mekka okereke :verified:
The manhunt for the United Healthcare shooter demonstrates something that I've tried to explain many times over the years, and that data shows is true: increasing police presence in a Black neighbourhood, usually *increases* the murder rate in that neighbourhood.🙂🙃
Wait... What?!
Yes. Seriously.
1/N
mekka okereke :verified:
Because cop shows have been lying to you all these years. CSI is a lie. Even Agatha Christie, Poirot, Columbo, all lies. That's not how murders get solved.
How murders really get solved: someone tells the cops everything: the killer, the motive, the weapon. All the CSI is just to verify the story.🤷🏿♂️
2/N
mekka okereke :verified:
If no one will talk to you? You. Can't. Solve. Murders.
NYPD budget is ~$11B a year. Larger than Ukraine's military budget was before Russia invaded. Not a typo.
NYPD has 36,000 uniformed officers and 20,000 civilian employees.
Doesn't matter.
3/N
mekka okereke :verified:
Black people don't call the cops. Black people don't talk to the cops.
So any crime with a large number of eye witnesses, is easier to get away with *if all of the witnesses are Black* 🤯
Black folk don't call the cops, because no matter why they were called, they mess with us when they show up.🙂🙃
4/N
mekka okereke :verified:
I don't get messed with more than the average US Black man. I almost certainly get messed with less frequently.🙂🙃
I just tell y'all about it when it happens to me.🤷🏿♂️
I am not unique.
Guess what percent of Black men have been the victim of police violence? Guess what percent have been threatened?
5/N
mekka okereke :verified:
They are still looking for this United Healthcare shooter, because the CEO was a white billionaire. That's at least a small comfort for the loved ones he left behind?
If he had been poor and Black, they probably would have moved on to the next case already.🤷🏿♂️
6/N
mekka okereke :verified:
People that kill a Black victim have more than 50% chance of getting away with it. Some places it's more than 80%.
The homicide clearance rate is lowest in places where Black people are the most afraid of calling the police.🤯
Name a city with brutal cops that don't care. I'll name a murder-y city.
7/N
mekka okereke :verified:
Something that has been shown to consistently and effectively reduce the murder rate in a city, is reducing police brutality, over-policing, and abuses like asset forfeiture.
This has worked in LA. East Palo Alto. Pomona. New Orleans. Etc.
Now ask yourself why we don't do this everywhere.
8/N
mekka okereke :verified:
One last thing you should be asking yourself:
"OK, I think I see how increasing police brutality, causes people to trust the cops less. But why does increasing the police presence in a neighborhood almost always mean a big increase in the amount of abuse that Black folk experience?"
Good question🤷🏿♂️
9/N
mekka okereke :verified:
Police don't do what you think they do.🤷🏿♂️
Most of what police do, by time, by arrests, by budget, is stop, search, ticket, and arrest people. The people they do this to, are overwhelmingly Black.
By default, more police in a neighborhood, means more policing in a neighborhood.
This is policing.
10/N
mekka okereke :verified:
And this is the so called "good" policing!
We haven't even talked about asset forfeiture, false arrest, beating, shooting, choke holds, unlawful search, etc.
Adding 100 more officers to a Black neighborhood, without intentional effort to tell those police *not to police*, decreases Black trust. 🙂🙃
12/N
mekka okereke :verified:
So, if more cops in Black neighbourhoods usually increases the murder rate...
because more cops means more cop violence, abuse, and money being stolen (asset forfeiture) from poor Black folk,
Then what decreases the murder rate?
We've known for at least 40 years. And it doesn't cost $11B a year.🤷🏿♂️
13/N
mekka okereke :verified:
Your city is not more racist than Boston in the 80s.
Not more violent than Boston in the 80s.
Your cops are not more brutal than Boston cops in the 80s.
And this worked there.
Call it "Operation Ceasefire" if you want. Or call it "I dunno... have we tried brutalizing Black men *slightly* less?"
14/N
mekka okereke :verified:
Biden's, Reagan's and Nixon's approach is: "over-police and abuse 40M Black folk and lock up 2M, most of whom are objectively innocent. Steal $60B from them, keeping them in poverty, and still don't solve any murders or thefts🤡"
The better approach is: "All the violence is done by under 300 people."
A policing strategy that says, "Treat all white people like Jeffrey Dahmer" would clearly be foolish. But one that says "Treat all Black men like Nate Boone Craft," is the status quo. 🙂🙃
15/N
mekka okereke :verified:
And yes, Boone Craft had twice as many victims as Dahmer. That we know of.
Anyway, here's a documentary on Operation Ceasefire, and what really works for reducing the murder rate. Content Warning, this documentary involves detailed descriptions of real cases. (Black people, don't watch this. You already know all of this stuff. There is no learning for you here. Only pain.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CuKHAVqm1Gw
16/16
mekka okereke :verified:
The flip side of this, is that police used to "solve" a much higher percentage of murders back before DNA evidence. Because they would just grab any Black person and blame the crime on them.
The introduction of DNA evidence, is used by the Innocence Project, to overturn a bunch of false convictions. Most of those false convictions, involve Black people.
https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-states/
Carolyn
@mekkaokereke CBC had an amazing series about some of the country's most prominent murder cases, most in the series being cases that set new precedent, such as the beginning of DNA in the use of solving cases. Some murders take years, some decades to solve, and it's almost always reintroducing the case to the public to see if it triggered a memory from someone who could help. Someone would come forward with new info and it caused a chain reaction to solve the case. DNA was a huge development..
Carolyn
@mekkaokereke ...but you need someone to match the DNA with.
The show mixes interviews with the actual detectives with re-enactments to help with the story-telling process. I highly recommend it to anyone who would like insight into how these things are actually solved. It's persistence, asking the right questions, finding the witnesses...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Detectives_(2018_TV_series)
Carolyn
@mekkaokereke In one of the cases, the detective knew who committed the crime but couldn't prove it. Years later, he heard about DNA technology and it changed everything. So tech is helping to solve cases, but it usually needs all the grunt work.
0xC0DEC0DE07E8
@mekkaokereke since Dragnet they’ve all been self-serving lies
Chris L
@futurebird @mekkaokereke me too (thankful you got away).
myrmepropagandist
I eventually found a way to get rid of the car parked on the sidewalk. It was also blocking a fire hydrant. So I sent photos to the FDNY. And they got the cops to stop doing that.
Asking them didn't work so they started showing up during games with the engine for "testing"
FDNY HATES blocked hydrants cares not who is doing it.
I made myself scarce since I was worried that cop would put together I was who told them.
myrmepropagandist
I sincerely think if I'd been a white lady he would have just said "well get to it" (then not done anything)
It was obvious he was trying to goad me into yelling back at him or touching him. Like REALLY obvious.
I remember making mental note of a security camera on a garage and then continuing being polite until I could walk away.
He told me that the car had to be parked there "to prevent a terrorist from blowing up the stadium"
I kid you not.
Just thankful I got away.
myrmepropagandist
I've been threatened by a cop. Because I told him about an illegally parked car (it was on the sidewalk killing part of our community garden, parked for a yankees game)
I shouldn't have to explain this, but if it matters: I was very polite.
He jabbed his finger in my face yelling at the top of his lungs.
You see I didn't realize that it was one of his friend's car.
But he could have just brushed me off and not done anything. NO. He flipped out on me.
It was terrifying.
Rich Felker
Demian
@mekkaokereke these successes seem so rare and most police departments seem to aggressively oppose such reforms/approaches. It’s made me much more sympathetic to an abolitionist position or at least defunding and more drastic accountability and shifting responsibilities to non-police groups. Really need to get gov leaders to step away from this adversarial and racist tough on crime approach that dumps money into rogue PDs while starving rest of city
ploum
@mekkaokereke : David Graeber wrote that policemen’s job is not to prevent violence. It is to write a report after the violence happened.
mekka okereke :verified:
Being a cop is objectively not a dangerous job. Pretending that it is, is part of the lie of copaganda.
Recently, most cops that die in the line of duty, die of Covid, because they refuse to take the vaccine.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109767886367905669
I refuse to pretend that a cop who dies doing their job, is somehow more noble or sacrificial than a landscaper who dies doing their job, or a teacher who dies doing their job, or a fisherman who dies doing their job.
Service is service.
Jacob Christian Munch-Andersen
@futurebird @mekkaokereke It is stories like these that make me wonder about the exact stories behind all those cops killed "in the line of service". What exactly is the ratio between cops that go down fighting an active terrorist, and cops that mismanage a benign situation so badly that they manage to trigger a fight or flight response in someone who happened to have a gun?
mekka okereke :verified:
Lumberjack or arborist is a truly dangerous job. However dangerous you think it is, it is more dangerous than that.
Arborists are disproportionately white, and disproportionately male. They are mostly not from a wealthy background. Many are from Washington State, a very white place, with a very racist history.
The majority of white people in Washington State vote *against* racism.♥️👍🏿
Any death in service of others is sad to me.
Tribute video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v4NNNZjMcV0
mekka okereke :verified:
After almost every major storm in the US, power service is interrupted. People don't have electricity. People want electricity restored as quickly as possible.
Sometimes power can't be restored because a tree has fallen on a transformer or power line. The tree is "hanger" which can be extremely dangerous. It must be removed.
No US state has enough arborists to handle this surge in storm work. So there are crews of arborists who fly around the country ahead of storms♥️.
mekka okereke :verified:
After a storm, when my power goes out, I pick up my phone and complain to the power company. If they say it may take 24 hrs to restore, I roll my eyes and go "ugh!" The power company might even go so far as to talk about "felled trees."
People die getting my power back on.
You will never convince me that the death of a white man from Washington, whose name I do not know, who knew how dangerous his job was, who flew to California to turn my power back on, is less noble
lkngrrr
@mekkaokereke @NohatCoder @futurebird Yup.
You see a couple of Asplundh trucks headed your way, you fill up a cooler with ice because you’re about to ride one out.
Jacob Christian Munch-Andersen
@mekkaokereke @futurebird Yes, but I still think it is worth taking a closer look at the deaths that do happen. Especially because violence begets violence, and I'd wager that the situations where cops get shot look a lot like the situations where civilians get shot.
Having some statistical and anecdotal evidence that keeping their gun holstered and being nice to people is actually a really good safety measure for cops, would be nice.
Bishop Whitewind
@mekkaokereke "rap snitches telling all their business, show up to court and be their own star witness"
I'll see myself out.
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