Decline and Fall: This Week's Evidence

Catch-22 Revisited

Since the NSA is spying on foreign heads of state, it doesn't take much imagination to think they might also be spying on members of Congress. Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote to Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, asking, “Has the NSA spied, or is it currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” He defined spying as “gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business.”

© CBS News

Gen. Alexander's reply did not deny spying on Congress. It was straight out of Catch-22. He couldn't answer the Senator's question, he said, because to do so would violate his privacy.

[T]his telephone metadata program incorporates extraordinary controls to protect Americans' privacy interests. Among those protections is the condition that the NSA can query the metadata only based on phone numbers reasonably suspected to be associated with specific foreign terrorist groups. For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search to determine if any records NSA has received under the program have included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress, other American elected officials, or any other American without that predicate.

If you read Gen. Alexander's letter, you see that he only answered that part of the Senator's question dealing with metadata and ignored the rest of the forms of spying he asked about. The General and his colleagues undoubtedly had a good laugh about the clever way they were able to dodge Sen. Sanders' query.

Memo to Sen. Sanders: I hope you've never visited any embarrassing websites. If you have, the NSA can threaten to leak this information to your constituents unless you vote the “right” way.

Another Reason Not to Vacation in Florida

I'm sure you've heard that Curtis Reeves, a retired cop, fatally shot Chad Oulson, the man sitting in front of him at a movie theatre, who refused to stop texting his baby sitter as they waited to watch Lone Survivor. Mr. Reeves' attorney has indicated he will plead self-defense under Florida's Stand Your Ground law, since he was hit in the face by an “unknown object” and therefore feared for his safety. Mr. Oulson allegedly threw popcorn at him. Ousler's wife was wounded as she tried in vain to protect him.

© thinkprogress.org

Florida's legal community apparently regards Mr. Reeves' acquittal as a serious possibility. “Here's the problem,” said Stetson University law professor Charles Rose, “We're trying to look into the mind of the defendant and posit what he thought was happening. That's often why these cases go (to) trial—because you just can't tell.” You also just can't tell how creative defendants can be if you allow them to report their own “thoughts.”

According to a witness, Mr. Oulson's last words were, “I can't believe I got shot.” Apparently he didn't realize the NRA, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Florida state legislature were sowing the seeds of his demise.

Memo to Mr. Reeves: Popcorn may indeed be life-threating, but only if you ingest it.

Cruel But Not Unusual

Speaking of the death penalty, the state of Ohio executed Dennis McGuire using a new, untested combination of lethal drugs. It took him 25 minutes to die. According to witnesses, which included his family, he writhed in agony and made “loud snorting sounds” while he was dying.

Mr. McGuire's lawyers sued to prevent the execution, arguing that the drugs could lead to “air hunger,” which would cause him to suffer “agony and terror” as he struggled to breathe. A medical doctor testifying for the state said he had no idea how long the drugs would take to kill him. But the judge accepted the Ohio Assistant Attorney General's argument that, in spite of the Constitution's guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment, “you're not entitled to a pain-free execution.”

© cathleenfalsani.com

The apparent reason for this failed experiment is that the usual drug cocktail used for lethal injections is in short supply and the pharmaceutical corporations have raised the prices. This has sent the states scrambling for a cheaper method. The combination of an anti-anxiety drug and a morphine derivative used by Ohio is actually just a larger dose of the drug mixture typically used as an anesthetic during a colonoscopy.

The McGuire family has announced they intend to sue the state of Ohio for causing him “unnecessary pain.” According to Douglas Berman, an Ohio State law professor, this will be difficult to prove since Mr. McGuire is unavailable to testify. (Unlike Mr. Reeves.)

Bruce Burns, a Republican State senator from Wyoming, has introduced a bill to bring back the firing squad in that state.

"Insane, Mad, Delusional"

A draft of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that it might be necessary to “extract vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the air” in order to prevent the global warming for which we are currently headed. The IPCC suggests some familiar methods of carbon dioxide removal such as planting more forests and carbon capture and storage (CCS)—capturing and burying emissions from power plants. CCS is untested and would be very expensive. However, the IPCC goes on to mention more radical geoengineering proposals such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to block solar heat. A recent climate model simulation showed that such schemes might have disastrous side-effects which could render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.

The man Americans elected as their president in 2000 reacted to the draft by calling these plans “insane,” “utterly mad,” and “delusional in the extreme.” He went on to say that:

The fact that some scientists who should know better are actually engaged in serious discussion of those alternatives is a mark of how desperate some of them are feeling due to the paralysis in the global political system.

Either that or they have a grant from Exxon-Mobil.

As both Mr. Gore and Naomi Klein have suggested, the appeal of these geoengineering schemes is that they allow us to believe that we can continue our current forms of energy consumption without having to change our behavior. Their appeal to energy companies is that they leave existing corporate power relationships in place.

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Catch-22

The Catalyst

This Will Not Surprise You

The Catalyst

Too many trees have been sacrificed on commentary in the wake of the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin verdict. It seems clear that an unconscious racial bias—shared by the perpetrator, the police, the prosecution and the jury—that unfairly associates young black men with violence was partially responsible for this miscarriage of justice. But Florida's Stand Your Ground (SYG) law, which tips the scales of justice in favor of the defendant, especially if there are no credible witnesses, also played a role. If a person is justified in using deadly force “if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another,” this law comes perilously close to suggesting that a racial stereotype shared by the culture can be a legitimate defense against a murder charge. Who would have thought that an armed man could attack an unarmed man, and when he starts to lose the fight, shoot him, and successfully claim self-defense? Would a black shooter with a white victim have been acquitted with the same defense?

An interaction (in statistics) occurs when two variables have an effect in combination that is not predictable on the basis of the effects of both of them alone. One type is a catalytic interaction. It occurs when two variables both have the same effect, but their combined influence is much greater than the sum of their individual effects. For example, both alcohol and barbiturates are depressants, but taken together their physiological effect is extremely severe and has resulted in accidental suicides. The one acts as a catalyst for the other.

John Roman of the Urban Institute gathered FBI homicide data from 2005 to 2010 (the last year available), a total of 82,986 cases. The primary variables of interest were the race of the perpetrator and the race of the victim, so unsolved crimes were excluded. The outcome of interest was whether the homicide was ruled justified. Cases involving law enforcement—usually an automatic acquittal—were omitted. Roman also examined whether the case occurred in one of the 23 states having SYG laws. Other control variables available in the data base were the number of perpetrators and victims, whether they were strangers, the weapon used, the year, the region, and the age and gender of the parties. Here are the data:

If we look at all cases, it is clear that both the race of the perpetrator and the race of the victim have significant effects. A homicide is more likely to be declared justified if the shooter is white and if the victim is black. However, the most important effect is a catalytic interaction between these two variables. The shooter is much more likely to be exonerated when a white perpetrator kills a black victim than with the other three combinations, which don't differ very much.

SYG laws also increase the likelihood that homicides will be ruled justified. However, the evidence that they act as a catalyst of racial bias is mixed, since SYG laws increase the number of exonerations in three of the four racial combinations—all but the case when the shooter is black and the victim white.

Would a critic be persuaded by these data? Probably not. It's possible that other variables not recorded in the FBI data base are influencing the outcome, variables such as the location of the incident or the immediately preceding events. A critic might claim, for example, that the white shooter-black victim category includes more home (or business) invasions where standing one's ground is justified. In such cases, we would expect the shooter and the victim to be strangers. As you can see, homicides are more likely to be ruled justified when the perpetrator and the victim are strangers, but lack of acquaintance seems to increase perceived justification in all four racial combinations, not just the white perpetrator-black victim case, as this explanation would suggest. (I drew this conclusion by eyeballing the charts; Roman does not present an analysis of these data.)

Laboratory experiments might help to eliminate some of the ambiguity inherent in the FBI data by creating scenarios which vary the races of the perpetrator and victim and hold other characteristics constant. For example, Birt Duncan showed subjects an ambiguous incident in which one man may or may not have shoved another and asked subjects whether an act of violence occurred. The results were similar to Roman's data; the incident was most likely to be judged violent with a black perpetrator and a white victim. If we are only interested in homicide, we might present participants with written descriptions of killings which vary the races of the shooters and victims and ask them to play the role of jurors. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if social psychologists around the country are doing that very thing right now.

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Blaming the Victim

Breathing While Black

Open Carry

Breathing While Black

Beginning ten years ago, social psychologists did a series of studies looking at the consequences of our cultural stereotypes about African-American men and violence. A study by Joshua Corell and others called “The Police Officer's Dilemma” is typical. White participants were shown slides of young men standing in public places, such as a park or a city sidewalk. Half of the pictures were of black men and half of white men. Within each racial group, half of the men were holding handguns and the others were holding some innocuous object, such as a cell phone or a soda can. The participants had a half-second to press one of two keys labeled “shoot” or “don't shoot.” The researchers counted the number of errors—either not shooting an armed man or shooting an unarmed man.

The results showed evidence of bias. When the men in the photos were white, the participants made the same number of errors regardless of whether the men were armed or not. However, when the men were black, they made fewer errors when they were holding a gun, and more errors when they were not. In other words, they were more likely to “shoot” a black man than a white man, both when he was armed and when he was not.

This is an example of automatic or fast thinking, which Kahneman calls “a machine for jumping to conclusions.” Subsequent research showed that the results did not vary with personal prejudice. However, the participants showed a greater “shooter bias” when they were more aware of the cultural stereotype, that is, when they gave higher estimates of the percentage of Americans who saw black men as aggressive, dangerous and violent. Exposure to newspaper articles about black criminals also increases the size of the shooter bias.

The fact that this response tendency is automatic doesn't mean it can't be controlled. The shooter bias can be reduced through practice and with certain kinds of training, such as instructing participants to ignore the race of the person in the photo and to concentrate on the presence or absence of a gun.

This series of three videos (about 35 minutes total) featuring social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt deals with primarily unconscious racial biases. The study on weapons stereotypes is in the second segment, but I recommend them all. (You Tube will guide you through them.) Some of them are shocking, and will make it clear why social psychologists are unwilling to accept mass media assurances that prejudice is a thing of the past.

I think these studies are relevant to the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman says he felt threatened by Martin, and so far, the Sanford, FL police have accepted his claim that he acted in self defense. This defense is made possible by Florida's 2005 “stand your ground” law, which was written by the National Rifle Association. Variants of which have been enacted in 20 other states. The relevant section of the law reads as follows:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

This law does away with the longstanding legal doctrine that, when outside your home, there is a “duty to retreat” when confronted with a dangerous situation. It creates ambiguity about when a person is acting in self-defense. How can it be objectively determined that a person “reasonably believes” he or she is threatened? The studies of shooter bias suggest that people might sincerely believe themselves to be in danger when confronted with an unarmed black man. Even if the perpetrator is wrong, he or she may escape punishment if the mistake is “reasonable.”

The difficulty is compounded when there are no witnesses or the witnesses are friendly to the perpetrator. Who is able to contradict the shooter's self-report of his or her emotional state? Not the victim. He's dead. As a result, police and prosecutors may assume that they have little chance of obtaining a conviction in a jury trial.

From reading the accounts or this incident and listening to the 911 tape (see below), I doubt whether Zimmerman sincerely felt himself to be threatened. He pursued Martin even after the police told him not to. However, the reference in the law to “prevent(ing) the commission of a forcible felony” seems to encourage this type of vigilantism. When combined with Florida's lax gun laws, the “stand your ground” law allows armed, aggressive, and possibly paranoid people to pursue their fantasies of law enforcement and justify their behavior with after-the-fact claims of self-defense.

Justifiable homicides in Florida have tripled since the law went into effect. In 93 cases in which the defendant claimed self-defense under the new law, charges were dropped in 57 of them, and 7 others were acquitted by a jury. This law is irresponsible and should be repealed. If the shooter bias studies are to be taken seriously, the equal protection claise of the Fourteenth Amendment would seem to provide a basis for overturning them.