Trayvon Martin and Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias involves looking at a situation and emphasizing the details that fit your preconceived notions, while discounting those aspects that conflict with them. In the case of Trayvon Martin, we seem to have one faction who deems it perfectly reasonable to believe that a young African American man in a hoodie, walking alone in the mid-afternoon, must be up to no good - gang activity, drug dealing, burglary, whatever. You find a Facebook page of a man named Trayvon Martin, and he's depicted striking what you believe to be a gangster pose? That can only mean that every black man named Trayvon Martin is a ganster. You see a picture of Trayvon Martin where he doesn't look dark-skinned? That can only mean that the biased media is trying to make him look less scary because, well, no logic there, just prejudice. And of course, despite your own obsession with race, it's tragic that everybody who is critical of the shooting of a 17-year-old who was doing nothing more menacing than walking is turning this into a racial issue. What sounds like a muttered racial slur by Zimmerman, perhaps a completely innocent reference to "bleah" people, right?

From what we've heard so far, it sounds like the police also drew conclusions based upon confirmation bias, failing to adequately challenge the dubious elements of Zimmerman's story and accepting Zimmerman's belief that nobody who looked like Martin belonged in that neighborhood or could be present for anything but nefarious purposes. The fact that they leaked information about Martin's background - facts irrelevant to the shooting incident - suggest that the person behind the leak believes that Martin somehow got what was coming to him, and believes that the fact that he apparently used marijuana supports that position.

On the other hand, you have a documented police officer wannabe with a history of violent confrontations, who likes to tour around his neighborhood playing captain of the neighborhood watch. (That's all documented.) It is pretty easy to go from there to seeing Zimmerman as a guy who wanted to be Dirty Harry - savior of the neighborhood - looking for a "Make my my day, punk" moment until he finally found one. That is, until he made one. The evidence is more sympathetic to this interpretation, given that there's no evidence that Trayvon Martin did anything wrong before being stalked and confronted by Zimmerman, but there is a possibility that Zimmerman has an innocent explanation for what sounds like a racial slur during his 911 call, and that he actually did stop accosting Martin and start to return to his car before a renewed altercation leading up to the shooting.

Let me emphasize, there is a material difference between inferring the worst about Zimmerman and the worst about Martin. With Zimmerman, we're talking about the guy who is still alive and is free to make his case. At any time he chooses he can make a public statement explaining what he really muttered during the 911 call, and provide a plausible explanation of why he would pursue Martin with such vigor, in total disregard of the instruction he was given by the police, then suddenly decide to let him go. He may be entitled to a presumption of innocence if he's prosecuted for a crime, but he is not owed any such presumption in the court of public opinion.

With Martin, on the other hand, there's no evidence that he did anything wrong or suspicious before being accosted by Zimmerman. Even in Zimmerman's own words, Martin's big offenses were walking through Zimmerman's neighborhood, wearing a hoodie on a rainy day, and keeping his hands in his pockets, presumably to keep them warm. Everything else is projection or, in the case of people like Michelle Malkin, opportunistic race-baiting. I don't see any measure by which Zimmerman's actions were reasonable, particularly after being told by the police that they did not need him to follow Martin, and it seems difficult to avoid seeing that his perceptions of race colored his actions, but there's room for a factual explanation that makes him something less than a poster child for a Dirty Harry wannabe who was eager to shoot a "punk".

I'm not going to argue that the public at large should give Zimmerman every benefit of the doubt, or cut him some slack. Given his documented actions, I'm not sympathetic to him. I do think this incident reflects the foolish nature of "stand your ground" laws that transform this type of incident from an "imperfect self defense" - "The fight I started wasn't intended to escalate to this level so I should only be convicted of manslaughter" - to actual self-defense. If the attention that this incident generates causes Florida to restore at least that level of sanity to its statute, that's worth something. Centuries of sound public policy lie behind the idea that you should avoid escalating a conflict to involve deadly force whenever possible, even if that means retreating, and it's a shame that legislators and lobbying groups have played up to the fears and prejudices of... well, people like Zimmerman... and have extended the concept of self-defense to the point of foolishness.

Trayvon Martin, From Pursuit to Gunshot - What Part Am I Missing Here

So far we have a 911 call in which we hear that George Zimmerman is following Trayvon Martin, despite being instructed by the police not to do so. Consistent with Zimmerman's report that, part way through his following Martin, Martin started running, we have the report of a friend of Martin's that he had noticed that he was being followed by a strange man and that she had told him to run.

Next we have the police recitation of Zimmerman's account of how he came to shoot Martin,

Police disclosed to the Orlando Sentinel that there is about a one-minute gap, after Zimmerman called police and before he fatally shot Martin, during which police say they're not sure what happened.

In Zimmerman's version of events, he had stopped following Martin and had turned around and was walking back to his SUV when Martin approached him from behind. The two exchanged words, then Martin punched him in the nose, sending him to the ground, and began beating him.

The police department is apparently attempting to overcome concerns over its competence in handling the investigation by leaking like a sieve - but only information prejudicial to Martin. But what I want to know is this: How did we go from having Zimmerman warm and dry in his car, being told by the police not to follow Martin, to having Zimmerman out of his car and engaging in fisticuffs with Martin?

Even if we assume that Martin got the upper hand at some point, and even if we're willing to take Zimmerman's story at face value, are we to believe that Martin turned around, ran toward Zimmerman, used some form of superpower to stop Zimmerman's moving car, pulled the door open, pulled Zimmerman out and then started to beat him? That doesn't seem very likely, does it?

So what I want to know is how Zimmerman came to be out of his car and in a physical confrontation with Martin, and why it would not have been perfectly reasonable for a 17-year-old who was not doing anything wrong to be very concerned about being stalked then accosted by a man who had no legitimate business accosting him, and who outweighed him by a good 100 pounds. Perv? Mugger? What would go through your mind?

It is inescapable that it was Zimmerman who created the context for Martin's fears, and that it was Zimmerman who in flagrant disregard of the instruction he received from the police chose to continue to chase Martin, and who chose to get out of his car and physically confront Martin. Are we to believe that after all of his bravado, and after starting that confrontation, Zimmerman didn't try to get physical with Martin when Martin continued to try to get away from him? Had Martin shot Zimmerman at that point, wouldn't he have the stronger case for self-defense?

And if that's the case, how the bleep does Martin's act of self-defense, after being stalked by a dim-witted, gun-toting police officer wannabe, become legal grounds for Zimmerman to kill him? Even a keystone kop should be able to see the problem with allowing a person who creates a violent scene to claim self-defense based upon his victim's acts of self-defense. What was Martin's supposed reason for breaking off his stalking of Martin and returning to his SUV, and his explanation for how Martin went from fleeing from being stalked to being a physical aggressor?

Whomever is leaking stuff out of the police department, do us a favor: rather than leaking irrelevant information about Martin, how about leaking the rest of Zimmerman's statement, as surely at least one officer involved in the investigation thought to inquire as to what happened between the time he was safely in his car and when he was being punched in the nose. And how about leaking the autopsy report, as it surely sheds some light on the distance between Zimmerman and Martin at the time of the shooting, and whether Zimmerman was on the ground with Martin on top of him or standing clear of Martin and removed from any reasonable fear of harm.