No organisation can be held responsible for the actions of an individual. BLM or police. But police unions are supposed to represent all police officers, and are voted on by all members of the organisation.
And police unions have systematically blocked accountability for police. They have blocked efforts to remove bad apples.
If all people identified with BLM held elections for a leader, and then that leader blocked prosecution of rioters, then the two organisations would be equivalent
I agree. I'd only add that peaceful protest is a precious right for all Americans, and there is residual harm to that precious right when peaceful turns violent.
"You could argue that that police departments are much more formal organizations than BLM protests, so we can reasonably hold them to higher standards. Fair enough. On the other hand, though, post-Floyd BLM violence was much more blatant than police brutality has been for many decades. So while many cops could semi-plausibly plead, “I had no idea this kind of thing was going on,” few protestors could have said the same."
This is only true if you haven't been paying attention to or ignoring all the blatant police brutality that has been occurring for decades. Additionally, the police spend a lot of time covering up their terrible behavior and have created vast legal structures to do so.
This statement doesn't live up to your normal high-level of intellectual rigor.
This is a very belated comment, but I think that the the frequency of police misconduct is more common than many realize. In a DOJ supported survey, more than two-thirds (67.4 percent) reported that police officers who report incidents of misconduct are likely to be given a “cold shoulder” by fellow officers, and a majority of police officers agreed or strongly agreed that it is not unusual for police officers to “turn a blind eye” to other officers’ improper conduct. 61% said that police officers don't always report serious criminal violations involving abuse of authority by fellow officers. Only 16% of respondents said that officers in their department never use more force than is necessary for an arrest. (Source: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/181312.pdf). The study is from 2000, but I'm not aware of a more recent study.
There are many anecdotes in which cops who blew the whistle on their colleagues crimes were subjected to persistent threats and abuse. These indicate that police departments are environments in which criminal abuse is common, and accountability by fellow officers is rare.
Police officers are also probably much better equipped to report wrongdoing by other officers than BLM protesters are to report wrongdoing by other protesters. The officers are much likelier to know the identities of the perpetrators and the methods to report them, for example.
I shared brief correspondence with Stephen Koch who wrote the afterward to the '89 print of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. We talked about Dickens' view of of guilt (guilt resides only in some specific guilty action rather than who he or she is) verses collective guilt or identity politics.
Yet what Koch said and what Bryan seems to acknowledge is that the proponents of collective guilt are not *all* wrong. Groups do oppress groups, and what should be the moral consequences of that?
Only tangentially related, but this reminds of a topic on which I sharply disagree with the received libertarian opinion. It's also one where I'd be eager to see your appraisal in a future post. I have high confidence in this claim:
* America is markedly under-incarcerated. Specifically, the number of people currently incarcerated in America is well below the optimal number.
While I agree that there are lots of laws that shouldn't exist and that there are many people in prison that should be released because the law they broke is immoral, I think there are far more people who are not in prison that should be. My belief is based mainly on a couple of empirical claims and at least one under-appreciated moral claim.
The key empirical claims are
* People released from prison have extremely high recidivism rates, even if we restrict ourselves to crimes that most libertarians agree should be crimes
* There are no known approaches to rehabilitation that are very effective and scalable. (The literature seems to sort of mirror early childhood education interventions. You only get good results with small N and the fadeout is swift and vicious.) This appears to be just as true in Europe as it is in the U.S.
The under-appreciated moral claims is this:
* Since government severely prohibits what its citizens are allowed to do to protect themselves from crime, it has an exceedingly strong obligation to protect them from predictable harms from crime.
This seems pretty intuitive. Regular citizens' ability to deter crime is greatly curtailed in many ways. For example, suppose I put a GPS locator on my car and it's stolen, and then I go to retrieve it from the thief. If during my retrieval the thief attacks me and I use deadly force to defend myself, in most jurisdictions I'm almost certainly getting prosecuted because, even if my use of force was justified by this attack in isolation, the law will say I should have had a reasonable expectation that the retrieval would lead to a violent encounter. I could conjure many other examples like this.
Regardless of whether we think these restrictions are justified or not, there's a strong presumption that their existence should make government especially beholden to protect me from crime.
White Americans do hold on to collective guilt for what they have done to other races, so there is a flaw in one of the assumptions in this argument. When one side continues to benefit from past transgressions, the guilt remains.
If someone is willing to condemn the bad apples on their side, I won't assign them any "guilt points." But not everyone is condemning the bad apples.
Look at someone like Trevor Noah. He's the face of a syndicated TV series, so he can't outright endorse the BLM riots. But if you read between the lines of his "social contract" monologue, you can see which side he's on. Same thing with John Oliver. He spent 32 minutes of his "Police" segment avoiding the subject of "is arson bad", but at the end of the episode he shared a video of a deranged lunatic calling for black people to "burn this bitch to ground."
This is a discussion of guilt and blame of individuals, but the protests were more about institutional change. While the protesters may or may not have had reasonable ideas about what changes to make, there is ample evidence that poor training, recruitment, police culture, unions, and lack of accountability result not only in newsworthy deaths but more frequent routine humiliations of otherwise peaceful minority citizens. Citizens who, I might add, are on average less powerful and therefore less capable to challenge police behavior in an effective manner (i.e. through legal action). Add that to a broader culture of stereotyping and a political culture that promotes "getting tough on crime", and the outcome is largely predictable.
There are a couple of ways to disagree with what you wrote (not saying I disagree, though).
First, you can argue that there's not just a fairness-element here (whom is it fair to blame?) but also a consequentialist bit. The consequentialist bit goes:
1. Left-wing goals are good for society, right-wing goals are bad;
2. Having a norm where people are blameworthy simply for not vocally supporting left-wing goals will be good for society, as it will encourage more adherence to left-wing goals;
3. Having a norm where people are blameworthy simply for not vocally condemning right-wing goals will be good for society, as it will encourage less adherence to right-wing goals;
4. Therefore, we should tell white people that they're collectively guilty for whatever violence it is that police do, and we should tell non-white people that they're not guilty for any violence that a left-wing organization does, not matter how closely involved they are with that organization.
I mean, I absolutely detest this argument, but I think it describes a lot of how people are actually thinking.
Another, probably more defensible approach is to figure out all the ways in which we rely on notions of collective guilt (this comes up a lot in voting but arguably also when corporations are fined for the actions of the people who lead them) and all the ways in which we don't (this comes up a lot in the legal system for criminal cases) and try to see whether your student's position would be well-supported.
Old news. But to develop the riots vs lives calculus further, how many riots would equal one human life? Doesn’t policing with greater respect to human life also secondarily reduce the chances of riots in response to bad policing? What is the cost to society of some portion constantly living in fear of police violence vs. some portion (maybe overlapping by the way) with fear of sporadic riot violence?
What percent of protests turn into violent riots? (My hunch is very few but that, like the weather, a certain amount of forecasting is possible.) nor are all riots equal. Certainly a violent riot threatening the functioning of democracy in our Capitol is worse than one threatening a used car lot after hours, yes? By orders of magnitude.
In other words, is there is a Pareto distribution in badness of apples?
This position doesn't solve the problem of trying to discourage certain actions by small population within a group of people that hold power (are in majority or influential). Perhaps we need to do more than just focus on the perpetrator. How do we solve systemic ignorance or inability to care about the gravity of injustice done on the minority? (Not naming specific names, since I am not an American).
TLDR: This position is just "morally safe" but may not change the status quo of how easy it is to do something bad and get away with it.
I think the big difference is police unions.
No organisation can be held responsible for the actions of an individual. BLM or police. But police unions are supposed to represent all police officers, and are voted on by all members of the organisation.
And police unions have systematically blocked accountability for police. They have blocked efforts to remove bad apples.
If all people identified with BLM held elections for a leader, and then that leader blocked prosecution of rioters, then the two organisations would be equivalent
" I suspect this position will displease almost everyone, but how is it wrong?"
It's like your entire world view in a nutshell Bryan.
I agree. I'd only add that peaceful protest is a precious right for all Americans, and there is residual harm to that precious right when peaceful turns violent.
"You could argue that that police departments are much more formal organizations than BLM protests, so we can reasonably hold them to higher standards. Fair enough. On the other hand, though, post-Floyd BLM violence was much more blatant than police brutality has been for many decades. So while many cops could semi-plausibly plead, “I had no idea this kind of thing was going on,” few protestors could have said the same."
This is only true if you haven't been paying attention to or ignoring all the blatant police brutality that has been occurring for decades. Additionally, the police spend a lot of time covering up their terrible behavior and have created vast legal structures to do so.
This statement doesn't live up to your normal high-level of intellectual rigor.
How useful are "discussions" in which few people are free to speak their mind if they dissent?
This is a very belated comment, but I think that the the frequency of police misconduct is more common than many realize. In a DOJ supported survey, more than two-thirds (67.4 percent) reported that police officers who report incidents of misconduct are likely to be given a “cold shoulder” by fellow officers, and a majority of police officers agreed or strongly agreed that it is not unusual for police officers to “turn a blind eye” to other officers’ improper conduct. 61% said that police officers don't always report serious criminal violations involving abuse of authority by fellow officers. Only 16% of respondents said that officers in their department never use more force than is necessary for an arrest. (Source: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/181312.pdf). The study is from 2000, but I'm not aware of a more recent study.
There are many anecdotes in which cops who blew the whistle on their colleagues crimes were subjected to persistent threats and abuse. These indicate that police departments are environments in which criminal abuse is common, and accountability by fellow officers is rare.
Police officers are also probably much better equipped to report wrongdoing by other officers than BLM protesters are to report wrongdoing by other protesters. The officers are much likelier to know the identities of the perpetrators and the methods to report them, for example.
I shared brief correspondence with Stephen Koch who wrote the afterward to the '89 print of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. We talked about Dickens' view of of guilt (guilt resides only in some specific guilty action rather than who he or she is) verses collective guilt or identity politics.
Yet what Koch said and what Bryan seems to acknowledge is that the proponents of collective guilt are not *all* wrong. Groups do oppress groups, and what should be the moral consequences of that?
Only tangentially related, but this reminds of a topic on which I sharply disagree with the received libertarian opinion. It's also one where I'd be eager to see your appraisal in a future post. I have high confidence in this claim:
* America is markedly under-incarcerated. Specifically, the number of people currently incarcerated in America is well below the optimal number.
While I agree that there are lots of laws that shouldn't exist and that there are many people in prison that should be released because the law they broke is immoral, I think there are far more people who are not in prison that should be. My belief is based mainly on a couple of empirical claims and at least one under-appreciated moral claim.
The key empirical claims are
* People released from prison have extremely high recidivism rates, even if we restrict ourselves to crimes that most libertarians agree should be crimes
* There are no known approaches to rehabilitation that are very effective and scalable. (The literature seems to sort of mirror early childhood education interventions. You only get good results with small N and the fadeout is swift and vicious.) This appears to be just as true in Europe as it is in the U.S.
The under-appreciated moral claims is this:
* Since government severely prohibits what its citizens are allowed to do to protect themselves from crime, it has an exceedingly strong obligation to protect them from predictable harms from crime.
This seems pretty intuitive. Regular citizens' ability to deter crime is greatly curtailed in many ways. For example, suppose I put a GPS locator on my car and it's stolen, and then I go to retrieve it from the thief. If during my retrieval the thief attacks me and I use deadly force to defend myself, in most jurisdictions I'm almost certainly getting prosecuted because, even if my use of force was justified by this attack in isolation, the law will say I should have had a reasonable expectation that the retrieval would lead to a violent encounter. I could conjure many other examples like this.
Regardless of whether we think these restrictions are justified or not, there's a strong presumption that their existence should make government especially beholden to protect me from crime.
White Americans do hold on to collective guilt for what they have done to other races, so there is a flaw in one of the assumptions in this argument. When one side continues to benefit from past transgressions, the guilt remains.
That works for me.
If someone is willing to condemn the bad apples on their side, I won't assign them any "guilt points." But not everyone is condemning the bad apples.
Look at someone like Trevor Noah. He's the face of a syndicated TV series, so he can't outright endorse the BLM riots. But if you read between the lines of his "social contract" monologue, you can see which side he's on. Same thing with John Oliver. He spent 32 minutes of his "Police" segment avoiding the subject of "is arson bad", but at the end of the episode he shared a video of a deranged lunatic calling for black people to "burn this bitch to ground."
At some point, you're an enabler.
This is a discussion of guilt and blame of individuals, but the protests were more about institutional change. While the protesters may or may not have had reasonable ideas about what changes to make, there is ample evidence that poor training, recruitment, police culture, unions, and lack of accountability result not only in newsworthy deaths but more frequent routine humiliations of otherwise peaceful minority citizens. Citizens who, I might add, are on average less powerful and therefore less capable to challenge police behavior in an effective manner (i.e. through legal action). Add that to a broader culture of stereotyping and a political culture that promotes "getting tough on crime", and the outcome is largely predictable.
There are a couple of ways to disagree with what you wrote (not saying I disagree, though).
First, you can argue that there's not just a fairness-element here (whom is it fair to blame?) but also a consequentialist bit. The consequentialist bit goes:
1. Left-wing goals are good for society, right-wing goals are bad;
2. Having a norm where people are blameworthy simply for not vocally supporting left-wing goals will be good for society, as it will encourage more adherence to left-wing goals;
3. Having a norm where people are blameworthy simply for not vocally condemning right-wing goals will be good for society, as it will encourage less adherence to right-wing goals;
4. Therefore, we should tell white people that they're collectively guilty for whatever violence it is that police do, and we should tell non-white people that they're not guilty for any violence that a left-wing organization does, not matter how closely involved they are with that organization.
I mean, I absolutely detest this argument, but I think it describes a lot of how people are actually thinking.
Another, probably more defensible approach is to figure out all the ways in which we rely on notions of collective guilt (this comes up a lot in voting but arguably also when corporations are fined for the actions of the people who lead them) and all the ways in which we don't (this comes up a lot in the legal system for criminal cases) and try to see whether your student's position would be well-supported.
Old news. But to develop the riots vs lives calculus further, how many riots would equal one human life? Doesn’t policing with greater respect to human life also secondarily reduce the chances of riots in response to bad policing? What is the cost to society of some portion constantly living in fear of police violence vs. some portion (maybe overlapping by the way) with fear of sporadic riot violence?
What percent of protests turn into violent riots? (My hunch is very few but that, like the weather, a certain amount of forecasting is possible.) nor are all riots equal. Certainly a violent riot threatening the functioning of democracy in our Capitol is worse than one threatening a used car lot after hours, yes? By orders of magnitude.
In other words, is there is a Pareto distribution in badness of apples?
What ever happened to living by the Golden Rule?
This position doesn't solve the problem of trying to discourage certain actions by small population within a group of people that hold power (are in majority or influential). Perhaps we need to do more than just focus on the perpetrator. How do we solve systemic ignorance or inability to care about the gravity of injustice done on the minority? (Not naming specific names, since I am not an American).
TLDR: This position is just "morally safe" but may not change the status quo of how easy it is to do something bad and get away with it.