The Myth of Murderous Police

           Have you ever asked a small child to guess how much you make in salary? The answers you get are just insane. One kid will say you make at least a million dollars a month and the next kid will guess a thousand dollars a year. You get these extremes because small children have no real point of reference. They don't work, or buy things themselves, so they have nothing to base their guesses on. They might know what the word rent means, but they don't know if rent is more expensive than dinner at McDonald's. Why am I starting a blog titled "The Myth of Murderous Police" by talking about how young children view money? Because the same concept applies, and is, in my opinion, the greatest reason why police-involved killings (and a great number of other things) have been blown way out of proportion over the past few years.

       In many ways, we are all children in the social media age. In the span of just a few years, cable/satellite television and the internet has turned the whole planet into our hometown. We simply are not yet accustomed to dealing with the scale. What do I mean by this? Thirty years ago, if a police officer in Portland, Oregon shot someone on duty, it would have probably been front page news in the local Portland newspaper, but would never have been heard about in Atlanta or Houston. This meant that unless you lived in a huge city such as New York or Chicago, you might go months, or even years without hearing about an officer-involved death. Now, however, with CNN, and Facebook, and Twitter your local news is basically everything that happens anywhere in the country. Our brains, however, can't grasp the numbers involved when you are talking about the entirety of the United States, so all it really grasps is that it used to never hear about officer-involved killings, and now it hears about them seemingly all the time.

        It is understandable that people believe this is a huge problem if they hear about these events almost daily, but one needs to step back and look at the scale. Official statistics are almost non-existent, but for the past few years the Washington Post has been keeping track of all officer involved shooting deaths in the country, and the average is just under one thousand per year. Now, if it were 1000 of these in your neighborhood, that would absolutely be an issue. This number, however, encompasses the entire country. To put it in perspective, in 2015, a little more than 2.7 million people died, of which 995 where at the hands of a police officer. That is 0.03% of the deaths attributable to police shootings. If you died in 2015, you were 35 times more likely to die in a car crash than you were to be killed by a law enforcement officer.

           To add a bit more perspective, there were 468 murders in the same year, in Chicago alone (a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, but that is an argument for another day). Take it a bit further, there were almost eleven million arrests made in 2015 nationally (not counting traffic violations). So in 2015, if you were arrested (and any arrest situation is potentially a very dangerous situation for any law enforcement officer), you stood a 0.009% chance of being killed by the officer. There aren't any statistics on how many arrests are physically resisted, but there is a good chance that it is thousands of times more than 0.009% of them. Racism has also been attributed to officers in regard to officer involved shootings, but again, the same types of numbers can be found. The same Washington Post database shows that in 2015, of the 995 officer-involved shooting deaths, 259 of those killed were black while 497, or nearly twice as many, were white. The numbers were nearly identical in 2016 and 2017.

          So why are so many people so vocal about this problem? As I mentioned before, the numbers they are dealing with are foreign to them. If we are going to live in this new world, this new information age, we need to get better at looking at the big picture. Imagine if you were on a reality show with cameras following you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. If the director decided to show your worst 15 minutes every week, and nothing else, what do you thing you'd look like? That is what social media and the 24 hour news cycle does. Every time a police-involved shooting occurs that is even remotely close to questionable, it is broken down, scrutinized, and judged (usually by people in a nice, safe, stress free area, viewing it in slow motion, over and over again). What you don't see is the thirty or forty thousand other arrests that occurred, problem-free since the last borderline-questionable event.

          In a perfect world, law enforcement officers would never have to kill anyone, black, white, or any thing in between. As we all know, however, the world is far from perfect, and there is a reason why we give our law enforcement officers the authority to use deadly force when necessary. They are vigorously trained on the proper use of force, with regular refresher training, and are heavily scrutinized whenever they use force of any kind (not just deadly force). Do they get it wrong sometimes? Of course. Are those mistakes sometimes egregious, even criminal? Yes. No system is perfect. Is it something we should always keep an eye on and try to improve? Without question, lives are at stake. Is it the plague that the media has portrayed it as? No, not even close. 

     

PEDs and the Baseball Hall of Fame

       Performance enhancing drugs. Steroids. Juicing. Cheating. No matter how you describe it, it is a topic that has consumed the baseball world for years now. Funny enough, it doesn’t seem to raise the same level of vitriol amongst the fans of other sports. Not an Olympics goes by without at least a few names failing a test and giving back a medal. Football players found to fail a test are merely suspended for a few games and the story might make the back page of the sports section. Baseball, however, and the media that covers it have chosen the topic as their favorite battlefront. Every year, the writers decide who will gain enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, and this topic consumes them like no other. Is this fair? In a word: No.

Rafael Palmeiro ended his career with over 3000 hits, 550 home runs, 1600 runs scored and 1800 runs batted in. Those numbers were better than 95% of the players already in the Hall of Fame when he retired. Not only did he not make it into the hallowed halls, but he dropped off the ballot entirely after 3 years. That is, of course, due to the rule that players found to have used performance enhancing drugs during their career are ineligible right? Well, if such a rule existed, then or even now, that would make sense. There was no such rule when he retired. There is no such rule now. Somehow, however,many of the members of the Hall of Fame selection committee have decided to enforce this non-existent rule. They do so, however, selectively, based on nothing but their gut. Yes, Palmeiro actually failed a drug test, but others that share his fate never did. 

Keeping players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens (arguably the greatest hitter and pitcher since Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson) out of the Hall of Fame because of ties to performance enhancing drugs just doesn’t make sense for the following three reasons:

       1.We don’t know, and will never know exactly who used PED’s and who didn’t.

       2.We don’t know, and will never know exactly what effect PED usage had on the game.

      3.It is inherently unfair to the players to enforce a rule that doesn’t exist, especially when it wasn’t something that was even discussed while they were playing for the most part.

The first of these arguments is made all the time, but it cannot be stressed enough. Yes, we know Palmeiro “juiced” late in his career. But can we say without a doubt that we know when he started? We have pretty strong evidence of Bonds doing the same, but again, we have no idea of when he began, or to what extent he did it. There are hundreds of players in the big leagues, and no one can tell you definitively how many of them were enhancing themselves chemically. It might have been 5%. It might have been 50%. For all those people who say that using these drugs made for an unlevel playing field, just how unlevel was it? PED’s are easy to find, easy to mask, and for decades they weren’t tested for in Major League Baseball. Yes, for those who didn’t use them, there was a disadvantage, but just who those people were, and just how much of a disadvantage it was will never be known. 

Every time you hear people arguing about this, they bring up the “clean” players. But there is no way to tell who those players are. Ken Griffey Junior is always brought up as a “clean” player. Well, one look at the back of a Griffey rookie card will show that he was 195 pounds when he started in the league. Bonds was about the same when he started. They were both listed at 230 on their last cards. So we are just supposed to assume that the exact same amount of muscle gain was natural on Griffey? Wade Boggs hit 24 home runs in 1987 (coincidentally the year after we can assume he met Jose Canseco, the center of the PED universe, as they played on the 1986 American League All Star team together for the first time). He had never hit more than 8 before then, and only hit double digits one other time (and that was just 11). Did he jump on the bandwagon for a year and later regret it and jump off? What about Nolan Ryan? No one ever mentions him, but how do you explain that he had more strikeouts in his forties than Jim Palmer had in his twenties? How do you explain a guy in his mid forties throwing high nineties fastballs in the ninth inning? Frank Thomas is another “clean” name because even though he looked more like an NFL defensive end than a first baseman, he had that frame from day one. Of course, no one stops to ask if he was enhancing himself before he ever even got into the league. Mind you, I  am not saying Griffey or Boggs or Ryan or Thomas were cheating. I don’t believe they were, but no one other than those players themselves can answer that for sure. A case can be made against pretty much anyone.

The second reason I think there is no reason to keep guys out of the Hall is that we can’t even say what the effect of steroids was to the game. Everyone points to the home run totals, but that is just one tiny variable in a huge equation. TO begin with, the game has always changed over time. There have been eras like the early sixties where pitching was so dominant that the rules needed to be changed. In the early eighties, home runs were out of fashion and the stolen base was the flavor of the month. Rickey Henderson’s records will probably never be touched, in part, because he played in a time when teams gave guys the green light all the time. He would never be allowed to attempt nearly as many stolen bases in today’s game of advanced analytics. Maybe the “Steroids era” was destined to be a big homer era anyway. Newer, smaller ballparks were in vogue. The beginning of really detailed video swing analysis helped hitters see things they never saw before. We can’t say that, without question, steroids were the only reason for the bigger numbers, nor can we say that is all they did.

When I was a child, there were two, maybe three guys who could flirt with 98 on the radar gun. In the mid nineties, it seemed like every team had at least one reliever that wouldn’t throw below 98. Was that due to steroids? Who knows, but nobody even talks about it for the most part. People love to wonder about how many more homers were hit due to steroids, but never stop to say how many more strikeouts were recorded. All we can do is what we should always do: only compare players to their contemporaries. Stop trying to compare Bonds and McGuire and Sosa to Ruth and Aaron, and just compare them to each other. Steroids aren’t the only variable, nor are they even the biggest variable when comparing guys from the nineties to those of other eras. Travel is different. Technology is different. Contracts are different. How do you compare a guy who makes tens of millions of dollars a year and uses bats designed and tested to insane tolerances using computers to someone who had to have a full time job in the off-season to make ends meet and used hand carved chunks of wood from whatever tree was available at the time?

Finally, there is the rule itself, or should I say the lack thereof. MLB and its fans loved the renaissance that came from the higher home run numbers in the nineties, and the players saw this and did whatever they could to thrive in this new environment. If you tell a 25 year old that hitting a dozen more balls per year out of the park is the difference between them making enough to live comfortably for life and them making enough for their great grandchildren to be raised on their 100 foot yacht, what do you think they will do? When someone like Jose Canseco tells them “try this, it will add 20 pounds of muscle, and keep you from missing any games” and then they see him and others like him making millions, with no testing or possible repercussions, what do you expect? Going back a decade later and trying to hold them accountable for something that you not only didn’t punish anyone for at the time, but instead actively supported is not even remotely close to fair. 

You can’t rewrite history, nor should we try to. Baseball, more than any other sport, thrives on its long history. This is both part of its appeal, and one of the worst aspects of it. Football and basketball change their rules constantly, so fans don’t even try to compare its players through the ages. Everyone simply understands that a great quarterback from the fifties will have numbers that don’t compare to a mediocre one today. We accept that Larry Bird is one of the 2 or 3 greatest shooters ever even though a few years from now there will literally be dozens of players with more three pointers in their careers. Baseball is different, though. Since the same basic rules remain from over 100 years ago, we want badly to compare everyone evenly. This, more than anything, is why so many people want to keep out certain players, or mark records with an asterisk. We need to accept that no matter how little the rules change, the world around them changes. As unromantic as it may seem to many, we need to judge apples to apples. 

If you want to create a rule that anyone found to use performance enhancing drugs will be forever banned from the game, I would be all for it, but you can’t make that rule retroactively. When Pete Rose bet on baseball games, he knew what the rule was. That rule was created before Pete was born. You can argue with the rule, but you can’t argue with its existence. Trying to ignore history is just as futile as trying to rewrite it. You don’t need to love Babe Ruth any less just because you acknowledge Barry Bonds’ home run totals. To try and ignore Barry’s numbers is insulting to both he and Ruth. Each was the greatest of their time, in the environment around them, and that is the only way they should be judged.

What This Is And Why I Do It

     I love a good debate. Who doesn't? It doesn't have to be on any topic in particular. I love a good sports debate, like whether or not Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame. Politics are always fun too, and political debate can really help you keep your Facebook friends list under control. Music can start some great arguments in the right crowd. I have seen friendships nearly dissolve over differing views on relationships or child-rearing. Star Trek vs Star Wars, DC vs Marvel, CNN vs FoxNews... wars could be started for less. The internet has changed the world in a way that no other technological advancement ever could: it brought us the realization that everything can be an argument.

     I don't actively seek arguments, but Twitter and Facebook and social media in general have made it almost unavoidable. Any ideas you post on those sites are either too short to get your point across before they get attacked, or too long for anyone to bother reading. No one is looking for information or exchanges of ideas, everyone is looking for a spot to drop a cool one-liner and be declared the winner of the verbal exchange. It's enough to make you want to disconnect altogether. I have too much to say to disconnect, though. There are just too many thoughts in my head to not share, but I refuse to keep sharing them a sentence or two at a time with people who either agree with me for no other reason than because they feel that they should, or disagree with me for much the same reason.

     I needed a way to get my thoughts out, in their entirety, without all the back and forth. Some ideas probably only need a few sentences, while others need a few pages. This blog will contain those ideas. I will jump around from one topic to another. Anything is fair game. Hopefully some of this might interest you, or someone you know, and lead you to thinking about it. Ideally you'll think about it enough to talk to others about it. We might agree (or not), but agreement isn't the goal. If we disagree, I want you to look at things differently, or get me to think of it differently. If we agree, I want you to know you aren't alone in the way you think, and maybe help you understand why you think that way. No insults, no threats, just ideas. My ideas. Agree if you want, argue if you must, but at least think about it.