Radley: Thank you for this series. Incredible, important work. A real service to the discourse of a kind that few people ever make.
There is just one element I wish was not in this latest piece and that is the casual swipes you take against the backlash against DEI.
It sounds from your description like Joye Carter is doing important work. I know for sure that Jennifer Eberhardt at Stanford is doing important work with police departments as well. I am huge fan of Eberhardt. I believe that if everyone in American read her amazing book "Biased" (along Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind") our country would be a far, far better place. Doubtless you have Carter and Eberhardt's type of work in mind when you're pushing back against the criticism of DEI.
But while I share your belief in the importance of this work, my own experience and research about DEI programs in the corporate workplace and everything I have read and heard about them in universities makes me believe that the criticisms of of these programs is warranted and that most of them are at best useless and at worst genuinely harmful.
So I think when you casually defend "DEI" in the way that you did you're making the exact same mistake Rufo did in the opposite direction. Both of you rhetorically combine all DEI programs into a single bucket. When Rufo does it, he is trying to discredit the good along with the bad. When you do it, you're (hopefully unintentionally) defending the bad along with the good. So I would hope going forward you'll be more precise in your defense of constructive DEI initiatives.
I paid for a subscription after I read the first two parts of this series for free. Thank you for excellent work. Some thoughts...
1. You were right to criticize Coleman Hughes. He (and Loury/McWhorter) promoted an obviously biased and flawed documentary. They should be called to account and you did that in a rational, even-handed manner relying on evidence.
2. Roland Fryer got famous a few years ago after he published a paper that found no difference in the incidece of deaths in custody between black and white victims. What I'd love to hear more about is the difference in lower level harrassment for black vs. white citizens in major urban centers. I think this ongoing, low level police mistreatment has a significant affect on the social development and socialization of young, African American males. It contributes to a distrust of authority and reinforces the widely held belief that the lives of young black men are defined and constrained by the color of their skin. I'm sure experts have expounded on the effect of police harrassment in poorer, inner city African American communities. I'd love to read them and hear your opinion about them
Of all the incredible insight and deeply researched conclusions presented here and in this series, a few things stand out for me:
—why do police often insist on excessive restraint when the suspect is not resisting in any way?
—why do police use tasers or pepper spray or other dangerous tools when there is no risk or bad behavior at issue?
—during the 2020 protests, a Twitter account documented hundreds of video examples of police engaging in violent and/or unnecessary physical responses to apparently harmless protestors - what causes that routine response?
I don’t understand. Just do the job in a logical and professional way. This consistent desire and reflex for some to go too far just boggles the mind, especially with what is at stake for both the victim and the perpetrator.
I think many people think there are a lot of “close cases”, where a situation evolves in an idiosyncratic way. But that is not really the case. I am hopeful we are moving in a positive direction with these behaviors - certainly RB’s work contributes to that likelihood.
I am an oral surgeon and routinely do IV anesthesia in my office. This means that I routinely straddle the line between conscious and unconscious, always ready to step in if we go over into unconscious. So, I am very well schooled in breathing and monitoring for breathing. It is Anesthesia 101 to know that the amount of weight on the chest adversely affects breathing. We are literally taught on day 1 to sit the patient up if they are having trouble breathing solely to get the weight off their chest. We are taught on day 2 to be very reluctant to offer IV anesthesia, without putting a breathing tube in, to people who have a lot of upper body weight. This is because we KNOW that we will have difficulty keeping them breathing while lying them back to work on them specifically because of the excess weight on their chest.
It is not a huge stretch of the imagination to think that putting a full grown police officer, weighed down with all of his gear, on top of a chest would also lead to the person having trouble breathing. The fact that people who purportedly call themselves doctor suggest that the excess weight of a police officer laden down with equipment is not related to trouble breathing is offensive. Honestly, it would be laughable if people weren't dying.
Another thought to consider is how to safely provide anesthesia to a prone patient. There are times in the operating room that the surgeon needs to work on the back of a patient. This means the patient needs to be upside down (prone). Some of these surgeries are quick and some are very, very long. No matter how long the anticipated procedure is, however, the anesthesia team goes to incredible lengths to flip the patient (after the breathing tube is in!). The monitoring of these patients is extreme because this is long recognized as a dangerous position, especially in people not breathing as they would normally do. For the police to so casually flip people, especially those who may be on drugs (by definition have the potential to have altered breathing) and then hold them with weight on their chest is basically just asking to hurt or kill people.
I found this to be the most convincing and best written of this series. The way to combat misinformation (and outright lying) is with good information. This series proves that point.
I confess that the excited delirium section managed to shock me, even though I thought I was somewhat familiar with the applications for BS exoneration. Good fucking grief.
As for the larger issue, I agree with many of your points, with some caveats. While racial biases in policing unquestionably exist (& as you say in the comments, the Roland Fryer story supports it, even though many conservatives have misreported it as showing no bias), the BLM narrative is crude and simplistic & creates its own dangers. I remember a NYT op-ed shortly after the George Floyd murder in which the author, a black New Yorker, literally feels every time he leaves home that he may not come back alive because a cop will shoot him. Sorry, but that's insane. (He's far more likely to be fatally hit by a car.) Of course this is partly related to personal experience and cultural history, but a climate that ratchets up such fears to such a degree isn't helping anyone (I would say the same of overwrought claims about women being in constant danger of rape). White women who have called the police (including campus police), rightly or wrongly, over conflicts with black women have been accused of literally trying to murder them. (IIRC, a black woman is about 20 times less likely to be fatally shot by police than a white male.) In some cases, riots happened based on a narrative that turned out to be patently false (e.g. the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin). And you're probably aware of the Travis Campbell study showing that more BLM protests were subsequently correlated with about 200 fewer police homicides but about 3,000 more non-police homicides. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/opinion/black-lives-matter-depolicing-homicides.html I don't think there's a straightforward trajectory of blame, obviously, but it's something to ponder.
Lastly, I think the "systemic racism" perspective is often unhelpful because it fails to look at more specific causes of racial biases in policing and weed out the "bad apples." My guess is that part of the problem is a general tendency among (many) cops to take a cruel, punitive attitude toward civilians they see as either defiant toward police or as "lowlifes" (not only lawbreakers of any kind but people who don't conform to the social order). This attitude is probably often correlated with racism because the "lowlifes" are profiled as disproportionately black. Another part of the problem is straight-up conscious racism, as in your anecdote about the Somali teens. Talk of racism being "baked into" American policing, or being present by design, treats it as almost independent of individual will and agency. It's not, and it can and should be addressed.
I have more thoughts but I'll leave it at that! Thanks again for the series.
This has inspired me to subscribe to my first substack. As a retired physician (department chair) I really appreciate the quality of medical knowledge you have acquired and used in these pieces. Before I was a physician I was a Navy Corpsman. I mostly worked on psych wards and then worked in mental health emergency centers to help pay my way through school. I have helped retain hundreds of violent psych patients, many of them on drugs. Even back when i was doing this we knew it was risky to sit on someone's back for very long and we never put a knee in someone's back unless we were overwhelmed and then only until we regained control.
Glad to see that the BS about delirium has finally been dropped by the ED docs. Never believed and have never seen it in all my years. The claims about drug levels have been so transparently false I have been ashamed, but not surprised, that anyone in the medical field would support them.
Outstanding work, Mr. Balko. I'm so glad I subscribed. You and your wife are one hell of a reporting duo.
One thing I was reminded about the Michael Brown case when reading this amazes me. His killing was justified once you accept that his walking in the street required a police response. The kid had literally just shoplifted but the police likely would have never even investigated that actual crime. Yet they were very good at harassing folks for walking in the street or other harmless junk. Amazing.
So, Coleman, Bari & Co. have (apparently) opted to abandon this disagreement, and instead lean on something as weak and dubious as, "We invited Radley to be a guest on our podcast but he declined."
Wow. Just wow. It is what it is (I guess).
I recall how quickly Hughes responded to a negative review of his book at currentaffairs.org. He proffered a full-throated, parsed out and lengthy written response--literally the opposite of this--and it only took him a week or so.
Was his response here different because Radley's critique was less serious? Obviously not.
I have enjoyed being a subscriber since I first caught wind of the The Watch (was it Fall 2023?). As with most if not all the work on The Watch, this series was thorough, shocking, and enlightening. Thank you.
Thank you so much for the work you do! I feel like the oppression and abuse of marginalized people does not get the attention from the media that it should. Your continued focus on these concerns is so important!
Thanks for doing this series. I just subscribed because of it. I feel silly making a formatting request in the comment section of an important topic, but... is it possible for you to tweak the layout so that links are underlined or the link-color is lighter? I have red-green color deficiency, and it is hard for me to find the dark red links in the text.
Thank you Radley for this 3 part series. Saved parts 2, 2 update, and 3 for a Saturday morning to give my full attention. You need a tip jar for subscribers like myself who think this kind of work justifies more. Maybe I missed it.
As for the DEI drawing some rebuke, I would be interested in seeing data on whether the criticisms come more from non-marginalized folks. It seems that way, but it could be confirmation bias. I read a quote once about decentering is not discrimination.
Radley: Thank you for this series. Incredible, important work. A real service to the discourse of a kind that few people ever make.
There is just one element I wish was not in this latest piece and that is the casual swipes you take against the backlash against DEI.
It sounds from your description like Joye Carter is doing important work. I know for sure that Jennifer Eberhardt at Stanford is doing important work with police departments as well. I am huge fan of Eberhardt. I believe that if everyone in American read her amazing book "Biased" (along Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind") our country would be a far, far better place. Doubtless you have Carter and Eberhardt's type of work in mind when you're pushing back against the criticism of DEI.
But while I share your belief in the importance of this work, my own experience and research about DEI programs in the corporate workplace and everything I have read and heard about them in universities makes me believe that the criticisms of of these programs is warranted and that most of them are at best useless and at worst genuinely harmful.
So I think when you casually defend "DEI" in the way that you did you're making the exact same mistake Rufo did in the opposite direction. Both of you rhetorically combine all DEI programs into a single bucket. When Rufo does it, he is trying to discredit the good along with the bad. When you do it, you're (hopefully unintentionally) defending the bad along with the good. So I would hope going forward you'll be more precise in your defense of constructive DEI initiatives.
This whole series was so well done that I had to become a subscriber and support your work.
I paid for a subscription after I read the first two parts of this series for free. Thank you for excellent work. Some thoughts...
1. You were right to criticize Coleman Hughes. He (and Loury/McWhorter) promoted an obviously biased and flawed documentary. They should be called to account and you did that in a rational, even-handed manner relying on evidence.
2. Roland Fryer got famous a few years ago after he published a paper that found no difference in the incidece of deaths in custody between black and white victims. What I'd love to hear more about is the difference in lower level harrassment for black vs. white citizens in major urban centers. I think this ongoing, low level police mistreatment has a significant affect on the social development and socialization of young, African American males. It contributes to a distrust of authority and reinforces the widely held belief that the lives of young black men are defined and constrained by the color of their skin. I'm sure experts have expounded on the effect of police harrassment in poorer, inner city African American communities. I'd love to read them and hear your opinion about them
Thanks for an excellent series.
Of all the incredible insight and deeply researched conclusions presented here and in this series, a few things stand out for me:
—why do police often insist on excessive restraint when the suspect is not resisting in any way?
—why do police use tasers or pepper spray or other dangerous tools when there is no risk or bad behavior at issue?
—during the 2020 protests, a Twitter account documented hundreds of video examples of police engaging in violent and/or unnecessary physical responses to apparently harmless protestors - what causes that routine response?
I don’t understand. Just do the job in a logical and professional way. This consistent desire and reflex for some to go too far just boggles the mind, especially with what is at stake for both the victim and the perpetrator.
I think many people think there are a lot of “close cases”, where a situation evolves in an idiosyncratic way. But that is not really the case. I am hopeful we are moving in a positive direction with these behaviors - certainly RB’s work contributes to that likelihood.
I am an oral surgeon and routinely do IV anesthesia in my office. This means that I routinely straddle the line between conscious and unconscious, always ready to step in if we go over into unconscious. So, I am very well schooled in breathing and monitoring for breathing. It is Anesthesia 101 to know that the amount of weight on the chest adversely affects breathing. We are literally taught on day 1 to sit the patient up if they are having trouble breathing solely to get the weight off their chest. We are taught on day 2 to be very reluctant to offer IV anesthesia, without putting a breathing tube in, to people who have a lot of upper body weight. This is because we KNOW that we will have difficulty keeping them breathing while lying them back to work on them specifically because of the excess weight on their chest.
It is not a huge stretch of the imagination to think that putting a full grown police officer, weighed down with all of his gear, on top of a chest would also lead to the person having trouble breathing. The fact that people who purportedly call themselves doctor suggest that the excess weight of a police officer laden down with equipment is not related to trouble breathing is offensive. Honestly, it would be laughable if people weren't dying.
Another thought to consider is how to safely provide anesthesia to a prone patient. There are times in the operating room that the surgeon needs to work on the back of a patient. This means the patient needs to be upside down (prone). Some of these surgeries are quick and some are very, very long. No matter how long the anticipated procedure is, however, the anesthesia team goes to incredible lengths to flip the patient (after the breathing tube is in!). The monitoring of these patients is extreme because this is long recognized as a dangerous position, especially in people not breathing as they would normally do. For the police to so casually flip people, especially those who may be on drugs (by definition have the potential to have altered breathing) and then hold them with weight on their chest is basically just asking to hurt or kill people.
I found this to be the most convincing and best written of this series. The way to combat misinformation (and outright lying) is with good information. This series proves that point.
THANK YOU for all the work writing this series.
I confess that the excited delirium section managed to shock me, even though I thought I was somewhat familiar with the applications for BS exoneration. Good fucking grief.
Radley, I really appreciate this series (and just subscribed). Don't know if you've seen but I also wrote about it recently in my Newsday column. https://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/cathy-young/woke-anti-woke-derek-chauvin-george-floyd-i0un1yec (unpaywalled link: https://archive.is/u6kb0) As someone who has found Coleman Hughes's work interesting and smart in the past, I'm really disappointed in his response. (Loury and McWhorter really set the standard for how to respond to criticism.)
As for the larger issue, I agree with many of your points, with some caveats. While racial biases in policing unquestionably exist (& as you say in the comments, the Roland Fryer story supports it, even though many conservatives have misreported it as showing no bias), the BLM narrative is crude and simplistic & creates its own dangers. I remember a NYT op-ed shortly after the George Floyd murder in which the author, a black New Yorker, literally feels every time he leaves home that he may not come back alive because a cop will shoot him. Sorry, but that's insane. (He's far more likely to be fatally hit by a car.) Of course this is partly related to personal experience and cultural history, but a climate that ratchets up such fears to such a degree isn't helping anyone (I would say the same of overwrought claims about women being in constant danger of rape). White women who have called the police (including campus police), rightly or wrongly, over conflicts with black women have been accused of literally trying to murder them. (IIRC, a black woman is about 20 times less likely to be fatally shot by police than a white male.) In some cases, riots happened based on a narrative that turned out to be patently false (e.g. the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin). And you're probably aware of the Travis Campbell study showing that more BLM protests were subsequently correlated with about 200 fewer police homicides but about 3,000 more non-police homicides. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/opinion/black-lives-matter-depolicing-homicides.html I don't think there's a straightforward trajectory of blame, obviously, but it's something to ponder.
Lastly, I think the "systemic racism" perspective is often unhelpful because it fails to look at more specific causes of racial biases in policing and weed out the "bad apples." My guess is that part of the problem is a general tendency among (many) cops to take a cruel, punitive attitude toward civilians they see as either defiant toward police or as "lowlifes" (not only lawbreakers of any kind but people who don't conform to the social order). This attitude is probably often correlated with racism because the "lowlifes" are profiled as disproportionately black. Another part of the problem is straight-up conscious racism, as in your anecdote about the Somali teens. Talk of racism being "baked into" American policing, or being present by design, treats it as almost independent of individual will and agency. It's not, and it can and should be addressed.
I have more thoughts but I'll leave it at that! Thanks again for the series.
This has inspired me to subscribe to my first substack. As a retired physician (department chair) I really appreciate the quality of medical knowledge you have acquired and used in these pieces. Before I was a physician I was a Navy Corpsman. I mostly worked on psych wards and then worked in mental health emergency centers to help pay my way through school. I have helped retain hundreds of violent psych patients, many of them on drugs. Even back when i was doing this we knew it was risky to sit on someone's back for very long and we never put a knee in someone's back unless we were overwhelmed and then only until we regained control.
Glad to see that the BS about delirium has finally been dropped by the ED docs. Never believed and have never seen it in all my years. The claims about drug levels have been so transparently false I have been ashamed, but not surprised, that anyone in the medical field would support them.
Steve
I'm a paid subscriber now. Solely because of one hell of a series entitled "The Retconning of George Floyd".
A few smart-ish people have attempted to debunk this debunker--they have failed thus far.
Like *seriously* failed.
Outstanding work, Mr. Balko. I'm so glad I subscribed. You and your wife are one hell of a reporting duo.
One thing I was reminded about the Michael Brown case when reading this amazes me. His killing was justified once you accept that his walking in the street required a police response. The kid had literally just shoplifted but the police likely would have never even investigated that actual crime. Yet they were very good at harassing folks for walking in the street or other harmless junk. Amazing.
So, Coleman, Bari & Co. have (apparently) opted to abandon this disagreement, and instead lean on something as weak and dubious as, "We invited Radley to be a guest on our podcast but he declined."
Wow. Just wow. It is what it is (I guess).
I recall how quickly Hughes responded to a negative review of his book at currentaffairs.org. He proffered a full-throated, parsed out and lengthy written response--literally the opposite of this--and it only took him a week or so.
Was his response here different because Radley's critique was less serious? Obviously not.
Sad. Just sad.
I have enjoyed being a subscriber since I first caught wind of the The Watch (was it Fall 2023?). As with most if not all the work on The Watch, this series was thorough, shocking, and enlightening. Thank you.
Amazing work as always.
just for fun-
'The aphorism they’re butchering is “one bad apple spoils the bunch.” If you don’t remove the bad apples, the rot spreads.'
Perhaps they are instead remembering Donny Osmond who told us, "one bad apple dont' spoil the whole bunch, girl!"
Thank you so much for the work you do! I feel like the oppression and abuse of marginalized people does not get the attention from the media that it should. Your continued focus on these concerns is so important!
Thanks for doing this series. I just subscribed because of it. I feel silly making a formatting request in the comment section of an important topic, but... is it possible for you to tweak the layout so that links are underlined or the link-color is lighter? I have red-green color deficiency, and it is hard for me to find the dark red links in the text.
Thank you Radley for this 3 part series. Saved parts 2, 2 update, and 3 for a Saturday morning to give my full attention. You need a tip jar for subscribers like myself who think this kind of work justifies more. Maybe I missed it.
As for the DEI drawing some rebuke, I would be interested in seeing data on whether the criticisms come more from non-marginalized folks. It seems that way, but it could be confirmation bias. I read a quote once about decentering is not discrimination.
Thank you again.