What ethnic group is most likely to be a Police officer that kills someone in the USA?
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? Sorry but âthose of mixed bloodâ comprises most all indigenous people in all of N/S America. Genetically there are very few âfull-blooded nativesâ at all, anywhere in N/S America excepting tribes numbering collectively only in the tens of thousands of individuals.
In places further west or with geographic features that allowed groups to remain isolated there are populations with larger percentages of peoples with predominantly indigenous genetic heritage who identify with & live within indigenous culture, but full-blooded? No.
Certainly few persons wholly of these Andean or Amazonian tribes are among the immigrants in question in North America. If you want to talk to a âfull blooded nativeâ these days, you would want to go to Bolivia, and they would probably speak Jivaroan as one of the largest populations of cultural isolates are the Achuar.
Everyone else is widely intermingled, everywhere, in many ways.
edit- Sorry not Bolivia, travel to Peru or Ecuador for the Achuar
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Not a lot of this matters to the original thread topic, but itâs good IMO to have a grounded view of indigenous populations which reflects the enormity of colonial effects.
Itâs good in many ways, not the least of which is disabusing the arguments of privilege when your local politician starts rambling on about how the government does too much for indigenous peoples. That happens here a lot.
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And by using that phrase you have tipped your hand once again. Only someone in denial about the blame the South takes for the Civil War would use that phrase, a phrase that implies it was all the Unionâs fault, and everything would have just been peachy if the Confederacy were left alone.
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That still doesnât explain things, if you look at the various statistics. For example, with African Americans, theyâre far more likely to be shot by the police while unarmed than other populations, theyâre far more likely to be killed in their interactions with the police than other populations, etc.
That is racism, though. Thatâs pretty much the definition of institutional racism, in fact. We have racist institutions that have biased interactions with specific populations that lead to negative outcomes with some consistency.
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Well I have been mainly to touristy areas. However I did get a peek at the real Mexico. I went to the Tulum ruins and talked with the guide some. Part of his speech welcoming us was to thank us for coming and to tell our friends to visit the history. But thanks to tours like this the town he grew up in now has running water and toilets and schools and other things we take for granted.
Then in Cozumel, one of our friends we were with is originally from Argentina, but her parents live in Cozumel, so we took a taxi out to visit. They live in and OK area, but we went through some real slums to get there. All very close to the main tourist areas which are as nice as Vegas or some similar place. We talked to her parents about differences. He said crime was bad around there, but that the tourists had nothing to worry about because, in his words, âThey know their place and they know if the tourists go no one will have anything worth robbing.â
Like all the houses in the area they had a small court yard with bits of glass stuck in the top borders to keep people from climbing them (and perhaps chupracabras).
We think the police are bad here, basically anything over a speeding ticket is going to require a bribe to the police or they throw the book at you. Their son got in a wreck and they claimed he was drinking, when he wasnât, it was just a wet road he took too fast, and they had to bribe them to make it go away.
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I am not going to argue what is and isnât racism. The problem is we all discriminate based on race, often subconsciously. I donât consider that to fit the definition of racism (the believe one race is superior over another), but it is discrimination. But even minorities have these same biases against each other. So how are they being racists against their own race? They arenât they are being biased and discriminatory.
I think it is two issues. I think there are real racists cops who donât care and are quick to use violence. I also think the average cop who has no outward racist views is primed against blacks and minorities. That they are going to cause them harm. While I am not a psychologist, I have been reading on how the mind works and priming has a lot of power over how the mind perceives something. If you are primed that this stop is going to be likely hostile, then a phone or brush is going to look like a gun to you for a split second which might cause you to take deadly action.
We all do this. Ever pull out in front of someone even though you looked both way? I had this happen on a residential street I used to go on several times a day. Almost no one is ever driving the other. I remember looking and saw nothing, but when I started to turn I got a horn. Holy cow. My brain expected to see nothing and nothing is what I saw.
In firearms safety we tell people to physically put a finger in the barrel/chamber opening and feel for a bullet when making a gun safe and empty. The reason is the extractor doesnât always work, and when people are primed to see an empty gun, in their haste they can be looking at a bullet still in the chamber and not see it.
When you read about this and other things like how plastic our memory is, it is some scary stuff.
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Iranian Air Flight 655. The entire crew of USS Vincennes expected to be attacked after the events of day before, saw a radar blip with military transponder code that was descending (the instruments were showing civilian transponder that was ascending), cross check against flight schedules shown no match (no wonder when the flight was delayed), and the rest is history of operator fallibility.
Humans in control loops are a very double-edged blade.
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Though the USS Vincennes was clearly at fault for this disaster, then Vice-President George H. W. Bush said, regarding the disaster:
âI will never apologize for the United States â I donât care what the facts are⌠Iâm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.â
Staggering.
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Tough to pin the blame squarely here. Here it was a lot about the instrument design colliding with the operator psychology. Blame the operators, which is tempting, and youâll get the same happening to a different crew.
Tribalistic. My tribe uber alles. The message was not aimed outwards, but inwards, to his core electorate who appreciates such jingoism. Same as various blustering claims of other leaders.
Donât do it, and voila, youâre âweakâ.
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It seems pretty open-and-shut to me. While itâs true the flight crew should have heard transmissions on civilian frequencies, the operators on the USS Vincennes had tables of civilian flights for just this sort of circumstance. They fucked up the time zone in the table and incorrectly assumed it couldnât be civilian, even though they traced the flight to originating at an airport that served both civilian and military interests (And that could have been another mitigating circumstance, but it warranted extra attention for sure).
Donât get me wrongâthereâs plenty of blame to go around, almost always in a case like this. This one thoughâŚitâs pretty clear our guys fucked up.
You linked it already, but I will again, and I encourage anyone curious to check it out.
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The correct term is pre-Columbian Americans. Amerindians is also correct although of faulty origin. First Nations is incorrect because these nations werenât the first ones in the Americas. They are thousands of years removed from the original inhabitants. Native Americans is wrong because anyone born on America is a native American. I donât accept changing the language to suit peopleâs political prejudices.
And thatâs why air crash investigations donât stop at âpilot errorâ but go further, to how the pilots and crews are trained and handled.
Iâd say that not much of the blame goes to the shipâs crew and the majority, the rest, goes to the US military as a whole including the ship system UI designers and those who set up the procedures. Hopefully there was a major set of lessons learned.
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⌠which is effectively the same as saying no one is to blame.
Do you take the same approach in criminal cases?
" âŚnot much of the blame goes to the murderer and the majority, the rest, goes to the country as a whole including the health system designers and those who set up the procedures âŚ"
In which case, you must be firmly against the death penalty.
What do you value more - assigning blame and punishment and being done with it, or addressing the causal factors that often go way beyond the obvious factors?
Pretty much yes. Nonsensically long penalties that e.g. the US seems to love have little deterring effect. And nobody seems to want to address the real causes. Instead blame gets assigned to some sacrificial pawns down the totem pole, and the system goes on unchanged.
Iâd suggest keeping it as an option that the convict can choose. Otherwise I am rather wary of it.
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What do you value more âŚ
Both, since it depends on the circumstances.
It seems pretty clear the Vincennes was waaaaay down the left end of that diagram.
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Is it an intention when you really believe you see what you think you see? The vessel was under attack the day before and there were casualties.
So you got a crew that was psyched out, expecting the worst, and seeing what they thought they are seeing in a crowd psychosis way.
If you think this is unlikely, you (and apparently the ship systemsâ designers) have unrealistic expectations about humans.
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Somewhat obviously; yes it is. Itâs not like Seaman Staines tripped over and accidently bumped into the comically large red DO NOT PRESS button.
You mean ⌠they were trained sailors? ⌠on the HIGHEST tech warship in the world? ⌠in international waters? ⌠under an airspace criss-crossed with civilian traffic? ⌠and they couldnât cope with something that happened yesterday?
No, youâve got a failure of command, compounded to a minor degree by poor design.
So, sure, fix the design aspects. But donât forget to get the mallet out and give the crew a bollocking. At least donât give them medals for it, FFS.
They later admitted that they were in Iranian waters at the time of the incident.
ETA - (Which makes it worse, obvs.)
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