Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
In January, Michael Harriott at The Root wrote that we don’t really know how many people the police kill every year even though there are organizations that make an attempt to count. But, Harriott notes, they leave out killings that ought to be counted. One of the main reasons we don’t know how many the police kill in any particular year is because the police aren’t required to tell us. “So,” Harriott wrote, “we decided to count ourselves.” Results: 1,112 non-suicide-related deaths by police.
The effort was accomplished in partnership with D. Brian Burghart, the founder of Fatal Encounters—whose mission is creating “impartial, comprehensive, and searchable national database of people killed during interactions with law enforcement”—to see how many people police kill each year.
After we sorted through the data, here are some other startling facts about 2019’s officer-involved killings:
- A black person was three-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by cop than a white person.
- A Hispanic person was one-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person
- An unarmed black person was three times more likely to be killed by police than a white person with no weapon
- An unarmed black person fleeing the scene was six times more likely than a white person to be killed by a police officer.
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QUOTATION
“I can't bring myself to watch yet another video, not because I don't care, but because we're all just a few videos away from becoming completely desensitized. The public execution of Black folks will never be normal.” ~~Andrena Sawyer
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Obama Campaign 2.0:
It also seems reasonable to question the effectiveness of the President's political organization. It is possible the "bubble" of the White House has numbed the political instincts of a great campaigner and his staff. The President has a significant role to play in off-year elections. Historically, the President's political party loses seats in Congress. But strong Presidents have occasionally bucked the trend and prevented a crippling of their agenda. This requires a campaign of sorts, albeit not as large and complex as a presidential campaign. Will a political campaign run out of Washington, not Chicago, be as effective as the previous campaign given an anti-incumbent political environment?
David Plouffe, if reporting is correct, has been given charge of overseeing the overall campaign by posting as outside adviser to the DNC. His strategy is simple: get 15 million first-time Obama voters to turn out again. Mid-term elections are usually party base turnout elections. The broader electorate is not fully engaged because no major candidate is on the ballot. Turnout falls down to mostly committed partisans of either party. Plouffe's strategy is to engage them once again betting they will support Democrats. The Vote 2010 initiative is a gamble to change the composition of the electorate by bringing first time voters into the Democratic base. Driven by MyBO it will rely on the 2008 team of community organizers and volunteers. So the "change the electorate" model is still in place.