A short, inexpert survey of scholarly work on police use of lethal force.

Source: NBC

The thing about Ferguson is... we are operating squarely within the confines of collective social and institutional memory. Trying to understand police use of force is complicated and difficult. I recommend to everyone that they review both the practices of Ferguson/St Louis County's PD's on their own merits, and the general guidelines on escalation-of-force protocols out there on the internet.

We still have a lot we don't know about the specifics in Michael Brown's death, though we all have our (widely varying) suspicions. We have more information about the Wallace shooting. But we don't know, so much as we feel, that these deaths must be understood in the context of broader trends in law enforcement and the sociological fabric of America. And that is extremely difficult to do, because many police departments and government entities don't appear interested in helping.

I have already spent a lot of Facebook real estate, on my own and others' walls, posting about Ferguson. I've talked with gun owners, police officers, social activists; country folk, city-dwellers; friends and strangers; liberals and conservatives; people of many colors. I've discussed the specifics of the Brown shooting, the relevance and impact of his purported robbery, the history of Ferguson PD, Wilson's background in a now-disbanded department, the feasibility or impossibility of non-lethal force in Wallace's death, the frequency and motivations of suicide-by-cop, and the broader challenges in combating racism in the American justice system -- the same stuff that hopefully all of us have been discussing and writing about.

I will therefore not go into that here. For the curious, suffice to say that, as a moderate social progressive, I think cops have it rough, but the black urban poor have it much rougher, and my empathy for officers runs smack into my belief that authority demands accountability. I also think the truth of the Brown incident probably lies in between the most extreme accounts, though where in between remains uncertain. But in a sense, the resolution of the Brown case shouldn't dominate a conversation about something this big. No one case can fully exemplify a national problem.

Because I think situations like this are always judgment calls in degrees, we can only really get a sense of what is and is not permissible, and desirable, in police behavior at a bird's-eye view. With that in mind, I present the following papers without comment. I did not collect them with a rhetorical goal in mind, and I have not even finished reading them myself. The only thing I'm confident they all had in common was they were written by scholars or analysts, and were subjected to peer review or solicited within the government. I just want to add something tangible to the conversation.

Note: hopefully some of these will be available to those who don't have access to University journal subscriptions. If nothing else, read the abstracts and skim the government-published pdf's. And of course, do your own research. After all, this isn't my area. I'm just trying to do what I can.

Jacobs D, Britt D (1979). Inequality and Police Use of Deadly Force: An Empirical Assessment of a Conflict Hypothesis. Social Problems 26(4).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/800504

Kaune MM, Tischler CA (1989). Liability in Police Use of Deadly Force. Am J Police 89.

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/ajpol8&div=1&g_sent=1&collection=journals#2

National Criminal Justice Reference Service, National Institute of Justice: Use of Force by Police, Pt 2.

Garner JH, Maxwell CD. Ch 4, Measuring the Amount of Force Used By and Against the Police in Six Jurisdictions. 

Alpert GP, Dunham RG. Ch 5, The Force Factor: Measuring and Assessing Police Use of Force and Suspect Resistance.

Adams K. Ch 6, A Research Agenda on Police Use of Force.

http://sashley.com/filessentbysteve/resources/use%20of%20force%20by%20police%20-%201999%20(part%20two).pdf

Jacobs D, O’brien RM (1998). The Determinants of Deadly Force: A Structural Analysis of Police Violence. Am J Sociology 103(4).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231291

Fyfe JJ (2006). Police use of deadly force: Research and reform. Justice Quarterly 5(2).

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418828800089691#.U_zQ6bxdWnQ

Klinger DA, Brunson RK (2009). Police officers’ perceptual distortions during lethal force situations: Informing the reasonableness standard. Criminology & Public Policy 8(1).

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2009.00537.x/abstract

Bennett RR (1997). Excessive force: A comparative study of police in the Caribbean. Justice Quarterly 14(4).

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418829700093541#.U_zQ_rxdWnQ

Walker S (2007). Police Accountability: Current Issues and Research Needs. Presented at NIJ Policing Res Workshop, Washington DC (2006).

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/218583.pdf

FutureArt: protected by policy? Free but impoverished? Can we have it both ways?

I consider myself a perennial noob on the subject of artistic intellectual property, so I'm soliciting reactions to this piece from Vox (ignore the up-front questionnaire if it please you).

Hatsune Miku, Pop Star of the People.
hoangtush @ deviantart

I honestly feel very conflicted. On the one hand, I am a huge believer in the power of decreasing supply costs to increase living standards, and the internet and its access to information and information-based services strikes me as a big deal. Resistance to the abundance of valuable services on behalf of its producers seems to me like a great way to entrench dying industries and inhibit progress; consider the replacement of auto manufacturing jobs with robots, and my argument in that kind of paradigm.

On the other hand, I really dislike the idea that valuable art, writing, music, etc., usually produced on small scales long before an artist catches on and often never reaching the profitability of some inferior work, would lose yet more financial leverage (as my grad-school colleague Erik Hoel shared).

One hope that i have is that the democratization of art production will spur the spotlighting of worthwhile artists; in a certain sense Biebs is the ultimate example of this, ironically enough, if only because as an overall package he was valuable to the market. Indie bands stand to benefit as well, and Arcade Fire's grammy isn't discouraging. Plus if it's true that personality, not product, is the marketable good, then the weird genius of Hatsune Miku at least changes the conversation, even if it's not clear how.

Another friend and former classmate, Jason Myatt, has kicked around an idea with me about a simple safety net that pays people to devote 20 hours a week to a demonstrated productive activity -- intentional pipe dream/thought experiment though it is from a current-implementation perspective -- to me suggests a possible solution. At least, it does so if only in the sense that, once global distribution of keep-you-alive supplies evens out and death by starvation/exposure could (if we chose) become a thing of the past, then the need to create policy to preclude literal starving artists would likewise diminish, and the question is only whether an artist would become rich and famous, etc. Capitalism survives, but not sell-enough-goods-or-die capitalism.

Pseudo-Marxist utopia though Jason's thought experiment might seem to be, it strikes me as valuable in this context precisely because it accommodates, in ways that a low-safety-net system does not, the possibility of marketplaces for products with almost no overhead. If everybody can, at baseline, stay alive and build lives for themselves reasonably well, then why would we need to have crazy arguments about structurally protective art distribution practices? Incentives could adjust in response to what people really want to spend their lives doing, etc., etc.

This post is a bit rambly, and I don't have a clear point I'm driving home. I'm just wondering if the solution to these economic problems is, in a sense, more fundamentally, formally macroeconomic than it is about the morality of art consumption and merit. I know we can never divorce ethics and policy, but I'm curious whether we can frame it a bit more practically.

I fully expect several of my points are ignorant and idiotic, and eagerly await my edification!