Maybe Profiling Isn't Such A Bad Idea?

[anarchist_nomad]

Dylann Roof
Elliot Rodger
Adam Lanza
James Holmes
Jared Loughner

Need I continue?

Perhaps we should start a random 'stop and frisk' type screening for white USAmerican males who are roughly between the ages of 16 and 25?[*]

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[*] Yes, I know they don't account for all the mass shootings. You've got Seung-Hui Cho (Korean), Wade Michael Page (40), Aaron Alexis (black), and so on. But the list is definitely disproportionately young white men.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Maybe gun control would be an even better one?

[anarchist-nomad.livejournal.com]

Heh. In the US of A, I betcha the profiling idea has a better chance of success.

After all, our Founding Saints Fathers granted us the Constitutional right to carry assault weapons openly into just about everywhere...

So very happy to have gotten out.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Yeah- gun laws are at least somewhat sane here since Dunblane. We only needed to be told once...........

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

Twice. There had been a previous round of restrictions after Hungerford.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

You're right of course!

But we still learned that something needed doing and did it.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that an awful lot of these young men(*) turn out to be flamboyantly mentally ill, and yet their problems were studiously ignored by their parents, their teachers, even the mental-health practitioners they may have come in contact with. In some cases, the people who should have been helping were enabling the violent behavior - Adam Lanza's mother provided him with the guns he used in his crime (he killed her with one of them). Many others were in serious denial: "it's just a phase he'll grow out of", "he needs to spend more time in church, praying", "boys will be boys", "deep down, he's a good boy".

Despite the long-standing misinterpretation of the US Constitution, it really would be a good idea to make it more difficult to obtain guns of all kinds. At the very least, it would reduce impulsive violence; if someone has a gun and gets into a fight, he's most likely to just pull the gun, but if he doesn't have a gun, he'll probably just hit someone, which is a lot less likely to be fatal.

But society also needs to have a better awareness of mental illness and how to deflect disturbed individuals away from becoming violent. Yes, this is as complicated an issue as gun control.

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(*) I can't recall any mass shootings, or mass killings of any other sort, by young women - and many of the young men left bizarrely misogynist statements in their private writings.

[anarchist-nomad.livejournal.com]

You're right, of course, about the wisdom of gun control and also our awareness of mental illness.

However, that's tangential to my point in making this post. Demographically speaking it is young white men who are most likely to commit mass murder with guns. However, our response is to look at the individuals, not their demographic. No one is considering profiling white men, and if it was attempted there would be a huge outcry.

Of course, most young white men are not mass murderers or criminals.

On the other hand, when another demographic -- say, for instance, a black man -- commits a murder, we focus intensely on their race, rather than looking at the circumstances of the individual. And most black men are not criminals, either. Indeed, over 99% are not! But society still views the entire demographic with suspicion.

Same for when a small group of, say, Muslims commits an atrocity like hijacking a few plans and knocking over some buildings. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists... but we don't see the individuals, we see their demographic and paint all Muslims with the same brush. (See, for instance, the outrage when a mosque was planned for Lower Manhattan)

By the same reasoning, we should be condemning all white men for the actions of these few horrific outliers. But we don't, of course. It's sensible... but then why don't we act just as sensibly when it isn't white men committing atrocities?

[dragonmamma.livejournal.com]

Because "obviously, THEY are intrinsically less reliable than WE are" and "It's a known fact that other races/colours/genders (insert demographic of choice)are more prone to instability/lunacy etc etc"
Or to put it another way, sloppy thinking is easy and cheap and makes us all feel "better" and "more virtuous". Heaven forfend that we should actually look at the real problem or even, my goodness, DEAL with it in some way. So much easier to tut disapprovingly and move on with our day.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I can't begin to describe how black people and white people fear, misunderstand, and have negative expectations of one another here in the US. Black parents give their teenage sons "the talk", about behaving in an exaggeratedly respectful way towards the police (and towards white adults in general). I know white women, my own age, who will, out of fear, cross the street and walk on the other side when they see a group of black people, or even one black person, standing on the sidewalk (footpath), no matter what the black people look like or what they're doing - hey, they're black, they must be about to commit a violent crime!

Why can't people get it through their heads that there's only one "race" on this planet - the HUMAN race?

[anarchist-nomad.livejournal.com]

You know, it's been nearly 50 years since Jane Elliott and the "Blue Eyes / Brown Eyes" experiment. Half a century!

You would think we would have learned by now that race is a made-up construct, and stop being so damn racist.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I remember that - it was a schoolteacher's idea for trying to help her all-white class understand racism, the day after Martin Luther King was killed. (I was in my junior year at Hofstra at the time.) Like all the other hippies, I'd been overcome by a scalding sense of injustice that started with the first "sit-in" a few years earlier. As you point out, why haven't we learned anything since then? Dammit, we're all just PEOPLE!

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yes, you're right - although perhaps the notion of screening for overt mental instability is a form of "profiling". But black people, especially young black males (and a few young black females (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Renisha_McBride)), far too often get arrested, mistreated, and even shot(*) simply for being black.

Ultimately, either we profile everybody (doing a great injustice to personal liberty and security, in the name of increasing the security of society as a whole)... or we profile nobody, and take no preventive action until a crime has been committed. I can't support either of those options. I don't know what the answer might be.

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(*) There's that problem with guns again. How did the London bobbies get by for so long without guns?

[anarchist-nomad.livejournal.com]

How did the London bobbies get by for so long without guns?

Past tense? The majority of police in the UK -- including London -- are still unarmed.

It's true that there are units that are authorised to carry firearms, but the most of the force does not.

Yet another one of the many things I prefer about living in the UK. It's far from perfect -- and, sad to say, getting worse -- but still a much saner and more civilised place to live than the US.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

For a very, very long time, it was "common knowledge" that British police managed quite well with billy clubs and bicycles, where American cops had pistols and patrol cars. I don't remember when it was that I heard that, due to an increase in violent crime in the UK, the bobbies were now given pistols in certain circumstances. At least you haven't upgraded to grenade launchers and armored vehicles... yet... :-(

[dragonmamma.livejournal.com]

"normal" police over here are still not authorised to carry or use firearms. We have special units that are allowed to do so and they are called in for "emergencies" (hostage situations for example). I believe the thinking is that if the Police are armed it merely causes escalation.
And I believe there is an actual aversion among English people to having armed police. Maybe we are more law abiding (unlikely) or maybe we remember our history when those in charge (Royalty/Aristocracy etc) could inflict any punishments they wished and we fought long and hard to overturn those rights and to give us all equality. And so we really dont want to give a killer advantage back to a select few wearing a uniform. Not sure really, but most people I know react with horror at the thought of having the police permanently armed - it's just not "English" doncher kn ow.

[anarchist-nomad.livejournal.com]

Indeed. From what I've heard (second-hand), when it has been put to the officers, the UK police themselves have always voted against carrying firearms. The rationale is that it would change their relationship with the public, and the idea that the police are there to serve the people.

I actually have my own opinions about police, and it's no secret that they are quite negative. But I'll bite my tongue here, since this is a discussion of the UK/US differences in police and not a general critique of the police as an institution.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

But I would think that the police do use specially marked cars more than bicycles now - or am I wrong about that too?