en English

America’s Dilemma Explodes

Podcasts Jun 4, 2020 Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Elmira Bayrasli

George Floyd’s fatal encounter with the police seems to have been a tipping point in the United States. It comes at time when the pandemic has caused unemployment to skyrocket and exposed the life-and-death stakes of longstanding inequalities.

Listen and subscribe to all episodes from your favorite podcast app. Find Opinion Has It on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Acast, or via RSS Feed. Have a suggestion for an episode? Email us at podcasts@project-syndicate.org.

HOLIDAY SALE: PS for less than $0.7 per week

At a time when democracy is under threat, there is an urgent need for incisive, informed analysis of the issues and questions driving the news – just what PS has always provided. Subscribe now and save $50 on a new subscription

Subscribe Now

Featured

The Scramble for Syria

The Scramble for Syria

Dec 12, 2024 Carla Norrlöf
The Energy Transition That Couldn’t

The Energy Transition That Couldn’t

Dec 17, 2024 Richard Haass & Carolyn Kissane
The Bank of Korea Moves Beyond Monetary Policy

The Bank of Korea Moves Beyond Monetary Policy

Dec 12, 2024 Soohyung Lee
Can Trump’s Tariff Threats Save Dollar Hegemony?

Can Trump’s Tariff Threats Save Dollar Hegemony?

Dec 17, 2024 Jeffrey Frankel
Syria’s House of Cards

Syria’s House of Cards

Dec 9, 2024 Barak Barfi

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, is Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Elmira Bayrasli

Writing for PS since 2016
3 Commentaries

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

new comment has been posted. new comments have been posted.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 6 Comments on this article

Brian G Jun 6, 2020

Liberalism has gone too far and it producing (even calling for) anarchy. On my lifelong union Dem fathers grave I have never voted for a Republican President. But here in NYC our Mayor makes numerous regrettable decisions. I believe Trump will win.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Peter Schaeffer Jun 4, 2020

The key (but unstated) law enforcement doesn't discriminate against minorities with respect to shootings in the USA. The issue has been studied to death for years and it is simply not true. See "NBER WORKING PAPER SERIESAN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN POLICE USE OFFORCE" by Roland G. Fryer, Jr" (NBER). Quote

"This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks andHispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactionswith police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, butcannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings–we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utilitymaximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expectedcosts of officer-involved shootings"

See also "Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings" by David J. Johnson (and others). (PNAS) Quote

"Despite extensive attention to racial disparities in police shootings, two problems have hindered progress on this issue. First, databases of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) lack details about officers, making it difficult to test whether racial disparities vary by officer characteristics. Second, there are conflicting views on which benchmark should be used to determine racial disparities when the outcome is the rate at which members from racial groups are fatally shot. We address these issues by creating a database of FOIS that includes detailed officer information. We test racial disparities using an approach that sidesteps the benchmark debate by directly predicting the race of civilians fatally shot rather than comparing the rate at which racial groups are shot to some benchmark. We report three main findings: 1) As the proportion of Black or Hispanic officers in a FOIS increases, a person shot is more likely to be Black or Hispanic than White, a disparity explained by county demographics; 2) race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot; and 3) although we find no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings, when focusing on different subtypes of shootings (e.g., unarmed shootings or “suicide by cop”), data are too uncertain to draw firm conclusions. We highlight the need to enforce federal policies that record both officer and civilian information in FOIS."
A new reply to this comment has been posted.

https://prosyn.org/XBAeeB2

Email required

Password required Remember me?

America’s Dilemma Explodes

HOLIDAY SALE: PS for less than $0.7 per week

Featured

The Scramble for Syria

The Energy Transition That Couldn’t

The Bank of Korea Moves Beyond Monetary Policy

Can Trump’s Tariff Threats Save Dollar Hegemony?

Syria’s House of Cards

New Comment

Email this piece to a friend

Contact us

Log in/Register

America’s Dilemma Explodes

HOLIDAY SALE: PS for less than $0.7 per week

Featured

Edit Newsletter Preferences

Set up Notification