Igor wrote:Return_of_the_STAR wrote:We’ve discussed the grouping of all police as a single entity as though they are a person before and clearly disagree so I won’t go into that any further.
Speaking about the police service as a single entity is the only useful way of discussing the police as a concept within our society, I think. I've already mentioned why I feel
ACAB is a valid statement; you entrust the police to enforce the law and the moment one of them is not held accountable, the rest of them are tainted.
I also think it's pointless speaking about individual police officers because it actually doesn't matter if there are zero racist police officers; in its current form and operation, the police force and its policies would still be racist.
There's an interesting phenomenon in statistics called Simpson's paradox. It occurs when a trend appears in several different data sets that then disappears or reverses when the sets are combined. So for example, you might be testing two different treatments for kidney stones; treatment A seems to be more effective than treatment B against small kidney stones, and treatment A
also seems to be more effective than treatment B against
large kidney stones, and yet as soon as you combine your data set, it's clear that treatment B is the better overall treatment.
Another example I just made up, goalkeeper A has a better penalty save percentage than goalkeeper B against left-footed penalty takers,
and right-footed penalty takers, and yet when the dominant foot of the penalty taker is ignored, goalkeeper B has a better overall save percentage.
It's reasonable to expect there are police officers that are not racist who work with other officers that are also not racist, and those officers might understandably be confused when someone calls their organisation racist. The interesting thing is, you don't need there to be
any racist police officers for systemic racism to exist within the police force. Much like the Simpson's paradox, we might get one trend when we look at the individuals but an opposing trend when we look at the collective. We very much like to see everyone as an individual, treat everyone on their own merits. We fail to see how those individuals might interact and miss the change in trend.
Black households are the most likely group to have an annual household income of less than £20,800, at 35%. Just 19% of black households have an annual income of more than £52,000 against the UK average of 27%. Lower incomes mean the black population need to congregate where there are jobs and available housing, which means cities, which means over 98% of the black community in the UK live in urban centres. A dense population suffering from high income inequality has, to my knowledge, never
not led to higher incidence of crime. So those areas are policed more. And the people in those areas are associated with the crimes being committed. BAME population in the UK is just under 14%, yet they make up 26% of the prison population and over 50% of the youth offender population.
None of this
requires a cabal of secretly racist cops. It doesn't require any racist cops at all. It's all just a natural consequence of rampaging income disparity. So it doesn't matter if you're not racist - if you're not racist, then you are not the problem. It doesn't matter if most police officers are not racist because the problem isn't racist police officers. Remove all racist police officers and BAME people will
still make up a disproportionate share of the prison population because they will
still be involved in more crime because they will
still be clustered in urban centres because they will
still be in the lowest income brackets because minorities always fall to the bottom. Until the issue of income inequality is fixed, this will always be a problem in our modern society and it's going to get worse.