We are familiar with the argument about unfair policing. We have heard the counter-argument: The person did the crime.
Biden is handling this correctly: He is staying out. Staying quiet. Let the evidence speak.
The issue of prejudicial policing has mostly been a complaint by the political left. Everyone has heard of the "crime" of "driving while Black" and "driving while Hispanic." We have seen targeting of Blacks in stop-and-frisk policing. The left calls it prejudiced. Police and their defenders say that the crime statistics warrant the special focus, and policing follows crime, not race. Deaths at the hands of police led to mass demonstrations and calls by some on the left to "defund the police." Now some Republicans are calling for defunding the FBI.
Trump isn't against weaponization of the justice system. He is against the Justice Department investigating him. Last week he said if re-elected he would appoint "a real special prosecutor." This one would "go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family."
Cases over policing have punctuated recent news: The shoot-on-arrival death of Tamir Rice, the death of Breonna Taylor in a hail of gunfire while police carried out a search warrant, the suffocation of George Floyd, the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, and the arrests coming out of BLM protests and the January 6 insurrection. Sometimes there is good video evidence. People see different things. I saw Ashli Babbitt as part of a mob breaking through a door attempting to enter the House Chamber, intending violence against Congress members. Trump disagrees. He calls Babbitt a patriot and martyr, unjustly murdered while fighting for justice. In politics it is a matter of who is fighting for what and a matter of majorities. Trump said:
If this happened to the "other side," there would be riots all over America, and yet there are far more people represented by Ashli, who truly loved America, than there are on the other side.
Trump's legal strategy in his current and impending indictments is a political strategy. He attacks the prosecution. In conservative media, Trump is picked on, the charges are bogus, that he is no more guilty than Biden -- indeed less guilty. Rivals of Trump don't want to defend Trump's innocence, so most picked up the bank-shot narrative. Defend Trump by blaming Biden.
Biden is letting this narrative grow, un-rebutted. It is the principled approach. It is politically dangerous for him. He is being hands-off while being accused of being too feeble to be hands-on. To his credit, he isn't trying to manage his reputation for vigor. He is managing his reputation for being the normal, low-drama advocate for non-political justice. Biden turned prosecution over to Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, who turned it over to Jack Smith, the special prosecutor. Jack Smith isn't grandstanding. Smith looks dour. Garland looks punctilious. The Biden approach is on brand: Low drama, things-are-back-to-normal. He trusts that the institutions of justice still have credibility, at least when they are led by people who appear deliberate and careful.
The power of the presidency is the power to persuade, to explain stuff, to create a narrative that makes sense of the world. Biden is hoping body language does the persuading. He is trusting that there is a decisive persuadable portion of the American electorate open to being swayed by objective facts. By documents. By tapes.
Especially tapes. Again and again in areas of disputed policing, the public has come to some resolution by seeing and hearing tapes. The retained-documents case broke open upon revelation of a recording of Trump bragging about having secret documents he cannot legally show because they are classified and he can't declassify them. That is a confession.
Maybe a majority of Americans simply don't care. Democrats have laid the groundwork of doubting the fairness of policing. Now it is the GOP's turn to do that. But there was always the GOP counter-argument when people protested suspect policing if it came to an arrest: It isn't bad policing if they found evidence of a crime. Maybe a person was stopped and frisked, but then police found an illegal gun. Maybe a person was pulled over for speeding, but he was recorded on radar going well above the speed limit. Equal or unequal policing wasn't the point, they argue. The point is that the person did the crime. The police did their job. Don't complain.
Trump was given every chance to give back the documents, and he refused, hid them, and lied about it. Like Ashli Babbitt, he was warned, but persisted anyway. She paid the price. Now it is Trump's turn. It is all on tape. He did the crime.
Biden isn't silent, not really. Biden is letting the crime speak for itself.
[Note: For daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com. The blog is free and always will be.]
10 comments:
The saying in jail is if you have to do the time if you did the crime. Except for sex offenders and people who committed forgery, generally the people who do the time are poor. Let’s hope that the ex president is an exception.
Black people commit crime at a significantly higher rate per capita than white people. Black people have significantly more interactions with the police per capita than white people. You can emphasize the second and ignore the first and conclude that the cops are racist. Or you can emphasize the first and ignore the second and conclude that the police are focused where the crime is.
The same two choices are available in the case of Donald Trump. He commits a disproportional amount of crime. He receives a disproportional amount of attention from the justice department. You can emphasize one or the other, and come to very different conclusions.
Your emphasis in either of these situations will depend heavily on your political inclinations. Is it two faces or a vase?
https://duckduckgo.com/?va=v&t=ha&q=two+faces+vase&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Frlv.zcache.ca%2Ffaces_or_vase_illusion_of_two_faces_like_a_vase_postcard-r7e6577643ca545029d1056c4916cd621_vgbaq_8byvr_540.jpg
By suggesting that even Trump should be subject to the rule of law, Peter opens himself to accusations of being ‘blinded by hatred’ and having ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ a hackneyed phrase enabling wingnuts to mindlessly dismiss Trump’s many transgressions. An SSRS poll found that 60% of Americans, i.e., anybody with any sense, approve of the indictment of Trump. It’s that other 40% who don’t believe in ‘justice for all’ that we need to worry about.
I always heard it aside you can't do the time, don't do the crime. A good friend who grew up a short distance from Former Guy told me shortly after he made his entrance down the escalator that the people if New,York have known him for a grifter and Con Artist since he was in his twenties. My friend couldn't explain how it has ta k en yhis long for his criminality to finally catch up to him.
Peter gave a very nuanced and careful description of the pros and cons of inviting Donald Trump. My comments about being blinded by hatred and “trump derangement syndrome“ were in no way directed at Peter.
Peter came down on the pro side of it. I come down on the con side of it. Rational people can amicably disagree about trade-offs like that.
Responding to differing points of view with invective and passive-aggressive innuendo isn’t helpful.
Peter gave a very nuanced and careful description of the pros and cons of inviting Donald Trump. My comments about being blinded by hatred and “trump derangement syndrome“ were in no way directed at Peter.
Peter came down on the pro side of it. I come down on the con side of it. Rational people can amicably disagree about trade-offs like that.
Responding to differing points of view with invective and passive-aggressive innuendo isn’t helpful.
Black Lives Matter has been protesting the disproportionate number of unarmed Blacks murdered by police. In contrast, Trump was arrested without incident and for good reason. There’s really no comparison.
Happy Juneteenth
Actually, the supposed disproportionality of blacks versus whites killed by the police is quite open to question. From the article linked below:
Still, the Lancet study claims “stark” racial inequities amounting to “systemic racism within the US police force.” This claim is based on the rate of police killings of each racial and ethnic group. The rate is calculated by dividing the number of homicide victims for each racial/ethnic group by the entire population of the group in the United States. Measured this way, the researchers found—and the Times emphasized—that “Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as white Americans were.”
This statistic may be valid, but it does not demonstrate systematic racism. In the overwhelming majority of cases, police were pursuing the eventual victim because of a crime—usually murder or assault (69 percent)—or the suspect was actually using a weapon (71 percent). In other words, the typical decedent was a violent-crime suspect fleeing from the police or threatening officers or private citizens with a gun. The decedent was often using drugs or alcohol (27 percent), and one in five had recently been diagnosed with mental illness. (This is based on NVDRS data from 2017 for a 34-state sample.)
WThe key question, then, is not how many whites, blacks, or Hispanics per 100,000 of each group were killed by police, but what percentage of each population group is likely to be involved in the circumstances leading to such a death.
One answer may be found in the arrest statistics for crimes of violence by group. The last full FBI crime report, for 2019, shows that the racial/ethnic proportions of people arrested for violent crimes, such as murder, rape, and aggravated assault, is nearly identical to the Lancet data on those who died in confrontations with police.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/when-cops-kill
As my comment made clear, I was talking about UNARMED Blacks. The rate of fatal police shootings of unarmed Black people in the US is more than 3 times as high as it is among White people, according to research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.
Happy Juneteenth
Cops don’t know who is armed before the fact. They have to go on the behavior of the suspect.
Take Michael Brown, for instance, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed by white Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MS. After this event, the good people of Ferguson responded with the customary spasm of arson and looting. Obama’s Justice Department under the leadership of Eric Holder weighed in with a promise to investigate.
A few months later, the Justice Department’s report came out. It contained conclusive evidence that Brown was attacking Wilson and trying to grab his gun when Wilson shot and killed him.
You have to actually know the details of each case like this to properly evaluate whether to blame it on a racist white cop, a black criminal, or an unfortunate string of misperceptions. An aggregate rate calculation can be enormously misleading.
Mark Twain once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”. He had that quite right.
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