If there is a “Black Lives Matter” movement then presumably there are Americans for whom black lives do not matter. The questions for today are “why not?” and “what should we do about it?”
First, I wonder if the U.S. is now simply too populated and government too centralized for us to be confident that Citizen A will care about Citizen B. As there are people suffering badly in other parts of the world and most of us don’t do much to help them it is clear that human sympathy cannot stretch to a population of 7+ billion. Thus why should we expect sympathy to stretch to 324 million (popclock)? (i.e., it is not simply that black lives don’t matter but that American lives per se may not matter to Americans, unless it is the life of a family member, friend, or immediate neighbor)
What about citizen involvement in local government, though? That doesn’t require concerning oneself with the full 324 million population of the U.S. Perhaps federal government involvement with law enforcement has demotivated citizens from becoming involved. Why invest a lot of emotional energy and caring in something over which you have no control? (See my review of the book Missoula for an example of how a local prosecution for a state crime was driven by bureaucrats from Washington, D.C.; it wouldn’t have made any sense for a Montana resident to weigh in on the question.)
From A Pattern Language:
. . . just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. . . . (J. B. S Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” The World of Mathematics, Vol. II, J. R. Newman, ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956, pp. 962- 67).
It is not hard to see why the government of a region becomes less and less manageable with size. In a population of N persons, there are of the order of N 2 person-to-person links needed to keep channels of communication open. Naturally, when N goes beyond a certain limit, the channels of communication needed for democracy and justice and information are simply too clogged, and too complex; bureaucracy overwhelms human processes.
And, of course, as N grows the number of levels in the hierarchy of government increases too. In small countries like Denmark there are so few levels, that any private citizen can have access to the Minister of Education. But this kind of direct access is quite impossible in larger countries like England or the United States.
We believe the limits are reached when the population of a region reaches some 2 to 10 million. Beyond this size, people become remote from the large-scale processes of government. Our estimate may seem extraordinary in the light of modern history: the nation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size.
They cannot claim to have struck the balance between the needs of towns and communities, and the needs of the world community as a whole. Indeed, their tendency has been to override local
needs and repress local culture, and at the same time aggrandize themselves to the point where they are out of reach, their power barely conceivable to the average citizen.
(emphasis added)
Are there any simple practical steps that we can take? As noted in “Should we have unarmed police?” (thoughts sparked by “Why aren’t there a lot more police shootings in the U.S.?”), I think it would be worth exploring the extent to which we could have a tier of law enforcement that didn’t automatically generate armed confrontations. I’m just back from Israel and there are plenty of security people there with guns but there are also people involved with security and law enforcement who don’t have guns.
If the folks behind A Pattern Language are right we should scale back federal and even state involvement with law enforcement. We accept a lot of variation from state to state in laws that have enormous effects on citizens’ lives (see Minnesota versus neighboring Wisconsin in family law, for example; or compare a state where marijuana is legal and taxed to one where possession and sale leads to a prison sentence; or look at penalties following a murder conviction). Now that some states are so heavily populated that the average voter has no voice, power, or access to those in power, why can’t we let the residents of a city substantially determine the way in which law enforcement is to be accomplished? (maybe there is a state-wide framework with some limits so that a local law can’t impose super-harsh penalties for crimes that most state residents consider minor)
At least some of the incidents that have led to recent protests began with traffic stops. How about we simply cut back on those? Use cameras and robots to mail car owners tickets for speeding, broken taillights, etc. The “due process” of being pulled over by a police officer, having a chance to explain oneself, and then to appear in court sounds good except that (a) nowadays someone might get killed, and (b) legal fees have skyrocketed in the 100 or so years since we established this convention.
Having unarmed police only works if you have a largely unarmed population. “Never bring a knife to a gunfight”. As much as we are now (some of us) mourning the recent police shootings, keep in mind that both of the “victims” were armed (with guns). If the police were not also armed, would the outcome in these two incidents have been the same (1 person dead each), with the only difference being that the cop would have left in a box instead of the citizen?
I drove around Spain a few months ago and I never saw a single traffic stop on their highway system. Not once. And yet the drivers drove at or close to the speed limit. The “secret” appeared to be a large system of traffic cams – if the traffic cam caught you speeding, it would just mail you a ticket. However, Spain appears to be a much more law abiding society than the US with vastly lower crime rates (despite extensive unemployment). Traffic cams do not deal with drivers who drive in an erratic manner, etc. so I’m not sure how well they would work here.
Based on your limits of 2 to 10 million, the US passed that point shortly after colonial times. BLM is based on a false premise – that the police don’t care who they shoot, especially not black people. This is not true at all. The average US police officer spends his entire career without shooting anyone and you can see in the recent videos that when they do feel compelled to shoot someone, afterward they often appear extremely distraught. In for example, Stalinist Russia, the NKVD shot people every day, sometimes by the thousands, and it didn’t “matter” to them at all – it was all in a day’s work to them. The US is nothing like this at all.
Most of the principles of BLM, according to their manifesto, have absolutely nothing to do with black lives (as befits an organization founded by lesbian feminists). ” We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure ….” , ” We are committed to embracing and making space for trans brothers and sisters …..”, “We are committed to fostering a queer‐affirming network. “, ” We are guided by the fact all Black lives, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status or location [sic – they got so caught up in the laundry list that they forgot the verb or else ran out of space on the flip card.] ” http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/
Could someone (and I am serious) explain to me, with examples, the difference between actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity and gender expression? It seems that there are six possibilities here (almost half of the listed pigeonholes for blacks, so it was obviously very important to them to distinguish between sexual identity and gender identity and between gender identity and gender expression) – could you give non-overlapping examples of all six? Or was this just a rhetorical flourish?
Age counts for more than population. Enjoy the decline!
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
No, this is an idiosyncratic strawman. The movement is specifically about violence against and mistreatment of black Americans that is worse than the treatment received by white Americans. It is protesting systemic racism, especially in law enforcement, and not general apathy.
Honestly, I don’t mean to dwell on it, and perhaps I’m simply confused, but it occurs to me that there must surely be very few people who didn’t notice this fact about the movement already. Why are you coming up with your own definition of their complaint, where the mistreatment is general and defined to an absolute rather than relative level, instead of listening to what they actually say?
Yes, there seems to be a definite relation with the turning of citizens (especially the poorest) into a funding source for police departments and cities through extremely aggressive and often bogus fines and citations.
Chris: if the BLM movement had chosen to instead name their organization “Stop Shooting Black People”, I’d be more on board with your reasoning. They chose to call themselves Black Lives Matter, as if the problem here is that people think that black lives don’t matter. Well, when I hear that, I think “most lives don’t matter to most people”. I can’t be expected to care about people I don’t know as much as I care about the people close to me. I don’t expect somebody in China to give a second’s thought for how my life is going. I think Phil is spot on.
Jackie: “Having unarmed police only works if you have a largely unarmed population” only makes sense if you believe the population should be subservient to the police (or the state). I think disarming your average beat cop or patrol officer (I mean taking away lethal weapons; they can keep their pepper spray and tasers) would be a great way to cut down on the number of police shootings. Call in the SWAT team if you need to arrest somebody you have probable cause to believe is armed. And ending the War on Drugs would be a great way to cut down on the “need” for policing in the first place.
I continue to fundamentally disagree with the appropriateness of critiquing an advocacy movement by steadfastly refusing to consider their stated goals past the three words in their name.
I mean, look. Someone could come to you and say:
You’d be right to call them a blistering idiot, and infer that they must not actually care about gun rights much to be so blithely dismissive and uninformed.
Alex – “Call in the SWAT team if you need to arrest somebody you have probable cause to believe is armed.”
How do they do it overseas? “You’re under arrest! Stop, or I’ll yell at you some more! Just wait until the SWAT team gets here!” No, don’t run away, or I’ll…”
How do you arrest someone who is resisting arrest without some means of overpowering them?
I agree about the ending the War on Drugs, but I would like to relinquish responsibility for their (health and economic) care as well.
Philg – it’s called Black Lives Matter as an attempt at a completely agreeable title, like Pro-Life and Pro-Choice (who could disagree with either of those?), not as a transparent descriptor of guiding principles.
I’m just back from Israel and there are plenty of security people there with guns but there are also people involved with security and law enforcement who don’t have guns.
Israel isn’t burdened with the same…err…ahh…let’s say, demographics as the U.S.
US should halt all family reunion and asylum-based immigration for few years, and revamp the immigration law to let in only select few based on their STEM/artistic abilities. However, a better educated society tend to become less religious, and become more immoral, and lead to an eventual collapse (which is why Peter Thiel’s Techie Island Fantasies will never work). Maybe that’s natures’ way to regulate humans.
” I think disarming your average beat cop or patrol officer ….would be a great way to cut down on the number of police shootings.”
Depends what you mean by “police shootings”. The number of shootings BY police would definitely go down – the police can’t shoot you if they don’t have a gun. The number of shootings OF police might go way up, even more.
Jack D: I think it’s possible they might not go up at all. Based on what I’ve seen/read about criminals (granted, it’s mostly fiction, but it’s the kind that has the ring of truth to it, like The Wire, and W.E.B. Griffin’s Badge of Honor series), they have guns so they can shoot other criminals, not cops. 99% of them know the dumbest thing they could possibly do is to shoot (or stab, or punch) a cop.
They know that today because they know the cop will shoot back. It’s very common for criminals to have outstanding arrest warrants so when the cop stops them for a traffic stop the cop is going to run their name and they are going to get arrested and go to jail for god knows how long. That’s why some of them are so anxious to get away (and/or shoot the cop) when they are stopped. If you are a criminal and your choice is either shoot the cop or go to jail you might decide to take your chances on shoot the cop.