The new version of speaking truth to power ....

 Whatever you do, don't dare to speak the truth about tragic events.

"We will never hear the last of these names. Eric Garner. Alton Sterling. Michael Brown. George Floyd. Rashad Brooks.

"And now Daunte Wright.

"We will never hear the last of them because there will always be more. And because certain people are invested in forcing us to hear about them.

But what they demand we hear isn’t the truth.


"Is it a tragedy that Daunte Wright is dead? Of course it is. Should he have been shot dead on Sunday by a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer? Why, no, he shouldn’t have been."

https://spectator.org/daunte-wright-shooting/

Right Place Right Time

 For 3 years wearing the badge, I wanted every day to be at the right place at the right time. This is a cool read. A few times I was. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/right-place-right-time-georgia-motorcycle-cop-finds-choking-teen-performs-heimlich-saves-life_3577321.html

Links on Police and Race

the-facts-on-race-crime-and-policing-in-america

Abstract:

This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force –officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice-column/3235072001/

If a genuine horror takes place, such as the death of George Floyd, there is no effort whatsoever to remind us how statistically rare such incidents may be. Of all black homicide victims last year, only 0.2 percent of them were unarmed victims of police. In Chicago last year there were 492 homicides and only three of them involved police.

https://nypost.com/2020/06/13/in-defense-of-america-not-a-failed-experiment-but-an-always-improving-one/

Budget Problems, Engagement First on the Chopping Block

800-900 officers, a budget of 193 million, and 80% of that is salaries and benefits. And this city does not have a "large" police department relative to other similarly sized cities. Now the Wuhan flu costs come calling.

To preserve the ability to respond to 911 calls, they seem likely to cancel the community engagement and outreach programs. No wonder nobody smart would want to be a mayor.
"MPD insiders say this will likely involve scaling back or disbanding the procedural justice and community engagement units, as well as the PAL program — which runs youth sports teams across the city — in order to preserve a more essential function: responding to 911 calls. If those units do fold, most of those officers would likely go back to patrolling the streets, joining school resource officers, who returned to working out of a squad car after the department lost its contract to work in city schools.

https://www.startribune.com/cost-of-deep-police-cutbacks-comes-into-sharp-view/571730462/?refresh=true