Last Call For Bad Math

You can always count on the Assrocket to compare apples to Easter Island head statues.

What was the racial breakdown of those who were shot by police in 2015? The largest number, 494, almost exactly half, were white. 258 were black, 172 were Hispanic, and the remaining 66 were either “other” or unknown. (Interestingly, Asians are rarely shot by police officers.)

The 258 blacks represent 26% of the total. That is about double the percentage of blacks in the American population. Is that prima facie evidence of racism on the part of law enforcement? Of course not. It is common knowledge that blacks have an unusually high rate of contact with the police, both as victims and as perpetrators. In 2012-2013, the Department of Justice found that blacks were the perpetrators of 24% of all violent crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known (in 7.8% of violent crimes, it was unknown).

So the percentage of blacks fatally shot by police officers (26%) is almost exactly equal to the percentage of blacks committing violent crimes (24%). Indeed, given that the black homicide rate is around eight times the white rate, it is surprising that the portion of blacks fatally shot by policemen is not higher.

I'm trying to think about this from a number of angles, and all I can come up with is "committing a violent crime" is equal to "being shot and killed by police".  I mean, that's exactly the two statistics he's comparing here, so he must be implying that if you commit a violent crime, you should be killed by a cop.

I mean, not sent to jail, or captured alive, or evaluated for possible mental health issues, or treated as a human being, it's just "police should be executing black people and actually I don't know why that rate isn't higher." Note the default here.

Hindraker has thrown out some doozies over the years, but this may actually be the worst, most callow, heartless, staggeringly false argument for the justification of police violence against black America that I have ever seen.

Why aren't more of us being killed by cops?  He seriously wants to know this.

It's astonishing.

It's A Mean Girls World

NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd loathes Hillary Clinton to the point of near-psychotic obsession with her, and now that President Obama has endorsed and appeared with Clinton at campaign events, Dowd is apparently going to be spending the rest of the campaign coming for him as well.

In a mere 11 days, arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington — Barack Obama, James Comey and Loretta Lynch — and jeopardized the futures of Hillary’s most loyal aides.

It’s quaint, looking back at her appointment as secretary of state, how Obama tried to get Hillary without the shadiness. (Which is what we all want, of course.)

The president and his aides attempted to keep a rein on Clinton’s State Department — refusing to let her bring in her hit man, Sidney Blumenthal.

But in the end, Hillary’s goo got on Obama anyhow. On Tuesday, after Comey managed to make both Democrats and Republicans angry by indicting Clinton politically but not legally, Barry and Hillary flew to Charlotte, N.C., for their first joint campaign appearance.

Obama was left in the awkward position of vouching for Hillary’s “steady judgment” to run an angry, violent, jittery nation on the very day that his F.B.I. director lambasted her errant judgment on circumventing the State Department email system, making it clear that she had been lying to the American public for the last 16 months.

Comey, who was then yanked up to Capitol Hill for a hearing on Thursday, revealed that instead of no emails with classified information, as Hillary had insisted, there were 110, of those turned over to the State Department. Instead of Clinton’s assurances that the server in the basement in Chappaqua had never been breached, Comey said it was possible that hostile actors had hacked Clinton’s email account. Among the emails not given to State, he said at least three contained classified information.

Hillary had already compromised the president, who feels he needs her to cement his legacy. Obama angered F.B.I. agents when he wasinterviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last fall and undermined the bureau’s investigation by exonerating Hillary before the F.B.I. was done with its work, saying pre-emptively, “This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”

Hillary willfully put herself above the rules — again — and a president, campaign and party are all left twisting themselves into pretzels defending her.

Obama aimed to have no shadows, but the Clintons operate in shadows.

This is a woman who hates Hillary Clinton with a passion bordering on obsession, to the point where I expect a boiled pet rabbit to show up in Hillary's kitchen.  Not only is Dowd reduced to repeating debunked Fox News talking points, but she doesn't even bother to hide her contempt for both Clinton and Obama at this point.

It's not a good look for her.

Sunday Long Read: Junk Science

The War on Drugs is designed to send as many people to prison as long as possible in order to enrich the pockets of the prison industry and its investors.  No wonder then that a $2 drug test with serious false positive flaws sends thousands of people to prison every month in America.

AMY ALBRITTON can’t remember if her boyfriend signaled when he changed lanes late that August afternoon in 2010. But suddenly the lights on the Houston Police patrol car were flashing behind them, and Anthony Wilson was navigating Albritton’s white Chrysler Concorde to a stop in a strip-mall parking lot. It was an especially unwelcome hassle. Wilson was in Houston to see about an oil-rig job; Albritton, volunteering her car, had come along for what she imagined would be a vacation of sorts. She managed an apartment complex back in Monroe, La., and the younger of her two sons — Landon, 16, who had been disabled from birth by cerebral palsy — was with his father for the week. After five hours of driving through the monotony of flat woodland, the couple had checked into a motel, carted their luggage to the room and returned to the car, too hungry to rest but too drained to seek out anything more than fast food. Now two officers stepped out of their patrol car and approached.

Albritton, 43, had dressed up for the trip — black blouse, turquoise necklace, small silver hoop earrings glinting through her shoulder-length blond hair. Wilson, 28, was more casually dressed, in a white T-shirt and jeans, and wore a strained expression that worried Albritton. One officer asked him for his license and registration. Wilson said he didn’t have a license. The car’s registration showed that it belonged to Albritton.

The officer asked Wilson to step out of the car. Wilson complied. The officer leaned in over the driver’s seat, looked around, then called to his partner; in the report Officer Duc Nguyen later filed, he wrote that he saw a needle in the car’s ceiling lining. Albritton didn’t know what he was talking about. Before she could protest, Officer David Helms had come around to her window and was asking for consent to search the car. If Albritton refused, Helms said, he would call for a drug-sniffing dog. Albritton agreed to the full search and waited nervously outside the car.

Helms spotted a white crumb on the floor. In the report, Nguyen wrote that the officers believed the crumb was crack cocaine. They handcuffed Wilson and Albritton and stood them in front of the patrol car, its lights still flashing. They were on display for rush-hour traffic, criminal suspects sweating through their clothes in the 93-degree heat.

As Nguyen and Helms continued the search, tensions grew. Albritton, shouting over the sound of traffic, tried to explain that they had the wrong idea — at least about her. She had been dating Wilson for only a month; she implored him to admit that if there were drugs, they were his alone. Wilson just shook his head, Albritton now recalls. Fear surging, she shouted that there weren’t any drugs in her car even as she insisted that she didn’t know that Wilson had brought drugs. The search turned up only one other item of interest — a box of BC Powder, an over-the-counter pain reliever. Albritton never saw the needle. The crumb from the floor was all that mattered now.

At the police academy four years earlier, Helms was taught that to make a drug arrest on the street, an officer needed to conduct an elementary chemical test, right then and there. It’s what cops routinely do across the country every day while making thousands upon thousands of drug arrests. Helms popped the trunk of his patrol car, pulled out a small plastic pouch that contained a vial of pink liquid and returned to Albritton. He opened the lid on the vial and dropped a tiny piece of the crumb into the liquid. If the liquid remained pink, that would rule out the presence of cocaine. If it turned blue, then Albritton, as the owner of the car, could become a felony defendant.

Helms waved the vial in front of her face and said, “You’re busted.”

The test was wrong, of course.  But Albritton was railroaded within days into pleading guilty and serving a 45-day sentence in a Texas county jail on felony posession of crack cocaine.  She lost her job, her apartment, and her livelihood.  Nobody back home knew she was in jail.

The field tests seem simple, but a lot can go wrong. Some tests, including the one the Houston police officers used to analyze the crumb on the floor of Albritton’s car, use a single tube of a chemical called cobalt thiocyanate, which turns blue when it is exposed to cocaine. But cobalt thiocyanate also turns blue when it is exposed to more than 80 other compounds, including methadone, certain acne medications and several common household cleaners. Other tests use three tubes, which the officer can break in a specific order to rule out everything but the drug in question — but if the officer breaks the tubes in the wrong order, that, too, can invalidate the results. The environment can also present problems. Cold weather slows the color development; heat speeds it up, or sometimes prevents a color reaction from taking place at all. Poor lighting on the street — flashing police lights, sun glare, street lamps — often prevents officers from making the fine distinctions that could make the difference between an arrest and a release.

There are no established error rates for the field tests, in part because their accuracy varies so widely depending on who is using them and how. In Las Vegas, authorities re-examined a sampling of cocaine field tests conducted between 2010 and 2013 and found that 33 percent of them were false positives. Data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab system show that 21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all. In one notable Florida episode, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies produced 15 false positives for methamphetamine in the first seven months of 2014. When we examined the department’s records, they showed that officers, faced with somewhat ambiguous directions on the pouches, had simply misunderstood which colors indicated a positive result.

ProPublica found hundreds of wrongful convictions and plea deals just in Harris County Texas and Houston alone.  Across the country, the number is easily in the tens of thousands, and yet these folks have to live their lives as convicted felons for years and sometimes decades.

Amy Albritton's conviction was overturned.  Many, many more will never be that lucky.

The Dangerous Days After Dallas, Con't.

It took less than 24 hours after the deaths in Dallas for the right-wing nutjobs over at Oath Keepers to declare war on the rest of the country. Miranda Blue at Right Wing Watch:

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, responded today to last night’s sniper ambush of police officers near a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas by calling for “patriotic Americans” to “go armed at all times” and “reestablish the militia system.”

Rhodes wrote on the Oath Keepers website that the shooting was the product of “the Marxist agenda to divide and conquer along racial lines and inspire blind hatred against all police, and against this nation in general,” warning that it would be used to “further militarize” the police and “trample on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

Tying the shooting in Dallas to the attack on an Orlando gay nightclub by an ISIS-inspired terrorist, Rhodes wrote that what “is now needed, more than ever, is the reestablishment of the militia of the people, trained, equipped and organized in each town, to defend against what is now clearly a ‘Tet Offensive’ American style.”

Understand that this has always been the end game for Rhodes and Oath Keepers and the open carry movement, the Minutemen Militia, the Council of Conservative Citizens, all of it.  Armed mobs patrolling the streets and terrorizing those people, the rebirth of Jim Crow lynch mobs all over the country. Scared black and brown people, cowering, put in their place by the modern fugitive slave catchers.

Don't believe me?  Rhodes himself all but says so.

Therefore, I call on all Oath Keepers, and all patriotic Americans, to come to the aid of their local police, and to the aid of their communities, and unite and coordinate in mutual defense against this orchestrated campaign of Marxist terrorism, which is the modern version of the wave of terrorism we saw in the late 60s and early 70s by the Marxist Weather Underground and related groups (who also frequently targeted police), along with the closely related Jihadist terrorism offensive, with Orlando being merely the latest in an ongoing wave of attacks. What is now needed, more than ever, is the reestablishment of the militia of the people, trained, equipped and organized in each town, to defend against what is now clearly a “Tet Offensive” American style, as Navy SEAL veteran Matt Bracken warned. While we work to reestablish that militia system, you must go armed at all times, and be prepared, at all times, to defend your community against these Marxist terrorists as well as their Islamist terror allies. Remember, they are in league, and you are their common enemy and their common targets.

The power elites who control, aid, abet and fund these terrorists will attempt to use these attacks to further destroy what little is left of our Constitution, but the one thing they do not want, and the one thing they truly fear, is for We the People, who are still armed, to come together and restore the militia of the several states. And the elites’ terrorist proxies among the Marxists and Islamacists also fear such a revitalization and restoration. So, let’s do what our enemies all fear most. Let us resurrect and restore the militia system of this nation, which the Founders told us is necessary for the security of a free state, and which must consist of ALL of the able bodied citizens of your community. It is time to finally get down to doing what is necessary. It starts with you and your neighbors coming together, now, to address this grave threat, and for you to lead them toward the only constitutional solution – the revitalization of the militia.

Armed mobs, guys.  And who is the "Marxist, Islamist" enemy?

Whomever the armed mob with the AR-15s says is one. Whoever resists.

That's the America they've always wanted and now they are openly calling for war in the streets.