Oh Now.... Priorities!!!

AG Loretta Lynch has opened her yap and apparently caused something of a stir in the activist community by dismissing the requirement that local police forces maintain and submit records of all the police killings and deaths in custody that happen in their jurisdictions.

No, she proclaims, keeping track of the "minutae" of police-public interactions is less important than "improving" police-community relations...

All righty then.

Statistics on police killings of civilians and civilian deaths in custody have been vastly understated for any number of years. I don't think there's ever been an accurate official count, and the statistics released by FBI are simply ridiculous. That wasn't even noticed beyond a certain community of activists until last year's uproar over the deaths of James Boyd, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and so very many others.

Then a 'national conversation' got underway about the problem of police killings of civilians, and part of that 'conversation' was the lack of  accurate and complete official data on the number of civilians killed by police and civilian deaths in custody.  Nobody was keeping track because it wasn't required.

Actually it was required. A law was passed in 1996 requiring police departments to report incidents of use of force and deaths in custody, but it was never enforced due to complaints from the field that the costs of reporting were beyond the abilities of many departments to handle. Consequently they couldn't be required to report.

Media stepped into the vacuum, first with a Facebook page called "Killed by Police" begun in May of 2013. This is an effort to track every media report of police killing of civilians and every report of civilian death in custody in almost real time. To date, it is the most  comprehensive and up to date listing of civilian deaths at the hands of police in existence. It is not, however, the flashiest, nor is it necessarily the most often cited. That would be the Guardian's "The Counted." In a distant third place would be the Washington Post's data on police shootings of civilians.

I noticed long ago that local media was more than happy to publicize police killings of civilians -- no doubt on the journalistic principle that "if it bleeds it leads". Some of the reports were quite lurid. On the other hand, they almost always stuck with the police version of events, as if there were some Immortal Truth in police statements -- which, of course, always justified their actions in eliminating the threat of yet one more civilian perpetrator.

It became a routine. Someone would be killed by a police officer. Inevitably, their mug shots and criminal history would be promptly released and litany of offenses which led to their death would be read out, almost always including "pointing a gun" or "reaching for waistband" thus causing the officer to "fear for his life and the safety of others" and justifying the discharge of his duty weapon. The suspect/subject subsequently "died" -- exactly how is "under investigation." The officer involved has been put on "standard paid administrative leave."

These reports were sometimes accompanied by dash-cam or body-cam views of the incident, but many times, there was no verification of police reports at all. Media accepted whatever the police said about these killings almost always without question. But that started to change when civilian witness videos became more and more available. Many of these videos showed quite clearly that the police version of events were fraudulent and false. Too many unarmed people, too many innocents were being killed, and police routinely felt comfortable lying about what happened.

Oh.

Police departments saw this discrepancy as primarily a public relations problem. They did not, at least at first, see any problem with their actions. Killings by police were always justified, and the lies and falsehoods that wound up in reports were merely the result of the "fog of battle" -- or what have you.

Police only killed out of absolute necessity, and only as the last resort. Always.

Videos showed that in many cases, police killed their victims on sight or within seconds of the encounter, without bothering to find out what was really happening; many victims were unarmed; some were surrendering or attempting to obey commands barked by officers when they were shot. Others were clearly having psychological issues that prevented immediate compliance, and so they were shot. Over and over again, police were shown escalating situations rather than defusing them, these escalations leading too often to use of deadly force by police. Too many times, police were shown using deadly force where none was called for, often in response to a 911 call from a concerned family member requesting medical intervention.

And of course these videos exposed a glaring racial disparity in police use of force and killings. Police abused and killed black people at a rate far greater than that of whites. It was plain to see. Black people were being shot and killed by police as a matter of course, whereas white folks would often be treated with kid gloves -- no matter if they were armed or even shooting at police. The discrepancy was stark and obvious. And it wasn't just black people; Native Americans, Hispanics, and mentally ill people of any race were being subjected to lethal force as a matter of course.

The rate of killing by police was much higher than had been previously believed due to the significant undercount annually reported by the FBI. The actual death rate at the hands of police is still unknown because many deaths in custody aren't reported. But just those police involved homicides reported in the media were three times the number cited by the FBI in its incomplete -- actually false -- reports.

Now Loretta Lynch is saying we don't really need accurate statistics on the number of deaths caused by police -- as gaining those statistics might-could be a burden on already over-stressed and under-funded/staffed police departments, and we really want to improve relationships with the communities police patrol rather than obsessing on numbers anyway, right?

Good God.

Good freaking God. What is the matter with her?

Crime is at a nearly all-time low. There are more people in jail and prison in this country than in any other nation in the world. Well over a thousand people die at the hands of police in this country every year, far more than in any other first world nation, and too often those who die at the hands of police should not have been subjected to lethal force. Yet almost always those homicides are ruled "justified" because police did the killing and there are layers of protections for police when they use lethal force -- whether or not it's objectively justified.

It's a huge problem and it appears to be growing.

Loretta doesn't want statistics, though. She wants "improved relationships." This goes right back to the earlier police departmental idea that the problem of police killings is one of perception -- PR -- not action. In other words, it's about the propaganda, not about the killing.

That Loretta Lynch apparently buys into this bullshit is troubling, yes? Well, it is to me.

On the other hand, I've seen so many consent decrees with various police departments around the country which seem designed to seek better ways to justify the police killings not reduce them.

This convinced me long ago that the DoJ really has no interest in lowering the rate of police homicide. Its primary interest is in coordinating police departments and police conduct to fit a standard of behavior -- and killing -- that will be "more professional" and gain greater public confidence and respect.

Yes. Well...

Community relations under those circumstances really are more important than statistics on police homicides.

I'm also led to believe that the FBI director doesn't want to have to bother with more complete/accurate statistics. There are real crimes to fight, after all.

No. This won't do.

We need an outcry, loud and sustained, against this attitude by the Top Cops. Stop the bullshit. End the deceit.

Somebody's Getting Very Rich From All the Turmoil in the Markets

From Yahoo News:

The stock market once again proved it can be an incredibly unforgiving and swiftly punishing place, as a two-week long downturn was given new fuel by Standard & Poor's decision last Friday to downgrade the U.S. credit rating.

Gold rose Monday, as did Treasury prices, but the equity market was a horror show across the board. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped 635 points, or 5.6%, to put the index below 11,000 at 10,810. Since its recent high of 12,810.54, right at 2,000 points ago on April 29, the Dow has surrendered more than 15%.

The S&P 500, to most people the truest indicator of the U.S. market, was lower by almost 80 points, or 6.9%, to 1119. It's now 18% below its 52-week high of 1363.61. Here's another way of looking at how unnerved traders were: The CBOE Volatility Index (^VIX), often viewed as a measure of trepidation, rocketed up 45% and closed above 40 for the first time in more than a year.

Semiconductor stocks were down 5.4% on average, major oil stocks slid 8.5%, and utilities lost 5.7%. Computer hardware shares and retailers fell more than 5%, and telecom names roughly the same amount. The meltdown was seen virtually everywhere investors looked. Financials, as measured by the Dow Jones U.S. Banks Index, dove 11.7%.

As was the case last Thursday when the Dow sank 513 points, all 30 of its components were lower again. Bank of America (BAC), one of the aforementioned banks, had the misfortune of being the hardest hit, dropping 20.3% to $6.51. Alcoa (AA) was the next worst performer, giving back 11.4% to $11.33.

While the Nasdaq is historically known for being heavy on technology stocks, a number of large-cap tech issues held up fairly well, considering the size of the decline. The Nasdaq was down 6.9%, but its biggest component, Apple (AAPL), lost 5.5%. Intel (INTC), another Nasdaq (and Dow) member was lower by only 3.3%. Google (GOOG) was off 5.7%.

Traders early on noted the heavy nature of the trading volume for the day. Combined with the point declines in the major averages, the level of shares changing hands would be considered committed selling by any observer.

On the upside, gold prices jumped $62.10, or 3.8%, or $1,710. As an aside, according to the opinion of a Breakout guest this very day, the metal is heading to $2,500 an ounce. Meanwhile, silver was up more than 2% to $39 an ounce. In the Treasury market, seen as a place of safety in times of larger-than-normal uncertainty, the 10-year note was climbing 1-24/32, lowering the yield to 2.36%, and the 30-year bond was bolting up 3-7/32 to take the yield down to 3.67%. Both are gigantic moves, the size of which is seldom seen.

The recent sell-off in stocks, not just the latest decline, has been driven by a combination of factors that aren't likely to evaporate overnight -- a series of disappointing economic reports in the U.S. before the S&P downgrade, worries about European debt, political fighting in Washington. The bottom line is that professional traders go where the opportunity is the best and where the trade makes the most sense.
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The takeaway: Stocks are collapsing, Treasuries are worth more and more, and Gold is through the roof.

Somebody is getting very rich on all three, and it isn't you and it isn't me. But somebody is.

We're in a new Bubble Economy; the race to the bottom is on in earnest.

It'll be pretty grim once the summer break is over.

Pretty damn grim I'd say.

And Americans Are OK With This?

The 22 Statistics Proving the Extermination of the Middle Class

(Note: From 2010; it's worse now)

•83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
•61 percent of Americans "always or usually"live paycheck to paycheck,which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
•66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
•36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
•A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
•24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
•Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009,which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
•Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
•For the first time in U.S. history,banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
•In 1950,the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000,that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
•As of 2007,the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
•Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
•In the United States,the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
•The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
•In America today,the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
•More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs,which are often very low paying.
•or the first time in U.S. history,more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps,and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
•This is what American workers now must compete against:in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
•Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 –the highest rate in 20 years.
•Despite the financial crisis,the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

All hail Brian Rogers making a go of it nevertheless up north in NM.

Was Markos Made the Fool?

It's hard to say what happened with Markos and the Research 2000 polls he commissioned for over 18 months.

He's filed suit and I understand the pollster is counter-suing. Some statistics geeks have had at the R2K formulae and declared them suspect, but anyone who was watching the results being headlined daily at Daily KOS had to be thinking at the very least that Markos was getting what he paid for, poll results that pleased his fancy.

I go back a long way with dKos. My user ID is 501; it would be lower but for the fact that my computer at the time was acting up and it wouldn't let me sign up to the Scoop site when the changeover happened, and I had to wait till the next day -- as I recall. It was a long time ago. At any rate, I was using a different screen name at the time, one that I still maintain for certain very limited purposes. I was active at dKos almost from the beginning of its emergence, made what I thought of as a number of online friends there, but most of them, like me, have since departed the place. In my case, I cut back commenting to nearly nothing after Markos pretty much turned the site over to the notoriously abusive Armando Llorens (aka "Big Tent Democrat") who was simply allowed to run wild for a couple of years -- until I guess he had to go into rehab. He eventually managed to get his ass banned by Markos, but only after an enormous number of complaints about his atrocious behavior had been sent to Markos. So far as anybody knew, he ignored them all. Armando was his man. And nobody could say anything against him.

Very early on, Markos declared himself a "poll junkie," and he showed an almost child-like belief in the "magic" of polls. I was puzzled. Markos clearly didn't know anything about polls or polling, and he would often misuse the results of this or that poll to reinforce whatever political belief or candidate he was promoting at the moment, even if the polls actually showed something quite different than what he believed. He would routinely tout polls that reinforced his belief, denounce polls that showed something else, and he seemed to be completely ignorant of how polling was done, how the raw data was massaged or manipulated, let alone how questions could control outcome, and how really slimy some pollsters were.

It was all "magic" to him. And he seemed to love the notion that polls could accurately predict the future. Of course, they often didn't, but that was a mere detail.

When he hooked up with Research 2000, I thought maybe he had learned something what with all his heady talk of "internals" and "crosstabs" and such. But then, the results he touted from R2K seemed to be intended to promote Obama and Democrats when there was no other indication that the public was quite so enamored.

He was getting what he was paying for, much like the clients of other polling outfits got what they were paying for. A tool with which to market political product.

But that's not to say the R2K polls were "fraudulent" as Markos is now claiming they were. My suspicion was they that they were designed to produce the results they did, much like other polls are, and that they were valid enough within their strict boundaries.

When Markos dropped R2K, the rationale was that the polling wasn't sufficiently close to voting results, particularly in the Halter/Lincoln Primary Thing in Arkansas. R2K's polling was off, but that's not unusual in the polling business. What seemed to make Markos wake up to the idea that something was out of whack with R2K was the fact that Nate Silver declared R2K's results to be essentially an outlier, not just on the Halter Thing but through and through, and thus unreliable.

The bias and unreliability of polls in general has long been a feature of the trade, however, not a bug. What was so special about R2K's bias and failings? That is still not clear, although statistics geeks have come up with plenty of charts and graphs that suggest that R2K may not have been doing any actual polling at all but might have been simply pulling numbers out of the air.

If that is so, wouldn't it be amazing? Actually, no. Not necessarily. Since they were consistently producing results Markos wanted to see -- much as other polling outfits do for their clients -- how they got those results really doesn't matter.

Polling in general really isn't reputable any more, if it ever was. "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics," isn't just a catch-phrase. Markos' child-like faith in polls and polling, in contrast to his general distrust and skepticism of nearly everything else, seemed odd years ago, and this episode has a distinctly odd aroma to it.

There are apparently those who are developing an elaborate conspiracy theory about Markos and R2K. That it was all a scam from the outset, and Markos was in on it, and he would still be using R2K to scam the public if it weren't for the "statistical anomalies" that were being pointed out far and wide. Under the circumstances, he has to make a big show of denouncing R2K and suing their ass; otherwise Markos's reputation is in the toilet, too.

Well, I think that goes too far. Way too far. Manipulated polls are a fact of life, have been for a very long time. So has using manipulated polls to market political products. Anyone who puts their faith in polls and polling because it supports their political ideology is, in my opinion, a fool. Rather than scamming, it is more likely that Markos was merely fooled by polls that showed what he wanted to see.

On the other hand, R2K may be a complete fraud.