. Cops don’t patrol in body armor. Cops don’t carry assault weapons, or drive tanks. Cops effect arrests by knocking on doors, not executing special operations assaults on the citizens behind the doors, because those citizens are innocent until proven guilty, and attacking them with military tactics makes it quite likely they’ll be killed. Cops don’t shoot children in playgrounds within 5 seconds of arriving on the scene.

Somewhere along the way this changed. Was it the language – War on Drugs, anyone? Popular culture, from Dirty Harry on down? Politics, and the need to be seen as tough on crime? When did we decide that, on balance, it is better that an innocent citizen dies than that a cop does? Remember, they’re all innocent until proven guilty – isn’t that supposed to be the rule?

A quick google tells me that in the US around 10 times more people are shot by police than police are shot by people. Here in Australia, the police are armed but guns are rare among ordinary folk (and handguns very rare). The risk of death from police is a tenth of that in the US in the state with the highest rate of police shootings. If it was people shooting police (or fear of this) driving police tactics, then you would expect the police death toll to be higher.

* Or the TOW rocket launcher, for that matter.

USA: police shoot 10 times as many civilians as civilians shoot police.

Australia: Police have guns, civilians mostly don’t.

US state with most police shooting civilians is 10 times as much as Australia?
US state with most civilians shooting police, has 10 times as many police killing civilians as Australia does?

J Thomas

Sorry. It was rather confused.

USA: police shoot 10 times as many “civilians” as civilians shoot police (I dislike the term “civilians”. Police are civilians).

Australia: Police are several times more likely to die at the hands of civilians than civilians at the hands of police.

USA vs Australia: Civilians are 10 times more likely to be shot by police in the US than in the Australian state with the worst record for police shootings.

US vs Australia: Civilians are much more likely to be armed in the US than in Australia. This seems to lead to them being shot more, but not to them shooting back more.

Police are citizens too.

That’s right. Numbers in the ballpark, not to the second decimal place. The worst Australian state for police shootings changes over time. Currently it’s NSW. Victoria Police were notoriously trigger-happy a few years back, but they never came near the US record.

“…an increasing number of non-terrorists will be tasered and some of them die as a result?”

That can’t happen in the U.S., because the attorneys for taser make certain that the cause of death is some medical condition which already existed in the recently-deceased.