Something doesn't add up

It is kind of astonishing that the mainstream media keep changing their messaging to fit the circumstances (not to better reflect the reality of the facts). We had another officer shooting last night.

So far the protests have been explicitly about BLM and systemic racism, etc. The head of the local NAACP was making all sorts of claims not supported by the actual empirical data and was never corrected by the interviewer. It is completely about white racism.

But in Atlanta, site of the most recent tragic shooting of a civilian resisting arrest and firing a stun gun at an officer after having been found passed out from drink in a drive through line, the messaging is subtly different. From Details of Shooting in Atlanta Fuel Debate on Police Use of Force. A careful headline but that is not how the media is presenting it. It is white racism.

The challenge is:

Atlanta is majority black

The Atlanta Police Department is majority black

The APD has historically been led by black Police Chiefs

The City Council is majority black

APD has invested in deescalation training and similar approaches

Atlanta has a very lenient catch-and-release system

APD has not demonstrated any pattern of racial bias between and among officers and the public

This can be seen as a a use of force issue. Possibly. If you close you eyes.

Police dashboard and body-camera videos show that Mr. Brooks was compliant and friendly with the officers when they first approached him and for some time after that, and the encounter turned to a struggle when the officers tried to handcuff him.

It does show that, emphasizing the tragedy of all this. Another life lost which should not have been.

But the NYT needs to lose the passive voice. "The encounter" did not turn "to a struggle" on its own. The police moved to handcuff him and he resisted arrest. All three collapsed to the ground where they continued a struggle for control. Brooks is clearly holding his own. It is sufficiently violent a struggle that both officers have their vest cameras knocked loose.

At some point Brooks gains control of the stun gun from one of the officers and breaks free. As he flees, he turns and fires the stun gun at the pursuing officer who is not the one who lost the stun gun. Does the officer know he is being fired at by stun gun rather than a gun? Who knows?

Justified? Who knows? We do not need to know yet. Officer has been fired. Awaiting possible charges. Chief of Police resigned. And we do not have near the full facts. But is this really a race issue? It hardly seems so. But the media and politicians are fully committed to forcing it to be one.

Police training is an issue. Police policies are an issue. Civilians fighting with arresting police are an issue.

By trying to force fit this into a 1960 moral mould, we just prevent ourselves from coming up with possibly real solutions. All because of a lazy media and power hungry politicians.

Our citizens deserve better.

UPDATE: And the other mitigating factor I should have mentioned - Atlanta has a system similar to CompStat. All systems can be gamed, but the Atlanta system works on civilian reports weighted by obvious factors. Physical assault crimes take precedence over property crime. Property crime takes precedence over ordinance infractions. Ordinance infractions take precedence over quality-of-life crimes. All that makes sense. In addition, the temporal urgency takes precedence. A crime happening now is more important than one that is suspected to happen. Suspected to happen crimes take precedence over past crimes.

Complex algorithms that embed commonsense assumptions. The upshot, though, is that the results are used by APD to spot trends and are constantly shifting police resources between zones and beats as the trends warrant.

The main point, though, is that the police are distributed based on empirical data generated from civilian reports. Ultimately, if one part of town is more heavily policed than another, it is because in that part of town are reporting a higher volume of more serious crimes.

As most people would agree should be the case.

And it takes one past source of friction out of policing. APD did not target or electively harass Brooks. They were called by civilians to address a potentially dangerous situation.

The tragedy remains, but as long as we are telling ourselves fictional stories about what is happening, we won't make much progress making things better.