Tag: Police

Dumbass Kalamazoo Sheriff Investigates Someone Who Called Him “Fat Ass” On Facebook

The Kalamazoo County Sheriff is apparently a dumbass as well as being a “fat ass.”

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — A West Michigan sheriff sent detectives to investigate a Facebook message he received calling him fat.

The incident report obtained by Newschannel 3 through a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard Fuller directed his investigators to the home of the man accused of sending the message.

While no crime occurred, the report showed Fuller sent detectives, not deputies, to talk to the man accused of sending the sheriff a Facebook message:

“Your a fat a– who needs to go on a diet. Stop us from living. Come get me if you want me tubby as fat b—-“

The report showed the sheriff took the message as threatening in nature and showed Fuller requested his employees make contact with the sender and warn against any threatening posts in the future.

The report showed on April 6, 2020, two Kalamazoo County detectives questioned a man at his home in Richland. The report said the 48-year-old denied writing the post and claimed his Facebook account had been hacked.

NBER Working Paper: Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence from 911 Calls

Interesting research from Mark Hoekstra and CarlyWill Sloan at The National Bureau of Economic Research on racial differences in use of force by police based on 911 calls.

According to the abstract,

While there is much concern about the role of race in police use of force, identifying causal effects is difficult. This is in part because of selection, and in part because researchers often observe only interactions that end in use of force, necessitating nontrivial benchmarking assumptions. This paper addresses these problems by using data on officers dispatched to over 2 million 911 calls in two cities, neither of which allows for discretion in the dispatch process. Using a location-by-time fixed effects approach that isolates the random variation in officer race, we show white officers use force 60 percent more than black officers, and use gun force twice as often. To examine how civilian race affects use of force, we compare how white officers increase use of force as they are dispatched to more minority neighborhoods, compared to minority officers. Perhaps most strikingly, we show that while white and black officers use gun force at similar rates in white and racially mixed neighborhoods, white officers are five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly black neighborhoods. Similarly, white officers increase use of any force much more than minority officers when dispatched to more minority neighborhoods. Consequently, difference-in-differences estimates from individual officer fixed effect models indicate black (Hispanic) civilians are 30 – 60 (75 – 120) percent more likely to experience any use of force, and five times as likely to experience gun use of force, compared to if white officers scaled up force similarly to minority officers. These findings highlight race as an important determinant of police use of force, including and especially lethal force.