Today Gardaí pepper sprayed, tasered and shot dead a young Black man with mental health issues. There will be an ombudsman inquiry, as there always is in the case of a death at the hands of Gardai. Some thoughts...

There have been many such deaths at the hands of police in the UK over the years. So many of them involve mental health issues. The @IRR_News has recorded many of those.
Police are rarely disciplined for the use of lethal force in the case of mental health issues, because the decision is based on the balance of threat versus force.
Butp police are not mental health specialists, and they make a judgement on the perceived safety of officers. Those judgements on threat are often based in biases that perceive ethnic minorities, particularly people of African descent, as more aggressive.
Policing of Black communities worldwide suffers from this bias problem, as do investigations into lethal force by police.
Police services rarely acknowledge these biases, nor do those bodies that investigate them.
No criminal offence in Ireland carries the death penalty, yet lethal force was used today against a single young suspect, in front of tens of Gardai, armed and unarmed.
The forthcoming inquiry into the death must take seriously the questions of bias which are raised by this incident, and whether Gardai acted appropriately - in light of the high risk of bias in favour of ethal force - in their findings.
Above all, we must remember that a community is grieving and fearful for their children tonight. An Garda Síochána must go above and beyond to demonstrate that they can be trusted to acknowledge and address bias, and police our communities fairly and transparently.
In the year of the death of George Floyd in the US, and #BlackLivesMatter discussions across the globe, it is imperative that we have an open discussion about this incident. To do otherwise risks creating deep seams of distrust here as in other countries.
https://t.co/6Ue3WwnNHU
Response to a few questions :
1. The intersection of race and mental health issues here is key. Racial stereotypes play into judgements of unpredictable behaviour in cases like these investigated elsewhere.
Racism is not one potential aspect.
2. Cases of lethal force tend to be more reflective of institutional trends and regional attitudes than psychology or behaviour of individual police officers. That should be taken into account here.
3. The focus here must be on building trust in policing, and in community, and accountability of organisations is part of that. Police officers act FOR the organisation when they use lethal violence. AGS must be prepared to be open.
4. This is also about preserving all our rights. Every person suspected of crime has legal right to arrest, investigation and fair trial. Lethal force removes all those rights on a subjective assessment by police who are not mental health specialists, prosecutors, judge or jury.
5. A lot of people are asking questions tonight about this case. My comments are an attempt to answer some of those, and aimed at the forthcoming inquiry.

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global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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