DL Open Thread: Sunday, October 31, 2021
How/Why Cops Turn Traffic Stops Into Deadly Confrontations. Short take–Because they’re trained that way. And because they can get away with it:
The deaths are among a series of seemingly avoidable killings across the United States. Over the past five years, a New York Times investigation found, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife, or under pursuit for a violent crime — a rate of more than one a week.
Most of the officers did so with impunity. Only five have been convicted of crimes in those killings, according to a review of the publicly reported cases. Yet local governments paid at least $125 million to resolve about 40 wrongful-death lawsuits and other claims. Many stops began with common traffic violations like broken taillights or running a red light; relative to the population, Black drivers were overrepresented among those killed.
The recurrence of such cases and the rarity of convictions both follow from an overstatement, ingrained in court precedents and police culture, of the danger that vehicle stops pose to officers. Claiming a sense of mortal peril — whether genuine in the moment or only asserted later — has often shielded officers from accountability for using deadly force.
This is a really good and extensively-researched article. Read it. Oh, and fewer cops in the Delaware General Assembly, please.
Why The Great Resignation Is A Good Thing:
“As the MIT professor David Autor recently wrote in the Times, the US economy has long been plagued by a glut of bad jobs,” (Fareed) Zakaria said. “Take a look at pay low skilled; American workers are some of the lowest paid in the industrialized world. They make almost one-third less per hour than their counterparts in Canada. Low-skilled Norwegian workers are paid more than twice as much. But pay isn’t the only problem. MIT’s auto writes: American workers also receive less notice and severance when they’re fired compared to workers in other wealthy countries. They take less vacation unlike their peers in most other rich countries> They don’t have guaranteed paid parental leave.”
Workers now have the upper hand.
“Autor says that the labor shortages we’re seeing the record job openings alongside record resignation are a market phenomenon that compels companies to improve on some of these policies to attract workers,” Zakaria points out. “We’ve already seen this in terms of pay average hourly earnings for workers have risen by more than a dollar in the past year.”
And guess what? This reality is good for the economy. It leaves space for the entrepreneurial spirit and compels a more equitable distribution of both income and wealth.
I Think The D’s Are Gonna Lose Virginia. Rethugs have successfully ginned up mouthbreather resentment while the D’s have once again opted for a Clinton retread who generates not a scintilla of enthusiasm. Not to mention, it’s an off-year. Recipe for disaster. One more prediction: The D’s will ‘learn’ all the wrong lessons from this.
The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.
And the lack of education in this country is such a problem that national security adviser Jake Sullivan described it this week as a critical issue for our national security. “I do consider it a national security problem,” he told me during a White House briefing on Tuesday. “In fact, it’s Dr. [Jill] Biden who has repeatedly said — and the president frequently quotes her — that any country that out-educates the United States will outcompete the United States, and that is a fundamental national security issue.”
What do you want to talk about?
https://www.wdel.com/news/probation-officers-to-conduct-sex-offender-checks-halloween-weekend/article_13cd34a0-38e7-11ec-ab4f-0b771c857763.html
Would like our legislators to remind us again why sex offenders are considered “safe enough” to live in our communities for 364 days out of the year, but only a pose a risk of re-offending one evening every October.