John Batchelor July 16 Institutional Racism mp3 torrent

"Institutional Racism" & Both Sides of the Story. @richardaepstein, @hooverinst
“…The key point here is that no matter what happened in the Castile case, large claims about institutional racism are hard to connect with the facts on the ground. There is no one in a high position who condones the shootings. There are countless programs in place to teach the police how they ought to behave in potentially risky settings. Training on racial sensitivity is at an all time high. There is an increasing use of police cameras to document police movements on a continuous basis. The ubiquity of private mobile devices makes it a virtual certainty that someone will record these events, in ways that eliminate much of the factual uncertainty surrounding individual incidents. Affirmative action programs are firmly in place across the land. There have been an increasing number of black and brown officers appointed to high positions in major settings, including in Dallas, where Police Chief David Brown is well known for his commendable initiatives to improve community policing. It is easy to understand Brown’s reaction to the horrific events in Dallas: “All I know is that this must stop—this divisiveness between our police and our citizens.” It is hard to know what to do next.

Sadly, Brown’s focus is misplaced. Public perceptions, largely influenced by the media’s coverage of such events, overlook the simple point that police homicides, whether or not justified in individual cases, are outlier events. It is not the general public that is the problem. Let 99.99 percent of all races and ages agree with every word Brown spoke. Yet we still have a major crisis. As Thomas Hobbes understood a long time ago, when the question turns to the use of force, what matters is the outlier, not the average citizen. A single outlaw has the capacity to disrupt and destroy many innocent lives. Preaching peace and cooperation to the multitudes that are appalled by violence does nothing to control the tiny tail, whose hatred could be perversely magnified by public expressions of love, cooperation, and peace.

Alas, there is a real risk that the harsh rhetoric denouncing racism only makes matters worse. The distribution of low frequency events is always hard to predict. Sometimes they cluster, sometimes they don’t. Here, what really matters is what happens when outraged individuals who are driven by incendiary anti-police rhetoric take the law into their own hands. Micah Johnson, the Dallas shooter, was an outlier and loner who took to heart the message of the New Black Panther Party that advocates violence against whites in general and Jews in particular. There are reports of similarly inspired violence against police in Tennessee, Missouri, and Georgia—but again these events have to be thoroughly investigated.

http://www.hoover.org/research/hasty-judgment-institutional-racism