> So you're saying that more police presence is harming people. How?
Ask the disproportionate number of Black men in prison. Ask white rapist Brock Turner why a white judge wanted to let off "because he's a good boy", or the Central Park Five or the Georgetown Jacket Three that spent decades in prison because white cops and prosecutors assumed their guilt based on the color of their skin.
If my posts sounds aggressive, it's because your posts are dismissive of the terrible culture that's led to the biased data that would be used to make predictions, and you have the gall to claim it's all fine and dandy.
> current hysteria
There is no hysteria going on right now, it's a quite reasonable response to decades of bad decision making on the part of police departments across the U.S.
> It is a reasonable perspective to have that if black Americans engage in more violence, it is because they have been subjected to more violence and deprived of opportunity. And that, ultimately, is in many cases, the responsibility of white Americans.
I disagree that this is a reasonable perspective at all. Adult people are wholy responsible for their actions. This fundemental fact underpins our whole society.
I would say that this statistic is primarily used to explain disproportionate encounters with (and subsequently death at the hands of) police. It's important to note that black people are also massively overrepresented as victims of violent crime. This suggests that black communities are generally more violent and therefore more likely to be policed. This fact along with others (like the behaviours of majority black police departments) can be used to construct in good faith a strong argument that there is no epidemic of police racism. This argument is not very popular, so it seems to get censored.
> He said that black communities have higher crime rates, which should rightly deserve more police attention, hence their interaction with police on a per capita basis would increase.
"Interaction" is one thing; police killing people is another.
(An aside: if we dig deeper to figure out why black communities often have higher crime rates... welp, there we go again, it usually boils down to some form of systemic racism.)
> ... but you've chosen to only accept the racism one.
Why do you feel the need to steer people away from racism as a cause? Nowhere did I say that racism is the "only" thing; please don't put words in my mouth. But it is, by and large, the root of the majority of the problem.
I've already spent more time than I care to on this topic, so I'm not going to go digging again, but if you look at studies around general police behavior (who they are interested in, who they detain, how long they detain them, stats around escalation, arrest vs. warning rates for same offense, etc.), it's pretty clear that police target -- whether consciously or subconsciously -- non-white people, and black people in particular. You can call that "bias" or "prejudice" or whatever you want; I call it racism.
But regardless, bottom line: black people are killed by police at a disproportionately large rate when compared to people of other races. That is what the data shows, plain and simple. I'm not really interested in quibbling over vague claims that racism has little or nothing to do with it, as that's clearly false. If you want an acknowledgement that racism isn't 100% the entire picture, then sure, ok, fine. (Though you don't seem particularly interested in venturing forth any suggestions or data pointing to other causes, so I question your motives here.) But racism is a huge contributor to these disparities. If tomorrow we could magically eliminate racism from everyone's mind, I guarantee you ant disparities would be so small as to not really garner anyone's attention.
So here's my question for you: what are those other non-racism causes of this disparity? And if you can name some, do the causes of those causes not actually boil down to systemic racism in the end?
> Finally, he tries to muddy the waters by essentially claiming black people seem to "deserve it" more, because apparently black people are involved in more crime than white people? Which, again, doesn't seem to be very well supported by data.
I don't think you're being fair to what he said. He said that black communities have higher crime rates, which should rightly deserve more police attention, hence their interaction with police on a per capita basis would increase.
You seem to be implying that cops are, subconsciously or not, more interested in using deadly force against black people than white people. The data you're using from statista seems to have many equally plausible explanations, but you've chosen to only accept the racism one.
> a large body of people are convinced by their lived experiences [1] that police violence is racially biased, and this conviction is further supported by a massive number of known individual cases
Okay, we know that there's an effect. No one is arguing that black people not only feel that way, but interact with (and are killed by) police at a higher-than-white per capita rate. That certainly should be addressed, and is a major social concern.
I think we agree on how to interpret the data at least this far -- that there's an effect, originally identified anecdotally by black people but supported by data, where black people are killed by police more often per capita. (Numbers I've seen are like 2.5x per capita -- but order of magnitude, I think we can agree on somewhere between 2x and 5x.)
Where we disagree, and I think we're just going to have to disagree, is that this is evidence that there's a lot of systemic racism going on. (Think "70 cent" wage gap, not "95 cent" wage gap.)
I think we're seeing a little bit of active racism, a lot of lingering economic effects of historic racism, a little bit of active cultural maladaptation, and a lot of general police violence. (That's me "thinking about the issue with an open mind" -- that distribution is basically the prior on social issue breakdown.)
You seem to suggest that the data suggests just "a lot of racism", which is where I disagree: I don't think the evidence is anywhere near moving the needle from the prior of "complex weave of the usual issues" to "outright, ongoing, systemic racism".
> But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on.
Finally, I just want to say, that this argument supports literally anything that sounds appealing, regardless of how likely it is to be true. There's a long history of creating new problems while attempting to solve problems by adopting solutions that make no sense upon detailed analysis, but sound good or appeal to our emotions in some way.
> The statistics show that the murders of unarmed people of color at the hands of police officers is disproportionately higher than that of the white people.
The statistics show all kinds of things. It would show the same for men vs women, young vs old, it would even show the same poor urban areas vs rich suburbs.
It's unfortunate, but also clear that certain demographics simply present a higher threat. Perhaps the police should be blind to age, race, neighbourhood and gender, but in reality that's not going to happen. It's a survival instinct we all have and if you pretend you feel less threatened when a group of young men walk pass you in a rough area compared to an elderly couple in the suburbs, then you're lying.
What you really need to be asking is whether these stats are a product of the increased threat young black men pose to the police or whether this is simply straight up racism. But the fact these statistics are not comparable to other minority ethnic groups living in the US, nor to black women, you have to question if racism is the best explanation of the data. Indeed if it is racism, it seems to be a very unusual type of racism which has prejudice specifically for young, male, poor, and of course, black individuals.
> For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed
This is a weird way to frame the issue. Are black people arrested for violent crime more often? I don't know, but if they are, that changes the conclusion. This seems like an obvious thing I'd want to find out if I were posting that Twitter thread.
> I am showing that when you control for violent crime rate, the disparity vanishes.
No, arrest rate and crime rate are not the same. That's the whole point of the discussion about bias in policing.
If you ask a more straightforward question, like "how often are people killed when they interact with police?", the statistics look different. Here's a study that says:
> On average, there were large racial/ethnic inequities in the rates at which White and Black people were killed during police contact. Across all MSAs, Black people were 3.23 times more likely to be killed compared to White people (95% CI: 2.95, 3.54, p<0.001).
Citation needed. Cops visit black neighborhoods more, sure. But they do that because they commit vastly more crime. Which is the cause and which the effect?
It's also a lot more complicated than that. People throw out studies that blacks are more likely to be caught for drug crimes. But they are less likely to be caught for more serious crimes. Possibly because they trust police less and are less likely to volunteer as witnesses. E.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-underpolicing-of-black-amer...
>By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime.
That is because they commit more violent crimes. Did you know that?
>Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed.
See the last point.
In 99.9% of cases, people killed by police are commiting crimes.
Also note that asians have the lowest rate of being killed by police. I suppose it was asians that were the real whites all along? Or perhaps you simply can't make sweeping conclusions from this data.
>A black man has little recourse if he is assaulted by a police man, or if his wife or child is killed by them
To be clear, those are not statistically significant events. In fact, they are insignificant at the population level, and there is no discrepancy across racial lines (as in, the numbers do not show Black Americans being targeted more than other demographic groups).
One of the challenges is that if a demographic group disproportionately engages in criminal activity (more or less), then it will necessarily have a disproportionate negative (or positive) interaction with the entire judicial system (police and courts) - but you cannot fix that with police reform. You can still make the case for Police reform and there are a lot of places of improvement (e.g. the practice of 'swatting' should NOT be a thing - police and judges that issue these warrants should be MORE discriminatory !!!), but that will not lessen the proportion of negative interactions.
>Families are torn apart by drug laws and prison pipelines.
That has NOTHING to do with police. Police enforce laws on the books - typically municipal and state laws. Most cities have progressive Democratic leadership (from mayor, to council, to police chiefs) and those cities also had the biggest issues with protests against police brutality.
> As a black man you are more likely to be killed by a cop than it is likely a cop dies in the line of duty
Same goes for criminals. And this is the mistake in your argumentation. Around 2.2% of black men were imprisoned in 2018 in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/252871/imprisonment-rate...). It's not per se outrageous that 5% or so of criminals die in the hands of the police, in a country with major social issues and easy access to dangerous weapons. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
> I know policing is hard. And frankly, I sympathize with a police officer who finds himself more intimidated by a black man on the street than a white man. It is racist and wrong to respond that way...
I think the relevant point from my source's editorial is this: "While these inferences aren’t fair to the vast majority on either side [(police or civilian)], they are rational responses to fear and uncertainty. As such, neither legislation nor indoctrination can banish them."
So I'm not sure it's fair to call police officers racist. It's certainly not old-school Racist in the form of a deliberate and systematic oppression of a minority or an opinion that they're genetically inferior.
(Disclaimer. This post is meant to provide insight into behavior of people, only. No specific public policy recommendation is hereby condemned or endorsed.)
> they didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a member of group X.
No one is asking for "special treatment". They are asking not to get special treatment that consists of being killed by police officers.
And yes, too many white people are killed by police. The police in the US have both a tendency to shoot too many people, and have a tendency to target too many black people, which both add up to shooting disproportionately many black people.
And yeah, the problem is more complex than simple racism by police. There are problems of too many criminals being armed in the US (both black and white), meaning that the police are more prone to shoot in supposed self defense. There are problems of class and poverty, that lead people into violence. There are a lot of complex, interrelated factors that lead to this.
But all of that said, it is undeniable that there are a disproportionate number of law abiding or peaceful, unarmed black men who are killed by police in this country.
> The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.
Interracial violence is a pretty small fraction of all violence.
Most violence is intraracial. Source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf (2010, reporting data up to 2005, see page 67); about 42% of homicides are black on black, about 45% are white on white, about 8.8% are black on white, about 3.2% are white on black. If you're white, I'd be a lot more worried about that 45% than the 8.8%.
You know what's likely to be the most likely way to avoid getting killed or shot? Not having family members who have ready access to firearms. You are a lot more likely to be shot by a family member in anger than you are by a stranger of another race.
> Dude, what has the obviously political and administrative policy of "stop and frisk" to do with the racial composition of NY cops? I'll tell you: Nothing!
That's exactly my point. When I said that Larry Elder's video mentions a number of true but irrelevant facts, this is what I meant. The fact that the police force is relatively diverse doesn't actually matter if the policies and culture of the police perpetuate systemic injustice and violence.
> And for good reason, because AFAIK it was wildly successful, and made New York a lot safer for most people.
Not really, crime in NYC didn't fall at a rate particularly faster than anywhere else. Freakonomics has a good chapter on this that suggests that the general drop in crime may have been caused by social policies across the US that helped stabilize the black community, notably the legalization of Abortion. Yeah, the legalization of Abortion in 1973 caused a drop in crime in the mid 90s.
> Naturally. Don't you think it's completely logical that people who also commit far mor crimes, also get into far more tussles with the police?
No, because the study controlled for other factors including violence of the person the police was interacting with. The conclusion of the paper (which if you'd read, you'd already know) was that police were more likely to escalate force with a black person compared to a white person exhibiting the same behavior. The caveat to this was that as the level of force increased, the racial disparity decreased. So while police were significantly much more likely to grab or manhandle a black person than a white person (again, controlling for the behavior), they were only mildly more likely to tase a black person and statically equivalently likely to shoot people of all races.
> That's because there is no opposite here... Abuse ? Legitimate use of force.
No, like I said this was controlling for the behavior of the civilian. So police were more likely to use force on black people for exhibiting the same behavior.
It's also worth mentioning here that crime is in many ways socially constructed. And the US justice system does a lot of things to make poor (and especially poor black) people admit to crimes that they didn't commit[0].
District Attorneys and police work together to put the most people behind bars (in some cases because they have quotas to meet, again watch 13th for more here), and they can do so most effectively by overpolicing poor communities.
This is for two reasons, one, yes, those communities often have more crime occurring in them, but two the people in them can't defend themselves. So if you're innocent put charged with a crime, you are forced to take a plea bargain or be stuck in jail (unless you can afford bail, which affluent people can, but poor people can't). So you admit to a crime which you didn't commit just so that you can get out of jail and maintain your employment.
Notice how this means that even innocent people are admitting to crimes they didn't commit, because it's actually in their best interest to do so. Notice how this means that crime numbers in some of these over-policed communities could be artificially inflated since even people are admitting to crimes they didn't commit.
> One way to do it, is to ask for policies that open up for more social community work, where the first responder to economical, drug related or abusive behaviour stops being the police, but rather a social worker, or some other community representative. It's just a suggestion. Should be right down your lane since you are a left winger!
Yes, this is the entire idea of Defund The Police, an idea being pushed by BlackLivesMatter[1].
> Were these fears unfounded then?
It doesn't matter. People being afraid isn't an excuse to enact literally explicitly racist laws.
> You didn't research very hard. From the Washington Post:
Actually, that very quote was what inspired my research. I wanted to know if the quote was misleading in favor of one narrative, so I filtered out cases where the suspect was armed and otherwise viably threatening.
> It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people.
I don't dispute that. I'm skeptical that black people are unjustifiably shot more frequently than white people, or at least with the frequency the media would have me believe.
> Nobody is talking about the bias being spontaneous. It is chronic and cultural.
It's very counterintuitive that police officers around the country would have a homogeneous culture that diverges so strongly from the cultures of the diverse communities from which they come and in which they live and in which they work.
It's necessarily "spontaneous" that police officers around the country coming from diverse backgrounds and living and working in diverse communities would spontaneously adopt a culture that biases them against one race in particular, especially when many of those officers are of that same race.
> Do you have anything to back up your claim that African American officers are more likely to use force against African Americans than white officers?
2 separate analyses come to mind, but there are others (I don't have the time to dig up at the moment). As far as I know, this isn't disputed among criminologists.
> but holy hell Black men do get killed when arrested disproportionately in the U.S..
This is selection bias. The ratio of police shootings to arrests is not higher for black people. Police shootings of black persons are national news, police shootings of white persons are not.
> White people are much safer around police because they have power in the legal system (generally speaking about the entire country); they can protect themselves.
This is true statistically, but I think OP's point is that statistics should not be used to dismiss individual experiences. Daniel Shaver was white, for example. Cheye Calvo was a white mayor when his house was raided (speaking of power!).
Thing is, police has too much power relative to the vast majority of citizens. The delta varies drastically between different population groups, but it's "too much" for all of them.
> Although the data doesn't show african american's are killed at a higher rate
Wait, what? Take a second look at the first 3 paragraphs, and then the "Racial Patterns" section of that Wikipedia article you linked.
When people say that police killings aren't racially motivated, they are disputing the causes of the disparity in race-based deaths, not the disparity itself.
I mean, you can just do the math from recorded police shootings yourself, and you pretty consistently across multiple years get death-per-million numbers for black communities that are around 1.5-2.5x as large as for white communities. Black men are pretty objectively killed at higher rates than white men, the studies you're talking about are questioning why that is and whether officer bias and/or systemic racism plays a role in those numbers.
> It really doesn’t and I sense that you seem to be downplaying the whole concept that statistics can be interpreted in many different ways.
Statistics can be presented in any number of ways; data can be used to lie in any number of directions.
But if you're not going to come here with a counterproposal, you're only undermining the movement Black Americans have been struggling with for so long by stating obliquely that these numbers are a lie.
Edit per yours (sorry you've been hit by rate limits. I get the feeling):
> One talking point is: per police interaction, an unarmed non-Hispanic Caucasian person has a 4 in 10000 chance of being shot while an unarmed African American has a 3 in 10000 ... so the only huge person actually has a higher level of risk per interaction.
The unknown variable here is the number of police interactions by race and whether they were the initiator or the intended target (or suspect, if a crime had taken place). That's why it's normally just reduced to shootings by police.
If you have the details and the exact breakdowns, it'd be helpful. But the BJS doesn't seem to discriminate between whether someone initiated the contact or whether they're the target of law enforcement action.
Ask the disproportionate number of Black men in prison. Ask white rapist Brock Turner why a white judge wanted to let off "because he's a good boy", or the Central Park Five or the Georgetown Jacket Three that spent decades in prison because white cops and prosecutors assumed their guilt based on the color of their skin.
If my posts sounds aggressive, it's because your posts are dismissive of the terrible culture that's led to the biased data that would be used to make predictions, and you have the gall to claim it's all fine and dandy.
> current hysteria
There is no hysteria going on right now, it's a quite reasonable response to decades of bad decision making on the part of police departments across the U.S.
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