Thank BLM for police body cameras

It is, of course, 10 years since Saint Michael Brown met his untimely end at the hands of a racist police officer, which kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement. Brown's situation was immortalized in the chant "Hands up, don't shoot!", at least until the court case revealed that this was not actually supported by the evidence, but at least BLM secured a few million dollar mansions for its Marxist organizers.

Still, people will believe what they want to believe, and court transcripts are notoriously hard to parse accurately. One frequently heard theme from officials coming out of these events is wanting actual body camera footage. This was pretty hard to argue with - it's not cheap to run a body cam recording services for a police department, but in terms of saving court time (one way or the other) it would be a clear win. So most police departments install both dashcams and body cams. The BLM folks celebrate, as it brings indisputable evidence of the police racism they claim. Right?

Try searching YouTube for police bodycam footage. You end up with an awful lot of footage where the perp / perps are a) black, b) violent, c) mouthy even when arrested, and d) arrested by police officers whose patience would have impressed Job himself. Ladies involved in shoplifting Walmart and Target are particularly egregious examples of this, by the way. I do particularly enjoy their almost universal use of "I can't breathe!" when being cuffed, along with Don't touch me!" when the officer tries to start the arrest process.

Certainly, there's selection bias - bodycams from fatal shootings with police liability don't make it onto these channels. However, they are still accessible elsewhere - and the bodycams make it very difficult for the police to escape accountability.

Conversely, there are at least as many horrible examples of police coming onto a scene, looking to aid injured parties, and being fatally shot themselves, so one would have to conclude that an awful lot of black receipients of police "violence" really brought it on themselves.

I wonder whether BLM fell into the trap of believing their own propaganda. Modern police bodycams generally suggest that an awful lot of black arrestees are very lucky not to have got the living crap beat out of them, and modern police tolerance for them is way too high, if anything.

Kyle Rittenhouse's "Acquitted" - a review

Kyle Rittenhouse's book "Acquitted" is, obviously, a Rorschach test. You look in to it, and you read what you want to take from it. There are those who call him a "white supremacist killer", and others who call him a vigilante - sometimes approvingly, sometimes not.

The book itself is apparently self-published, with author and journalist Michael Quinn Sullivan being the co-author; in this kind of collaboration, the risk is always that the voice of the author is lost, or alternatively the co-author doesn't supply enough direction and the book wanders everywhere. Thankfully, the book avoids that trap. It's not a doorstop (only 118 pages), and the line formatting is, frankly, terrible, but it's very readable and packs a lot in.

The first nine chapters - leading up to chapter ten which starts the events of August 25th, 2020 - are an interesting, and at times sad, view into Kyle's childhood and teenage years. His family was quite dysfunctional, with a drugs-and-women depedent father, whom he has subsequently cut out of his life, and a loving mother who nevertheless was terrible with money. Kyle and his two sisters moved around houses a lot, didn't do very well at school given all the disruption, and he recognizes that he was well on the way to delinquency. It was the police cadets at school, and in particular the male role models he found there, which brought him back (mostly) to the straight and narrow, with a new determination to train as an EMT/firefighter. He qualified as a lifeguard, and was working that job in Kenosha when "Saint" George Floyd expired in Minneapolis and the BLM riots started, eventually spreading to that town in August.

Of the riots themselves, he describes being in town the day after the first riot, and seeing both the destruction wrought, and the way that white and black citizens got together in determination to clean up and repair that destruction. He and his friend lent their efforts to the clean-up, but everyone was aware that the riots might well restart that night, so he volunteered to stand guard at a car shop, equipped both with his rifle (legally held) and his EMT kit.

Then the riots kicked off, violent thugs ran around burning and breaking the city, and at some point Kyle was chased into a dead end by Rosenbaum, who grabbed for his rifle...

There's a joke going around Twitter that "Kyle Rittenhouse fired at three random liberals, and two of them were pedophiles." The truth is a bit more nuanced, but Rosenbaum certainly had a record of sex offending against minors, along with a lot of violence, and Huber was a repeat domestic abuser, also with violence. Grosskreutz, the sole survivor, had a list of lower-level offences. Certainly, it seems clear that the two fatalities from Kyle's shooting were not individuals for whom society should particularly mourn.

Nevertheless, Kyle's reflections on his actions that night were interesting. He certainly doesn't celebrate them - he says that he wishes that night had never happened, and with everything that followed it's hard to be sceptical about that wish. In more detail, he wishes he hadn't chosen to go to Kenosha that night - but given that he did, he doesn't regret bringing the rifle. He points out that given the level of violence threatened and demonstrated towards him and others that night, the rifle likely saved his life - from Rosenbaum's likely violence with him cornered, by stopping Huber from beating him any more around the head with his skateboard, leading to head injury and long-term headaches, and probably Grosskreutz by preventing him from firing the (illegally conceal-carried) pistol he pointed at Kyle.

Interestingly, he also regrets a number of the things he said and did after being released from jail on bail, during trial prep and during the trial itself. Some he details, some he alludes to, but in particular he reflects on his naivety with regards to all the grifting that happened around his case, and how his situation was presented in wildly different ways across the media. In particular, he strongly resents Joe Biden whose PR campaign adverts presented Kyle's case in a very different way to the actual facts.

A few people and organizations come out with a lot of credit. The juvenile detention organization, which held him for just short of 10 weeks, bent over backwards to support him, give good advice and guidance, and keep him safe. Things started to get dangerous when inmates came in who had heard about Kyle's case, and the threats started. By the time he was transferred to adult jail in Kenosha, there were already outside organizations briefing inbound prisoners on Kyle, with the clear implication to cause him physical harm. An additional three weeks in effective solitary confinement in the Kenosha jail was even less fun, though again the guards were professional and kept him safe.

Mark Richards, the lead defense counsel in Kyle's case, seems to be a remarkable man, and one of the few lawyers whom I think I could respect. He agreed to write the foreword in Kyle's book, and unlike many other forewords, this is very worth reading. In particular, he notes:

Kyle is 1 of only 3 clients I have represented in a murder case where I personally believed the individual was truly not guilty of what he was charged. [my italics]

Kyle clearly admires Richards, describing him as an incredibly focused man, unafraid to be blunt with his client, a hard taskmaster in trial preparation, and frequently calling out Kyle on his bad judgements. Corey Chirafisi, co-counsel, was also greatly valued by Kyle; as a former prosecutor, his practice court sessions quickly showed Kyle how to present himself in court, how to avoid being tripped up too often, and warn him about different strategies the prosecution could use to elicit damaging testimony from him. Crucially, Kyle described the subsequent trial as holding "no surprises".

The defense team was not pro bono; Kyle was fortunate that his case had caught enough media attention, and that the available facts e.g. from the videos that night, seemed to corroborate his case. A substantial defense fund was raised, and spent, in addition to the $2 million in bail that Kyle was required to raise before being released. Donors from all across the country effectively prevented Kyle from being railroaded into a multi-decade jail sentence. One wonders how many others without such support have not been so lucky.

The prosecution lead, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger, no doubt wishes he'd never taken this case to prosecute. I didn't realize at the time, but Kyle (presumably from Mark Richards' observations) noted that the District Attorney had passed on the case - and likely because it quickly became clear that there was a lot of photographic, video and then forensic evidence on Kyle's side. Binger is infamous in the trial coverage as having a strip torn off him by the judge when he repeatedly tried to introduce Kyle's use of his right to silence - which is a big no-no. Kyle clearly doesn't like Binger, which is no surprise, and takes some relish in pointing out that none of the prosecution witnesses helped Binger's case, and some actively helped Kyle.

The rest is history. Kyle did okay on the stand, Richards and Chirafisi did a rock-solid presentation of the defense facts and argument, the jury came back after four long days with unanimous "not guilty" verdicts.

The ending is fairly bittersweet. Kyle has won his case, and has his freedom, but is unable to take up his desired career (EMS/firefighter) for the forseeable future, until his notoriety reduces. There are still civil cases pending from the families of the people he shot, so the remaining money his case raised will probably be eaten up by defending those. He still has panic attacks from the night, but has a support dog Milo who helps him with this. He has started a job as a entry-level political consultant, which I guess isn't a bad choice given the experience he has had with politics - on both sides.

"Acquitted" is available on Kindle from Amazon, and from rittenhousebook.com in paperback. If you care about the American justice system, and the truth, it's worth your time to read.

Evanston - an inadvertent experiment in racial math

Hat tip for this to @DanProft on Twitter:

AP Calculus at Evanston Township H.S.

"...the course is restricted to students who identify as Black, all genders."

"...the course is restricted to students who identify as Latinx, all genders."

Neo-segregation is the absurdity of identitarianism taken to its logical end. pic.twitter.com/Jo8I9yzZCa

— Dan Proft (@DanProft) April 30, 2023

Note: I'll be giving references throughout these blog posts, but I have high confidence that they will soon be wiped out, so I'm preserving as much relevant text as possible.

Evanston Township high school in Illinois (1600 Dodge Avenue, Evanston, Illinois, 60201), is in the suburbs of Chicago, about 7 miles north of Chicago city center. It has just achieved notoriety by racially segregating its math classes. For background, Evanston's population demographics are 16.1% Black, 11% Hispanic or Latino - not far off the USA average.

In case you think I'm indulging in hyperbole, here is the curriculum:

• AP Calculus AB - MA0515: Students will study the equivalent of one semester of college calculus... This code for the course is restricted to students who identify as Black, all genders
• AP Calculus AB - MA0555: Students will study the equivalent of one semester of college calculus... [No racial restriction]
• AP Calculus AB - MA0565: Students will study the equivalent of one semester of college calculus... This code for the course is restricted to students who identify as Latinx, all genders.

The same pattern is repeated for the Pre-Calculus course, which is a precursor to AP Calculus, and in the case of Latinx for 2 Algebra, which is the precursor for Pre-Calculus.

Note: I looked at the Science courses, and they did not have any kind of racial restriction.

Some background: the "AP" classes are usually taken at ages 16-18, though can theoretically be taken any time in the four years of high school. They are 1 year long, have a well-defined national curriculum, and culminate in an exam which is marked completely separately from the coursework and other scoring for the class; so, for a 1 year AP course you get a regular grade (0.0 to 4.0, approximately, higher being better) and also the final exam grade (integers 1 to 5, 5 being best). You could in theory get a 1.0 in class (terrible) and 5 in final exam (amazing) - or 4.0 in class (great!) and 1 in final exam (did you even spell your name correctly?). They are notorious, especially in mathematics topics, for needing coaching to do well.

In UK terms, AP Calculus AB is something around A-level Mathematics. The separate course AP Calculus BC - which is offered here but not racially segregated is more like A-level Further Mathematics, and only for hard-core nerds.

The obvious question: why is the school doing this, and what are the implications?

A tempting answer is: "to cheat!" Why else would you split out by race? You give the Latinx and Black students a teacher who marks easy, say about +1.0 on the curve, and the rest of the students a teacher who marks hard, say -0.5 on the curve. That way, a Latinx student who is actually 1 whole grade point behind a white/Asian student, would show up in final results as 0.5 points ahead, and therefore tempting material for a college recruitment.

Problem! The AP final exam is hard to cheat on. All students in the school should be taking it at the same time, under the same conditions, and probably in the same room. It would be very hard - though not impossible - to give the Black/Latinx students an advantage by writing down or correcting answers. If a school took this route, it would show up for any sample size other than tiny, by the white/Asian students having much higher final AP exam scores than their course grades would predict, relevant to Black/Latinx.

What I think might be going on instead: the school assigns the Black/Latinx classes their best teacher in the area, and a time-serving loser for the white/Asian class. This will muddy the waters in the scoring differentials. With a good teacher, Black/Latinx will achieve their maximum potential in both class and final exam, whereas white/Asians will depend heavily on external coaching - or high innate ability - to do well, since the teacher is useless. And, as an explanation for why they're not doing it for AP Calculus BC, they probably only have one teacher who can lead this subject, and in any case lots of external parental help / tuition ends up being important, which Black/Latinx students are less likely to get in any case.

Short version: in my opinion, this school wants to boost Black/Latinx student achievement in mid-level math, at the expense of white/Asian students. If you're one of the latter, consider identifying as Black.

I'm really looking forward to how this experiment works out, and I sincerely hope that legal action doesn't kill this segregation - as it well might - because getting this relative performance data would be fascinating.

Elon Musks' employees might be racist

A Happy New Year to all my occasional readers! May your 2022 be less fucked-up than your 2021, which is probably the best we can hope for.

I was inspired to put pen to... LCD? whatever... reading a breathless Los Angeles Times article on racism and discrimination at Tesla's Fremont, California plant:

4:05 p.m. Feb. 12, 2022: An earlier version of this article said that at least 167 racial and sexual harassment suits were filed against Tesla since 2006. At least 160 worker lawsuits were filed over various grievances, not just harassment.

Oh, sorry, that was an article correction. I'm sure that most of the 160 lawsuits were about racism and sexism. Many, at least. Some, for sure. I wonder why they didn't give a more specific breakdown?

Anyway, let's get on to the meat of the allegations from California's (government) civil rights agency, who are clearly in no influenced by Tesla's move from California to Texas that will take billions of dollars out of their income:

Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges.
Only Black workers had to scrub floors on their hands and knees, and they were relegated to the Fremont, Calif., factory’s most difficult physical jobs, the suit states.
Graffiti — including “KKK,” “Go back to Africa,” the hangman’s noose, the Confederate Flag and “F-- [N-word]” — were carved into restroom walls, workplace benches and lunch tables and were slow to be erased, the lawsuit says.

Ooohkayyy... Let me show you where this factory is located:

It's squarely in the Bay Area, which is one of the most liberal areas known to man persons. It's just down the road from Oakload, which is heavily Black. If this behavior was really happening at the scale indicated, I would fully expect mobs from Oakland to come and burn down the factory - while mobs from San Jose and San Francisco with artificially colored hair paraded cleverly-worded signs outside.

This claim is almost certainly massively exaggerated bullshit, based on a few events. I mean, the Confederate Flag? If you ever flew it here, your house and car would be burned down in short order. But, and here's the kicker, it might contain a kernel of truth.

Thing is, these "triggering events" aren't coming from the well-established white supremacists in the Bay Area (either of them). They're coming from the near-minimum wage factory worker class - and, to no-one's surprise, this is dominated by recent immigrants: Very few of whom are in any way white.

The dirty secret which the California civil rights agency skirts around is, and this goes back to Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird", practical racism mostly happens around the same strata in society. The Ewells were racist - eventually, fatally so - to Tom Robinson because he was only one rung below them in society - a hard-working black man, not far off from doing better than the wastrel crackers who formed the Ewells. Things have not changed much in 60 years.

The relevant strata of society in the case of Tesla - and any other manufacturing company in the Bay Area - is recent immigrants in manual labour, earning not much above the minimum wage. There is strenuous competition for these jobs, and indeed for the positions just above them that have more security and better prospects. As such, you tend to see the various communities form "views" on the other communities. And, unfortunate as it might be, African-Americans are seen as the least hard workers and least dependable.

From reported experience in major cities, in both USA and Canada, newly immigrated Hispanics and East Asian Americans tend to be reasonably coherent groups, with intra-group solidarity (if you were Manuel Labor on the factory floor, you'd support Javi in his attempt to get a full-time position because he's "one of you", you'd grudgingly agree that Binh from Vietnam could do the job but he's clearly trying to climb to the management ladder, but there's no way you want Marland from Jamaica because he's always complaining and making other people fix his mistakes, but the boss won't fire him because he's black and they can't be doing with the inevitable racial discrimination claim...

This is deliberately a caricature, but it's the practical reality in a wide range of jobs around here. There's strenuous competition for jobs and advancement, so the natural defensive tendency of the human is to join a tribal group for self-protection, and absorb their attitude towards other groups.

Interestingly you don't get so many (proportionate to immigration rates) South Asians in these jobs - they tend to come to the Bay Area on graduate-level visas, or head towards their own small business rather than working for The Man. But still, they have a view on Black Americans, and it's often informed by the relative racial proportion of people robbing their - and their extended family's - retail establishments.

I particularly liked this claim from the article:

One was lodged by a female Black employee who said her female white boss struck her with a hot grinding tool and called her “stupid” and the N-word and insulted her intelligence. The suit says the supervisor was fired but later rehired.

A white woman, in the Bay Area, using physical violence and calling a Black woman the N-word in earshot of anyone else? And the company re-hires her? I would love to hear the details of this case. I suspect the actual facts are quite different to the stated ones.

I understand that the California governing class is mad at Elon for taking his money away from them, and that an accusation of racial discrimination is the easiest tool to exact revenge. But let's not be fooled - these claims are likely 90% bullshit, and the core of real racism arises from the struggle for good jobs and money between non-white ethnic groups.

Asian-American Lives Matter - and SF Supervisor Matt Haney is medacious

Reprising my post in May about Chinese Lives Mattering, in the context of assaults on elderly Asian folk in San Francisco, readers will not be surprised that this has continued to happen, and in fact worsen:

Now community leaders are saying the area is facing a new challenge; racially motivated violence, with a number of elderly Asian American victims the targets of unprovoked physical attacks.
"I am upset and appalled at the recent incident of an attack on a Vietnamese elder two weeks ago," said Judy Young from the Southeast Asian Community Development Center. "This should not happen."
Police say that was one of two victims, one 71-years-old, the other 78. The son of one of the victims posting photos of his mother's bruised face on Instagram.

This is, clearly, awful.

Fortunately, Supervisor for SF's Tenderloin District, Matt Haney, is on the case:

Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the Tenderloin, says racially charged rhetoric from the Whitehouse has helped fuel anti-Asian Pacific Islander bias and ultimately anti-Asian Pacific Islander attacks.
"There's been that type of hatred that has come from people at the top of this country, national leadership which has sent a message of hatred that has been felt by API members of our community," said Supervisor Haney.

This is... an interesting assertion. Let's break it down. Is the President beating down on Koreans? Filipinos? Hawaiians? Samoans? Vietnamese? Taiwanese? No, Matt Haney clearly means the rhetoric against ... the Chinese Communist Party and its singularly deplorable actions with regard to the Wuhan Flu.

So, clearly the miscreants assaulting Vietnamese Americans in SFO are completely separate from those assaulting Chinese Americans in SFO last year, and are in fact the MAGA-hat wearing white supremacists who are known to be endemic in SF. Right, Matty babe?

I Googled for photos of 34-year-old Michael Turner and it turns out that he is not the phenotype you would normally associate with White Supremacy. In fact, he bears a remarkable resemblance in ethnic origin to the perps of the 2019 attacks I described previously. Who knew? He also has a history of violence and larceny which indicates this might not be an out-of-character moment for him.

Entertainingly, SF's radical left District Attorney, Chesa Boudin - the son of two murdering radical left-wing terrorists - tried to play tough on this case:

"Just yesterday one of my [assistant district attorneys] convinced a judge to detain that man in jail pending trial and we will not release him until we are confident he can safely be released," said San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

With Chesa having done such a sterling job to date of protecting the SF citizenship from scumballs, I'm sure we can all sleep more soundly in our beds.

I repeat my previous assertion. The Asian-American community are worried about one specific ethnic group commiting violence against them. It's not Caucasians. The fact that the local news are strenously avoiding providing any coverage of what's actually happening should not be surprising, but continues to be very depressing.

Master/slave terminology - bears repeating

Two years ago I made fun of the effort to remove the terms "master", "slave", "whitelist" and "blacklist" from tech vocabulary, and made the assertion:

I don't have any intrinsic objection to using alternative terminology for master/slave, or for blacklist/whitelist. But I've scrutinised the people calling for this change, and I'm going to keep using the original terminology because civilised people should not yield an inch to these totalitarian fuckers.

With the developments in crimethink in the past two months, I stand by this more strongly than ever.

Surviving Diversity Training

If you work in a bureaucratic or enterprise organisation, the inevitable result of 2020’s bout of intellectual masturbation on the topic of Black Lives Mattering is going to be more "training" based on the apparent need to increase diversity in your organisation at all costs. One is reminded of the remarks of the great American satirist Tom Lehrer in the intro to his song "It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier”:

“...one of the many fine things one has to admit is the way that the Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion, in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on the grounds of ability.”

How then can we unenlightened peons “ride the wave” of diversity training so as to achieve the maximum benefit? Allow your humble correspondent to guide you.

Assuming that you're taking an in-person or video-driven interactive training session, the first thing to understand are your own objectives:

• Are you hoping to benefit from what’s being taught;
• Are you looking for the minimum interaction and distraction for your life; or
• do you resent the intrusion on your life and intend to resist actively?

All are valid choices, but make sure you pick one and plan for it. Are you aiming to avoid risk of being disciplined/fired? That's also an important factor to be aware of. If you're 63 and planning to retire soon, you might well not care at all, and in fact being fired could be a trigger for a lucrative constructive dismissal suit. If you've just accepted a job at another company which is not full of woke scolds, you can probably go to town. If you're 22 and just starting your career, your risk appetite is likely very small. Know before you go.

You also need to understand your “facilitator” (session leader), what they’re trying to achieve, and how they’re intending to do it. Unless they’ve just come down with the last shower, they will be mentally grouping their audience as above, and labelling each of you "learner", "holidaymaker" or "prisoner" - who says that stereotyping doesn't serve a purpose? Generally they try to focus on the first group and minimize contact with the others, but you might come across someone who is on an evangelical mission to convert everyone - in that case, holidaymakers and prisoners are no longer safe.

Course pre-reading and objectives

A tactic I've recently seen is to distribute “pre-reading” around the group. To make sure it gets done, they may also require everyone to prepare a small amount of pre-work based on the reading. This might be a form you have to submit before the course, or to assemble some written notes on your response to it, or to prepare a scenario for discussion in the group. (e.g. to answer: “what is a time that you felt uncomfortable in a racially charged situation? How did you respond? How did you think the other parties felt?”)

If your corporate training department is doing its job - and it’s quite possible that they aren't - the course description should come with some stated learning objectives. This will tell you a lot about what the course is trying to get you to do, and it will also clue you in to what evidence they might expect the course to produce. After all, the instructor can’t blithely claim "everyone is racism free now, that will be $5000 please!", or at least they shouldn't be able to. Therefore your company will be expecting objectives that are at least somewhat measurable, and expect to measure them.

The objectives will therefore tell you what the instructor wants you to be thinking or to have achieved by the end of the class, giving you a clear signpost to the topics under discussion. This can be a useful prompt to do pre-reading around the topics. For instance, if it requires "understanding the causes and result of implicit bias" then understanding the original study and the various debunkings can prepare you well for raising pointed questions.

Conducting yourself in session

If you intend to be a holiday maker, the worst thing to do is to make this apparent in the first ten minutes of class. Turn up a bit early, be chatty with the facilitator and others, take active part in the icebreaker activity (there's almost always an icebreaker). That should buy you some initial credit with the instructor, even though you disengage for the rest of the session. I'd also recommend doing the same burst of activity when you come back from each break. That way the instructor starts to get the impression that he or she is boring you, despite your best efforts to be attentive. Or possibly that you're snorting cocaine in the bathroom in the breaks, which I cannot endorse.

If you're a "prisoner" looking to tunnel out, I'd actually recommend a similar approach. At the very least, you don't want to look hostile in the first ten minutes. (And you shouldn't be hostile then anyway, because even the most painfully right-on diversity trainer deserves a chance to show that they're trying to make this session useful and interesting.) However, it's fine to develop a more quizzical look and increasingly more defensive body language over time. Evolve from an occasional raised eyebrow to stroking/holding your chin (showing disagreement with what the facilitator is saying), to crossed arms, to switching between crossed arms and crossed legs, depending on how obvious you want disagreement to be. This raises an implicit challenge to the facilitator, and whether they take you up on it can indicate their level of confidence in their content.

These events are normally "laptops down, phones down" so that everyone is "present". However taking a notebook and pen won't raise any eyebrows, and these can be useful tools. Whenever the facilitator says something weird or objectionable, you can take a direct note. This can be great material for feedback (see later). At worst, you can draft a love letter to your garage mechanic - no-one's going to ask to see your notes, and if they do then you can indignantly refuse. Make sure it's your own pen and own notebook.

Video sessions come with their own opportunities and challenges. For holidaymakers, feigning attention on video is a whole topic in itself, but you want to watch out for the facilitator calling on you for a response when you have no idea what they just said. Normally they require everyone to have video on and be on mute by default, which buys you a few seconds to "fumble" for un-mute. I recommend using an external, wired mike (e.g. on headphones), and so if you're stuck then gently move the plug out and in while you're talking to fake a dodgy connection. Practice makes perfect! Remember to temporarily stop using that mike and move to just using the laptop mike - it's then fine to "reset" your machine at the next break and report things "working" again.

I also recommend setting up poor lighting conditions in your room; either a strong light source causing glare (sun through a window), or curtains drawn to "remove the glare" but leaving a dark, grainy picture. Touching an unwashed thumb on the camera lens can help too - be sure to clean it after the session! For dark rooms, remember that glasses can reflect the colours of your screen so check before the meeting to see if they give anything away.

Group and pair exercises

Ideally, have a good friend in the same session who has similar views on these mandatory training events, and pair off with them for exercises if you get the chance. However, experienced facilitators will make people rotate round groups, so you've got to plan on group exercises with one or more "committed" learners. In my experience the best way to handle this is to realise that people love to talk about themselves - and the self-righteous adore it. So lead them into talking about their experiences, ask "concerned" and "interested" open questions such as "how did that change how you thought about...", and let them run out the clock for you.

You're going to need to have one or two experiences to talk about, if you don't have an obvious topic then I recommend something like:

• the time you were the only white person / male / non-tranvestite in a place and had an epiphany "this must be what it's like to be black / female / a cross dresser all the time!"; or
• childhood experience being once-off mean to someone black / female / cross-dressing which you only ten years later realising how that affected their relationships in school and oppressed them; or
• if you're got military experience, something on perception of veterans - veteran status is protected in the USA, and companies often have diversity outreach efforts focused on veteran hiring not least because they work hard and are good at execution and leadership but strangely diversity courses seldom talk much about this.

Stirring the pot

If you've got a best friend / partner / family member in a "protected" category, and frowns on "diversity" training, don't be afraid to cite them. "My mate is black and he says it's daft to focus on deaths caused by police as long as we're all shooting each other all the time" - as long as he'll back you up on that, you can probably get away with it. It will derail the hell out of the conversation, so make sure you're comfortable with raised emotions if you're going to try this.

The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) label is itself ripe for manipulation. You could refer to it as Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE); or perhaps Inclusion, Equity and Diversion (IED), making sure to use the appropriate abbreviation. Every firm should have a constructive IED program, after all!

Agreeing with "Black Lives Matter" and raising the game by suggesting "Unborn black lives matter too!" addressing the 35% abortion percentage in the black community is probably only viable if you don't mind a meeting-without-coffee with your boss and HR afterwards. Mind you, if you're a well-established Christian (or Muslim!) you might be able to get away with it.

If they do mention deaths-at-the-hand-of-police, you can refer to my previous analysis of the 2015 black unarmed fatalities in the USA. Short version: if you're not armed, and don't actively try to attack a police officer, you're actually remarkably safe even if you're black.

Raising the well-documented differences between genders is only for the suicidally determined. The facts might be with you, but you can expect prompt personal attacks on you during and after the course.

Constructive feedback

There is almost inevitably a post-course survey. The temptation is to blow this off with the minimum of effort, but If you actually want to effect changes then this is one of the best bang-for-your-buck places to make effort.

In terms of scoring, try not to be too much of an outlier. Score the content and the facilitator honestly and separately if you can. You can have the world's best facilitator, but if they're stuck with bad or dishonest material then there's only so much they can do. Highlight how the course has failed to help you meet the objectives or failed to be convinced about the assertions.

Where possible, make recommendations for "improving" the exercises. Say that there needs to be more time / quicker switching around / better briefing / more guidance on picking the right focus topic / content that you can better relate to. Again, you want to show helpfulness so they don't dismiss your scores and feedback as "grumpy prisoner".

If the facilitator or someone in the class has said something actually offensive, don't hold back from flagging it - I'd suggest without naming the person, at least initially. Make sure you wrote it down verbatim at the time in your notes, with the point in the session marked, so you can point to your notes as evidence.

Next steps

With luck, that will be it for the next year or so. No matter how woke the company, diversity training is expensive in terms of lost productivity, so they're unlike to repeat it unless they feel they have to. Sit back and enjoy 364 days of just treating people like people without fear or favour no matter what their skin colour, gender, age, or religion.

Auditing mappingpoliceviolence.org

I recently encountered the site mappingpoliceviolence.org which contends that the US police are out of control and desperately need to be reined in, I thought I'd take a look at the data that their data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe and general spokesperson DeRay McKesson present as evidence of these assertions. The site's data is used as one of the main arguments of campaigns such as Campaign Zero which tries to drum up membership and money for anti-police causes in the light of George Floyd's death.

"Mapping Police Violence" (hereafter referred to as "MPV") asserts that unarmed black people are killed by police much more often that their demographics would suggest, that police are seldom held accountable for this, and that this is therefore a clear signal that the US police are racist. Handily they list *all* the victims for 2014 and 2015, with a brief summary of what happened in each case. So I thought I'd look through the list for 2015 to see whether the facts on the ground correspond with their interpretation.

MPV lists 104 fatalities of unarmed black people, 13 of which ended with police officers being charged with a crime. Let's take the first 26 listed (25%), and see what happened in the other cases - did a guilty police officer escape scot free? From these 26 I'm excluding the cases of Tiara Thomas and Paterson Brown where the officers were actually charged and therefore we can safely say something needs to change.

Police did something significantly wrong

1. Michael Lee Marshall (Denver, CO): In custody with significant mental health problems, restrained by officers in the jail and subsequently choked on his vomit. Denver paid the family $4.65M. Officers involved received a short suspension. They clearly weren't intending to cause him harm, but it seems clear that they were either badly trained or negligent in what they did.
2. Christopher Kimble (East Cleveland, OH): At first I'd categorized this as "accident", but on reflection I moved it. Kimble was knocked down and killed on a crosswalk by a police cruiser responding to a call. The crosswalk and street lights weren't working. That said, the police cruiser had one headlight non-functional and it was driving about 40mph in a 25 zone without sirens or flashing lights. If you're driving a police car then you're responsible for ensuring its road worthiness, and if you're operating outside normal driving restrictions then you're responsible for doing so safely. There was a civil suit against the city, and to my mind the family should win it.

Victim shooting seemed justified

1. Keith Childress (Las Vegas, NV): Violent crime history, advanced towards police with what looked like a weapon despite being repeatedly told to stop.
2. Kevin Matthews (Dearborn, MI): Apprehended after committing a theft, shot while trying to reach an officer's gun during a struggle.
3. Leroy Browning (Palmdale, CA): Arrested for drink driving, starting struggling while being handcuffed and made a grab for officer's gun belt. In hindsight it wasn't clear from evidence that he'd actually managed to touch the gun but it was reasonable for the officers to fire in self defence as he was "poised to gain" control of the firearm.
4. Miguel Espinal (Yonkers, NY): After a reckless car chase escaping from being pulled over by police for tinted windows, ran into woods where an officer caught him and they struggled, Espinal tried to get officer's gun and the officer shot him in self defence. Struggle wasn't witnessed but forensic evidence strongly supported the officer's version of events.
5. Cornelius Brown (Opa-Locka, FL): Schizophrenic, attacked a police car and smashed its windows. Officers tasered twice without effect; when he advanced on them with a stick they opened fire.
6. Richard Perkins (Oakland, CA): Drugged up on meth and morphine, Perkins approached officers while brandishing a gun that turned out to be an Airsoft replica.
7. Anthony Ashford (San Diego, CA): After being apprehended "casing" cars in a car park, Ashford grabbed the police officer's taser and tasered him in the neck, tried to get the officer's gun. The officer shot him in self defence.
8. Dominic Hutchinson (Riverside, CA): Repeatedly declared he had a gun, then ran at the officers carrying some binoculars he'd broken up to look like a gun. "Quintessential suicide by cop" said the police chief, and I'd have to agree
9. Lamontez Jones (San Diego, CA): When stopped by police for disrupting traffic, Jones pulled out a replica gun and pointed it at the officers. Unable to see that it was a replica, they shot him. There is public video evidence of what happened. The family filed a wrongful death claim against the city but I didn't find any evidence that it went anywhere.
10. Junior Prosper (Miami, FL): After crashing his taxicab into a stop sign, and apparently intoxicated, Prosper walked away from the scene of the accident. A police officer caught up with him, a fight started and the officer fired his Taser. They went down an embankment into trees, the officer pursued and caught Prosper, struggled again, Prosper bit hard on and worried at the officer's finger, and the officer shot him. The District Court agreed with the officer that it was a reasonable reaction in self defence.
11. Keith McLeod (Reisterstown, MD): After being chased for trying to buy narcotic cough syrup with a fake prescription, McLeod went for the back of his waistband and pretended to pull out a gun. Although he didn't actually have one, the officer feared for his life and opened fire as McLeod's hand started to move back.
12. Lavante Biggs (Durham, NC): Suicidal, after prolonged negotiations in a stand-off, Biggs walked towards police officers and produced a gun. He put it down and picked it up a few times, hence the "without a weapon" category, but was always close enough to grab and fire it. I don't see that the officers had any real choice but to shoot.

Clearly an accident

1. Bettie Jones (Chicago, IL): stray bullet in an otherwise justified shooting. Police officer was nevertheless subsequently fired.
2. Roy Nelson (Hayward, CA): Voluntarily transported with police for mental health issues, started to struggle. Police applied a body restraint harness as he was a big guy, but that impaired his breathing when coupled with his meth intoxication. He stopped breathing in the car and died. City paid $1M compensation.
3. Alonzo Smith (Washington DC): Arrested by special police officers after running around shirtless and screaming, Smith was arrested and handcuffed but died of cardiac arrest due to high level cocaine intoxication.
4. India Kager (Virginia Beach, VA): Travelling in the same car as her child and the father of her child, Angelo Perry. Perry was a known violent criminal, suspected of being about to murder someone. When police stopped the car, Perry opened fire on officers, who shot back. Both Perry and Kager were killed. The 4 year old child was unharmed. A jury awarded Kager's family $800,000; police were clearly not intending to kill her, but returning fire was inevitable once Perry started shooting.
5. Tyree Crawford (Newark, NJ): Passenger in a stolen car. Police pursued the vehicle. When it stopped, Crawford bailed out and was hit by a police vehicle. Obviously an accident, caused by a poor life choice of getting involved in car theft.

Something needs to be done

1. Michael Noel (St Martin, LA): Schizophrenic whom police tried to take into protective custody at his home, went off the rails and attacked officers , shrugging off two taserings and striking an officer. The officer shot in self defence. It seems to me that better training in de-escalation for mental health crises could have stopped the situation escalating to this point.
2. Nathaniel Pickett (Barstow, CA): Stopped by a deputy after trespassing, Pickett tried to escape. The deputy caught him and there was a struggle. The DA's office found the shooting justified but a federal jury disagreed and awarded the family $33M in compensation.
3. Jamar Clark (Minneapolis, MN): Got into a struggle with two police officers outside a building, police officers claimed he tried to get one of their guns, and shot him in self defence. The available evidence and many witnesses didn't provide a clear picture of what happened, but did not indicate any improper behavior on behalf of the police officers. The city later settled with Clark's family for $200,000.

Not relevant to police

1. RayShaun Cole (Chula Vista, CA): This is an odd one to be included, and very sad. Cole was shot dead by his Customs and Border Patrol girlfriend in a domestic incident; 3 months later she died in a road accident that has a strong whiff of suicide. This had nothing to do with the police, really.
2. Wayne Wheeler (Lathrop, MI): Again, shouldn't really be in the list: a neighborhood dispute that ended in punching and Wheeler being fatally struck in the head. The neighbor who struck him was an off-duty cop, and Wheeler apparently attacked the man when he was in his own yard. Nothing to do with police practice or procedure.

Evaluation

Of the 24 cases actually relevant to the police force we have:

• 12 where the shooting was justified,
• 5 accidents,
• 3 where there seems to be a need for improvements even if the police officers weren't strictly at fault,
• 2 where police were at fault and charged, and 2 more where they seem clearly at fault.

So that's 7 out of 24 where police could reasonably be said to be at fault. If we extrapolate that to the list of 104 (and similarly assume 8 of those 104 cases are not relevant to the police force itself), that would be a total of 28 unarmed black people left to die at the hands of police in 2015.

Now that's still needless 28 deaths too many, but out of about 42 million black members of the US population, it's literally less than one in a million. Looking at 2015 black homicide data, 6,152 victims were male, and 862 victims were female. The black homicide rate is nearly twice the white homicide rate. By all means let's push police-caused deaths down, but there seem to be other, more significant areas that Black Lives Matter could focus on. Incidentally, there were 121 justifiable homicides of black victims by law enforcement.

Similarly, 20 unarmed black people killed by accident by police is tragic, but it's not obvious what the police could do to reduce that in many cases. Note that two of the 5 accidents analysed above were caused by consumption of illegal drugs, and two others by the victim hanging around known miscreants.

You'll also note that only 3 of the cases featured women. 2 of the women were killed accidentally, the other was killed by her police officer boyfriend. For some reason it seems to be that black men interact negatively with the police a heck of a lot more than women. I wonder if the same is true for black men vs white men, and if so why?

Update: analysis of the next chunk of the list in Part 2

Chinese lives matter

This is not about what you might think it's about. Hong Kong, and indeed the PRC, do not feature.

Yik Oi Huang

Let me tell you about Yik Oi Huang. A grandmother, she was 88 years old on Tuesday 8th January 2019. Early that morning she left her house in Visitacion Avenue, San Francisco, and went for her morning walk - a staple activity of Chinese senior citizens which we could usefully imitate. It would be the last time she walked anywhere.

In the park someone attacked her, beat her brutally, and left her for dead before apparently entering her home and then fleeing the area. She was hospitalized with head injuries, a broken spine, hand and ribs. Allow me to repeat: she was 88 years old. Any level of violence towards someone that old would be shocking, but the injuries inflicted on this old lady went several steps beyond that term.

SFPD arrested a suspect 11 days later. He was 18 years old, and black. The suspected motive was robbery. At this point he is still awaiting trial, though I would imagine that he stands a very good chance of his charges being upgraded to murder.

Yik Oi Huang did not die immediately. She suffered in hospital for the next 360 days before finally - mercifully - passing away on 3rd January this year.

You remember the protests filling the streets of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other places with large Chinese communities? You remember Chinese youths breaking shop windows and setting light to businesses across San Francisco? No, of course you don't - it never happened. This event barely registered outside San Francisco. Try searching "Yik Oi Huang site:cnn.com" on Google. Now try doing the same with "Michael Brown site:cnn.com", "George Floyd site:cnn.com" by contrast - hundreds of thousands of results.

Shuo Zeng

Shuo Zeng was 34 years old on New Years Eve 2019, but would not live to see 2020. With friends at the Starbucks in Montclair District, Oakland to celebrate the New Year and his birthday. He was a research scientist at Aspera, having graduated from Kansas State.

Oakland is notorious for laptop thefts, and today would see another one. Shuo Zeng had his laptop with him, not unusual behaviour for a techie. A teenager ran in to the Starbucks and grabbed the laptop, ducked out through the door being held by an accomplice, and jumped into a car driven by a third man.

Unwilling to lose his laptop, Shuo Zeng bravely - but unwisely - pursued them. He reached them as they got into the car. The car took off and Shuo Zeng was knocked against a parked car. He suffered head injuries and died in hospital.

The police found the suspects and charged them all with special circumstance murder and second-degree robbery. All three men were black, at least two of them from San Francisco.

CNN at least have one article about Shuo Zeng on their site. They do not, of course, mention the race of his assailants. One wonders if they would have done the same had he been black and his assailants white.

Wenjian Liu and the Can Man

There have been other, more famous incidents. Wenjian Liu was one of the two NYPD officers executed by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley on December 20 2014. An elderly Chinese man collecting cans in San Francisco was abused by two black men in a video that went viral in February this year. Chinese residents in areas with a significant black presence know who they need to be wary about, and it's not the police.

My point

Over 99% of the US population, myself included, felt that the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25th May was appalling, and that the action taken against the officers involved was entirely justified. Police brutality is unfortunately not that rare in the USA. However, I'm baffled as to why anyone thinks there's an obvious racial component to this. Floyd was nicked for passing a counterfeit bill - the actions of the arrest seem heavy-handed, but not the arrest itself. Do they claim that the officers were particularly brutal because he was black? Where's the evidence?

It is instructive to compare the criminally negligent behaviour of Derek Chauvin holding Floyd's head down for far too long, with the criminally negligent behaviour of Shuo Zeng's laptop thieves in driving away with no regard for his safety. In neither case did there seem to be intent to kill, but both cases resulted in death. Chauvin had country-wide protests screaming for accountability - which they already had in part, since he had been fired from the force and charged with murder-3 in record time. Shuo Zeng had a quietly grieving family and local community, but that was it. No protests, no riots. Barely a headline.

The black community might claim - unjustifiably, in my view - that Black Lives don't matter enough to the USA in general. But it seems to me that there's a stronger case that Chinese Lives don't matter as much as Black Lives do.

Blacklist your master, and whitelist your slaves - Silicon Valley word police

Working in Silicon Valley ("putting the crazy into California!") is always an education; there seems to be a Shepard tone of neuroticism in and out of the workplace. Every time you think you've seen the craziest thing you can imagine, something nuttier comes along shortly afterwards.

In the world of global-scale computing, big services like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail are very strongly interested in what happens when a machine in their service infrastructure fails. (This is relevant, I promise.) If only one machine knows how to handle data from user Joe, then Joe is going to be very upset when that machine reboots for an OS upgrade (5-15 minutes downtime), or worse becomes permanently unavailable because a data center technician accidentally bridged the rack bus bar onto the hard drive with her ^[1] screwdriver because she was paying too much attention to the shapely arse of the technician fixing the next rack over.

The natural solution is that you have multiple machines - maybe in multiple datacentres - which know how to handle data from Joe, and there's some kind of load-balancing across them which knows which of those machines are healthy, and which aren't. But out of all of those machines, you need to have at one which has the canonical state of Joe's data, and which all other machines agree to take data from. Otherwise you end up in the state where there are two or more different views of Joe's data, and can't tell which is valid. In that case, the machine with canonical state is known as the "master", and the other machines receiving state from it are known as "slaves".

I think you can see why this terminology has started to become "controversial" to the Usual Suspects:

Problem:
The term Master in Master Components is potentially offensive to people of color and women, and I suggest we use a more inclusive synonym.
Proposed Solution:
Suggest renaming to "Primary Components" or "Leader Components"

(By contrast, when the failure occurs at a higher level in the software, you end up writing garbage to all copies of the data - on both masters and slaves. If you've overwritten previous data, your only hope is to bring it back from an earlier system state snapshot - witness this Gmail inbox wipe-out from 2011.)

That was silly enough, but now the common terminology of "whitelist" (allow these items, but not others) and "blacklist" (allow all items except these) has come under attack:

Per https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1032050325513940992, [Tweet by Ruby-on-Rails founder] I'd like for Rails to set a good example and tone by using better terminology when we can. An easy fix would be to replace our use of whitelist with allowlist and blacklist with denylist.
We can even just use them as verbs directly, as we do with the former terms. So something is allowlisted or denylisted.

Obviously the narrative here is that "black" is associated with negative connotations ("block") and "white" associated with positive connotations ("allow"). So I'd be fascinated to know why they continue to allow Code Pink to seize a positive affirmation space for people of the predominant Western European ethnicity, and refuse to attack the use of "yellow" for cowardice.

It's not just limited to colour of skin - there are a long-term crusades to stop people using "guys" as a generic term for a group of familiar people, "handicapped" for people who are disabled, and "innumerate" to describe Diane Abbott.

It's clear that this is a concerted effort to control the use of language in order to shape ideas - if you're forced to use an approved (restricted) vocabulary, you can't easily express concepts that are regarded as unacceptable by the vocab approvers. And if you think it's going to stop here, I have a bridge to sell you.

I don't have any intrinsic objection to using alternative terminology for master/slave, or for blacklist/whitelist. But I've scrutinised the people calling for this change, and I'm going to keep using the original terminology because civilised people should not yield an inch to these totalitarian fuckers.

If I were tired of employment, I'd be tempted to make a traditional English dish and bring it to my next group potluck. "Oooh, these are tasty, what do you call them?" "Faggots." It would be worth it just to hear the sharp intakes of breath and see the (put-on) outrage. I could even double down: "Are you saying my cultural heritage is offensive?" although of course I'd lose badly by the rules of intersectionality and Victimhood Poker.

[Complete tangent - traditional English terminology for the testicles of an animal is "fries", so you can have "lamb fries", "pig fries" etc. Therefore when someone from an older generation asks you "do you want fries with that?" you might get more than you bargained for.]

[1] All the recent training examples I've seen have had women take a dominant role as problem-solvers, and men nearly exclusively doing the stupid / illegal / morally dubious actions. In the spirit of gender equality, this is me trying to redress the balance.

White terrorist kills four black men in Fresno - major news outlets silent

I cannot fathom why this was not headline news back in April. From Reuters:

A white man accused of shooting three people to death in Fresno, California, wanted to kill as many black men as possible because he expected to be arrested for another shooting, police said on Wednesday, calling the incident a hate crime.
Harold Allen Murphy, 39, fatally shot the three black men in downtown Fresno on Tuesday after realizing he was wanted for the killing of a black security guard last week, Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said.

It's possible that the police were reading too much into the racial motivation

“What he told our detectives last night was that once he saw he was wanted for murder, he was not going to go down for shooting a security guard for disrespecting him, but that he was going to kill as many black males as possible,” Dyer said on Wednesday.
Police allege Murphy opened fire 17 times as he walked and ran along several blocks in Fresno, killing the three men in less than four minutes.
He surrendered while shouting: “Praise Jesus!,” police said, adding they had not yet recovered the weapon Murphy discarded.

You would think that a blatantly racial multiple murder by a Christian white supremacist would have dominated the airwaves for weeks, wouldn't you?

The gentleman concerned is this week being scrutinized to see if he is fit to stand trial. One can only imagine the inner-city riots which will result if the court doesn't think a trial is in the public interest.

Please note: it's possible that I may have mistranscribed some details of the case and you should definitely read the original article...

28 hours of racial lies

One of the latest bits of social justice posturing is the play "Every 28 hours", a project produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival:

Every 28 Hours is a national partnership focused on the widely shared and contested statistic that every twenty-eight hours a black person is killed by vigilante, security guard, or the police in the United States.

Regular readers will know that a maths-based arse-kicking is coming. But perhaps, disregarding the numbers, this play is still a compelling work? After all, Harold Pinter was a complete arse, but his plays could still pull in the crowds. Might it be the same here?

The Every 28 Hours Plays consist of 72 one-minute plays inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, with participation from artists across the nation.

OK, maybe I'll save myself the price of the ticket and just gently gouge out my eyes with a spoon.

One black person killed every 28 hours is 312 black people murdered a year. This is 312 murders too many, no matter who's doing it - and, let's be clear, I'm not quibbling with this . However, let's put this in some numerical context, shall we? I'm assuming that the "Every 28 Hours" authors are mostly liberal arts majors, so I promise to go slow and show my working. (Which, I'd guess, is a sight more than they do.)

The Facts

I'm using the FBI 2015 crime figures, specifically Expanded Homicide Data Table 6 (Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Victim by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Offender, 2015).

Race/Ethnicity of victim	Total	Race of offender
		White	Black / African-American	Other	Unknown
White	3,167	2,574	500	49	44
Black / African-American	2,664	229	2,380	13	42
Other race	222	60	34	126	2
Unknown race	84	34	20	6	24

The other key stat is that, as of 2010, 12.6% of Americans are black or African-American - 1 citizen in 8. I'm making a leap of faith that this fraction has not changed significantly in the past 6 years. Since white people are about 63% of the population, they outnumber black Americans 5 to 1.

The Math(s)

The obvious stat that leaps out - though is hard to state grammatically: white people kill approximately as many white people as black people kill black people. White-on-black and black-on-white killings are actually relatively infrequent. This is also true for the "other" racial category (Asian, mixed-race, Native America etc) which turns out to be a similar fraction of the US population as black / African-American, but only about 7% of the number of racial colleagues killed even if you incorporate the "unknown" category.

So we could produce a companion play "Every 220 Minutes" representing the time interval between one black person killing another black person. We could also write "Every 17 1/2 hours" for a black person killing a white person, and "Every 38 hours" for a white person killing a black person.

But wait! If we have to wait 38 hours for a white person to kill a black person, and a black person is killed by a vigilante / security guard / police officer every 28 hours, doesn't that mean that some of those vigilantes / security guards / police officers must be black (or other ethnic minority)? Why yes, it does. I wonder if "Every 28 Hours" brings out this aspect of the statistics.

The truly terrifying stat is simply that black Americans kill about the same number of people as white Americans despite being outnumbered 5:1. The fear of young black American males held by many white people is visceral rather than statistical - the rate at which black people kill white people is about what you'd expect given the relative proportion of population - but black people in the 20-29 age range should be fucking terrified of black males aged 17 to 24 because they are the ones doing most of the killing of victims in that age range.

Why in the name of all that is holy are the "Every 28 Hours" folks talking about (white) police officers as a deadly influence, when young black men do 10 times more killing?

The Weasels

Let's go back to the Every 28 Hours claim:

...every twenty-eight hours a black person is killed by vigilante, security guard, or the police in the United States [my italics]

Now why, do you think, they added those two extra categories? If they could say:

...every twenty-eight hours a black person is killed by the police in the United States

then wouldn't that be a more powerful message? Perhaps they're not using it because it's not true. The Washington Post reports 258 black people killed by police in 2015. If "Every 28 Hours" used that figure as its basis, it would be called "Every 34 Hours" instead.

The statutory ad hominem

"Every 28 Hours" producer Claudia Alick is big on artistic direction, with a minor in hip-hop coaching, but it seems that her MA from NYU and BA from GWU have not equipped her with the ability to do math. Or perhaps she has the ability, but also gained the power to ignore the figures for the greater good of spreading propaganda. She certainly doesn't seem to be concerned with actually improving the lives of, and reducing the horrific body count in, the black American community in any meaningful way.