Quote Originally Posted by drillerpie View Post
Ok well if it's been relegated from 'enlightening' to just 'worth a look' I'll probably give it a miss. Appreciate your honesty though.

There's a change in police attitudes and behaviours every time there's an incident like the George Floyd killing (by that I mean video of a black man killed by the police played over and over again on all platforms to successfully create the false impression that this only ever happens to black people) which is referred to as the Ferguson Effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect

There has been a huge Ferguson Effect in the US this year. This article gives an idea of the scale. It could be just a coincidence or it could be down to other factors, but when you look at the timeline it seems quite a compelling hypothesis.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox...ts-trump-biden

So when you claimed ‘the police in Chicago (and several other major US cities) have pretty much stopped pro-actively policing black communities since the BLM demonstrations’, what you should have said is ‘there’s a working hypothesis that suggests police ‘pull back’ following egregious incidents, but there’s lots of competing evidence which so far has led to no obvious conclusion’. You could have added ‘Obviously which conclusion you come to will be strongly influenced by what prejudices you went in with’. In other words what you claimed was in effect bullsh!t, as I suspected.

Even if the ‘Ferguson effect’ does have merit, does that mean that people shouldn’t protest or complain when police officers fatally put their knees on the necks of their suspects, for fear of this leading to increased murders in the following months? I really think you should give this more thought.

A book can be both ‘worth a look’ and ‘enlightening’. You’ve made your mind up on this subject anyway, so I suspect other opinions/perspectives would fall on deaf ears.