Might have been useful to, I dunno, think this through a bit:
Officers from a Florida police department have been criticised for using mugshots of black suspects for target practice.
One of the images pictured the brother of a female soldier, who visited a shooting range last month for her annual weapons qualification training.
Sgt Valerie Deant, a clarinet player in the Florida Army National Guard, recognised the image of her brother, Woody, among six targets used at the range earlier by the North Miami Beach police snipers, according to NBC News.
The mugshot was taken 15 years ago, when Woody Deant was arrested as a teenager in connection to a fatal drag race. Mr Deant served four years in prison and was released in 2004.
North Miami Beach police chief J. Scott Dennis admitted that his officers used poor judgment, but denied racial profiling.
“Our policies were not violated,” Mr Dennis said. “There is no discipline forthcoming from the individuals who were involved with this.”
He said his sniper team includes officers from racial minorities and using photographic targets was “vital for facial recognition drills”.
I love the “I’m not a racist, I have a black colleague shooting at those mugshots, too” defense.
Seriously, WTF?
Corner Stone
The full sized target I get from Law Enforcement Targets is a white thug in a skull cap beanie with a nasty .38 revolver pointed at me.
Calouste
So WTF does a city of 41,000 need a police sniper team?
srv
Even if there were mugshots of white people, why would snipers need to ID them?
Laertes
Humans have a natural aversion to deadly violence, and not until the Vietnam era did we figure out how to condition this mechanism away. The trick is to shoot at human likenesses, and promptly reward success.
If you want your officers to be able to shoot black people as a reflex, rather than only after careful thought, you need to carefully prepare them by having them practice, day in and day out, shooting at likenesses of black people. Ordinary target silhouettes won’t do the trick–they don’t look sufficiently human, and practicing on them won’t adequately prepare you to shoot at the real thing without a moment’s hesitation.
Mike J
Since they shot every person on that target, obviously they’re failing their facial recognition drills. I guess they all look alike to cops.
West of the Cascades
Wikipedia tells me that the racial makeup of North Miami Beach (pop. 41,253) is 47% white or caucasian (including white hispanic), 18% non-hispanic caucasian, and 41% black. In a sane world, this never would have happened, but in a saner world, this Chief of Police would immediately lose his job (not because the mayor/city council reflexively do the right thing, but because there’s enough potential for political blowback if they don’t).
Not holding my breath, though.
OzarkHillbilly
I won’t say a word.
jl
@srv: Puzzles me too.
‘ using photographic targets was “vital for facial recognition drills”. ‘
Can someone explain that statement o me. Or was it CYA BS word salad?
They need to develop skills to recognize the individuals? I don’t think can be right?
They need to develop skills to recognize human faces, so they don’t gun down dogs, cats and stray wombats by mistake?
They need to develop skills to distinguish African-Americans from whites? Many cops seem very adept at that anyway, and unfortunately do not make good use of that skill.
So… WTF is he talking about?
Edit: to be fair, if it was a sniper team, I can see them showing a photo before hand, and then asking them to shoot that person. Then they should have pics of all kinds of people, mean and women, all sorts of races, all ages. They shouldn’t be using mugshots, in any event.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I read that earlier and I got nothin’ except rage.
srv
@jl: They all look the same to them, so practice. Of course, not a problem if they get the wrong one.
Lavocat
From the We Knew It All Along Department: Cops are desensitizing themselves to extreme violence against African-Americans.
Not only that, cops are probably so conditioned to see blacks as TARGETS that it rationalizes the whole shoot first, claim he was reaching for a weapon later mentality of being a cop in Post-Racial Amerika.
Mike J
She’s about eight years old, those books are way too advanced...
Roger Moore
@jl:
I’m certainly leaning in that direction. It’s a vague but plausible-sounding excuse, which is the best kind of ass covering. The unverifiable claim that they’ve used white mug shots in the past falls into the same category.
Laertes
It’s word salad, but it’s deliberately silly word salad–he wants you to know that he odesn’t believe what he’s saying, and that if you aren’t on his side, he’s sneering at you.
He’s trolling.
Unabogie
If you want to understand how John Crawford and Tamir Rice were murdered within seconds of being spotted by police, here’s your answer. They prepare for shooting people like this.
dopey-o
@Mike J:
Lemme see, about 100,000 years since homo sapiens moved out of the forests and onto the savannah, where we organized ourselves into groups such as extended families. At a time when ‘facial recognition skills’ were a very important component of survival skills.
But these cops in Florida… must be the heat and humidity that erodes those millennia-old skills that the rest of us have mastered since the age of … about … 3 years old?
Alex, I’m going with ‘racist pigs’ for $500.
Feebog
Forget it Jake, it’s Florida.
Heliopause
If that’s the case then using police photos in the rotation should be no problem.
Mike in NC
@Feebog: Darn, beat me to it.
Cpl Cam
” He said his sniper team includes officers from racial minorities and using photographic targets was “vital for facial recognition drills”.
This sounds a little bit like “all black people look alike to some of my officers…” Which sucks but, if that is the case, could make this pretty valuable training…
Zinsky
Why not use likenesses of Timothy McVeigh, James Holmes and Adam Lanza – three vicious, mass-murdering, cold-blooded WHITE killers?
Cervantes
Just when one might be tempted to think they can’t get any lower, they submerge yet again.
Anyway.
@Corner Stone:
You missed out. Discontinued two years ago by that same company was a line of targets called the “No More Hesitation” series, featuring a mother, a child, grandparents, and a pregnant woman, all armed. Per the company’s marketing expert:
@Laertes:
Sounds familiar.
Cervantes
@Zinsky:
Too much glare?
kindness
When I first saw that earlier today I thought, shit why couldn’t they have slipped at least one white guy in there because, well shit because everyone is going to think they are freaking racist cops shooting at black dudes. I mean, what else is anyone going to think. That’s why. Just damn stupid & ugly.
Villago Delenda Est
@kindness: And very, very obvious.
If you’re African-American, you are a perp. Period.
Just this last Sunday, a social worker here in Track Town USA had an oped published by the local dead tree relic, and made the point that while most cops are honest professionals in public service a few are not. And those few make it difficult for people to trust ALL cops.
Immediately, the usual Faux-addled suspects were whining that you can’t make general statements like that, it’s unfair to the good cops!
Well, these are the same sorts who insisted that all these black people were committing, or had committed, crimes, therefore it was perfectly acceptable to gun them down without a second thought.
The cretinous stupid and lack of self-awareness. IT BURNS!
Villago Delenda Est
@Laertes:
If you actually believe this, I’ll have to assume you’ve never studied history.
Cpl Cam
@jl: If they had pics of “all kinds of people” it wouldn’t be “facial” recognition…
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Corner Stone:
Oh, well clearly it’s okay then. Thanks.
Laertes
@Villago Delenda Est:
Right? I mean, obviously, there’s been lots of killing in history, so anyone who says that humans have a natural aversion to killing has got rocks in his head.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing
Felonius Monk
I guess these pictures were shot because they tried to grab the cops gun or something?
gian
@kindness:
It looks like a recycled photo lineup. The kind used to see if a witness can pick out the right guy from a bunch of similar looking people.
So they all should look like the same race.
As for why the black lineup? Someone made the choice during this time of protest to use it rather than any other one. It was a choice
Omnes Omnibus
@Laertes:
Yep.
ETA: On reflection, I’ll grant you an reluctance to kill, but as for violence, no. And killing if need be.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Fixed It For Me.
Laertes
@Omnes Omnibus:
You’d think, right? So would I! Of course, it turns out I’ve never been in a situation where it made sense to try and kill someone, so like most people I don’t really know if I’m capable of doing it or not. I suppose we can all cook up ideas about what we’d do in this crazy situation or that, but I’ve read a bunch of guys who’d been in actual combat who’ll say that it’s real hard to know who’s going to react in what ways.
It’s like when people hear about the Milgram experiments–they all say “Oh, if that was me? I’d totally stop zapping the guy as soon as he said he wanted out” or “I wouldn’t zap him at all” or whatever? It’s just bullshit. You can’t know. The thinky choosy part of our brains that we think is totally in charge isn’t running the show near as much as we think. “Advertising doesn’t work on me!” “I’m immune to peer pressure!” “I’d never submit to an unjust authority figure!” “I could totally put a bullet in some bad guy without flinching or reflexively turning the gun away before I fire or totally surprising myself by saying freeze instead of shooting.”
What. The Fuck. Ever.
So, yeah, it totally makes sense that if I’m in a foxhole with a rifle and there’s enemy soldiers coming to kill me I’ll have no problem at all shooting them and anyone who says otherwise has got shit for brains.
Except that a bunch of people who study war for a living took at look at that shit and found out that lots of soldiers just couldn’t. It’s weird, but sometimes when you go collect actual data, the data aren’t what you expected. Go figure.
Now, maybe Grossman and Marshall and those other guys got it wrong? Could be! They’re weird and controversial guys, and I’m just a lay reader, not an expert in the field, so I’m not sure. Near as I can tell, though, their conclusions are far from certain but still reasonably solid. And what they report, which I found to be totally surprising, is that most people simply aren’t capable of killing unless they’ve had special training.
And (part of) the way you turn ordinary people into killers is you get them practicing with real (or very near) weapons on targets that look very like humans.
Which brings us back to why it’s such a shitty idea to have cops taking target practice at photographs of black men.
Gian
@Omnes Omnibus:
If I recall correctly, there hasn’t been a single war-free day on the planet in a long time (I remember people used to say “since WWII”, but really it’s not like there were war free days during WWII)
it’s kind of a mess when I think about it too much, because the existence of the society which prevents us from going all lord of the flies on each other enables us to go all cattle trucks and ovens on each other.
Villago Delenda Est
@Laertes: Well, the notion that techniques for overcoming any aversion were invented during the Vietnam War ALSO defies what we know from history. I mean, “kill the hun” was in someone’s imagination? Or were wogs?
These techniques of “de-humanifying” the enemy have been around for a very, very long time.
This is nothing new. To assert that it magically appeared 50 years ago is…well, not very credible.
RSA
@Heliopause:
High school portraits of police officers’ kids. Then I might be convinced that there’s nothing racist going on…
aimai
@Cpl Cam: In what sense? It would only be valuable if they were being trained *not* to shoot some black people by having other target images that were not being shot at. At any rate what “facial recognition” is possible on an image taken from a mug shot that is 15 years old?
Laertes
@Villago Delenda Est:
“Kill the hun” (or, later, “kill the japs”) mostly didn’t work. People did it because they’re human and war makes humans hate. From Marshall’s data, however, we know that this hate alone wasn’t, in most cases, enough to get people to kill up close.
As you say, “kill the hun” is nothing new, and yet the fraction of soldiers who were capable of killing up close* remained low, according to Marshall, until they Skinnered up the training and started conditioning soldiers to reflexively fire on human-like targets.
Now, maybe Marshall’s data are wrong, and the fraction of soldiers capable of killing wasn’t as low as he says it was prior to Vietnam? I gather that’s where some of his critics have directed their fire. But you can’t simply breeze in and say “Soldiers have always hated” and imagine that you’re addressing the substance of the argument in any way. All that does is advertise that you’re refusing to consider it.
*up close: IIRC, Grossman/Marshall’s case is that humans are mostly unable to kill in person. Pretty much anyone can look through a bombsight and pull a release lever.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I’m a bit surprised. My local range will let you use (and they sell) the illustrated targets.
Bring in a photo and they’ll toss and possibly permaban your ass. Totally not OK.
Sherparick
@Gian: or before WWII for that matter. There was pretty much continuous fighting on the periphery of Europe from the end of WWI to the mid-twenties. Imperial wars by the French and English in Syria and Iraq respectively festered through the twenties and thirties (See Nothing is Ever New), and of course the China-Japanese War started with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, while at the same time, China was involved in multiple civil wars, the biggest being between Chiang and Mao. So since 1914, there has been some significant slaughter going on somewhere.
Villago Delenda Est
@Laertes: A study was conducted after WWII that a lot of soldiers never fired their weapons. If they did, it was because they were near a crew served weapon that made a lot of noise.
I’m not sure this supports the idea that they were adverse to killing. They might have been adverse to being killed, however, and the noisy machine gun meant that the little pop they made wasn’t as noticeable with all that racket going on.
Breaking down socialization that is adverse to killing has always been part of military training. This is nothing new at all. The accuracy of modern firearms has been increasing ever since the American Civil War…therefore making it more likely that when one fires, one will hit something….and be hit in return.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sherparick: Many conflicts never show up on the domestic radar because they don’t involve Americans directly, and they’re in places the media is adverse to visiting. There is something going on in Africa all the time, it seems, but our media rarely reports it because…it’s not Paris. The Ayatollah Khomeini based his opposition to the Shah in Paris for a good reason…it was much easier to get media coverage in a place the media likes to be than it would be somewhere in the Middle East, closer to home.
Sherparick
On the initial subject of this thread, this Chief needs to understand that you don’t have to wearing a white hood and burning crosses to have a “racist” problem. It starts with “them” v “us” thinking, and we humans all have that burned into our synapses. One of the spin off of the War on Terror racket is lots of security training firms have gotten into the business of providing security training to cops, and the trainers are former military, a lot of them Special Operations types, who worked for the military and contractors like Blackwater, so they bring that mind set that “you are in bandit country and all the wogs and gooks” are threats with a “shoot them before they shoot you mentality.” Not quite the attitude of police dealing with citizens.
chopper
He didn’t even say ‘black colleagues’. He said ‘racial minorities’, which may mean that one of the guys on the team is half-Asian or something.