> You said "This kind of violence affects everyone" and this is disingenuous when we look at the ratio of black vs white being murdered by police.
If you want to argue that this kind of violence affects certain races more, that's fine. But why downplay the fact that it affects all races? The percentages are higher for Black Americans, but White Americans still make up the majority of people shot by police[1]. If people actually cared about creating a broad coalition to address this, they would want to highlight both facts, not hide the latter fact.
You actually see the a similar attitude when racists attack social programs. If members of a minority group are more likely to benefit from a program, they treat it as a program for minorities, even if the majority of beneficiaries are non-minorities.
It's also interesting to see how people divide the demographic information. If you look at the breakdown by sex, you'll find that the divide between men and women when when it comes to these shootings is much, much greater than the divide between races. Yet the latter is talked about a lot all over the media, and while I don't think I've ever seen the latter treated as an issue. My guess is that we'd also see another large divide if we divided the numbers by wealth (and this article is a good example of that).
> 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.
> advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated
I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational.
Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic.
The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general.
I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist).
Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?
> 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.
> 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?
> So it's not monolithic, I've definitely been at "BLM"-y protests against police violence where non-Black victims were mentioned.
Yes, I'm generalizing. It's not possible to make meaningful statements about a millions-strong movement that apply universally, so I'm generalizing just like we generalize about "liberals", "conservatives", "progressives", "Trump supporters", etc. And I stand by my generalization--any mention of white victims of police violence was an aberration, an outlier.
> I think the level of violence and aggression that police enact on certain communities would probably not be tolerated if it affected people with more political power -- they target people with less political power, which has racial components in the USA is why race matters, but is not exclusively "black and white", sure.
I mean, I think virtually everyone agrees that police killings are classist. Of course, BLM wouldn't have been controversial if the message was merely "police target poor people (who are disproportionately black)". Something like 90% of Americans in 2020 (per Gallup or Pew--I forget which--but think about how big this number is particularly in light of the polarization of American politics) agreed that police brutality was a problem and police reform was needed--this was extremely uncontroversial. But the claim wasn't "classism", it was "racism"--police target ("hunt" was even commonly invoked) black Americans because of their race.
> 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.
> 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.
> The theory that minorities are disproportionately shot by police started to seem questionable to me once I corrected for things like police encounter rates and homicide rates
You don't have to fully subscribe to the intrinsically-racist Black Lives Matter narrative to agree that unaccountable police are a major problem regardless of race. And IMO unaccountable police is a more fundamental issue than the newly-stoked racism.
> 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.
> black criminals harming white people get very little coverage
That makes sense though. It's not a competition between the two groups so the amount of black-on-anything violence is irrelevant to the issue of police shooting people when it can be shown that the people being shot weren't acting violently.
Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly down the block for your sister getting raped. Not only is it victim blaming, but it misses the point that these aren't meaningful groupings. (All black people, your sister and the prostitutes, etc...)
> how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?
Well, I don't claim that but I think I could, because I see them grasping at straws and forwarding the same tired stories around as if they prove anything. With no effort to dig into the facts behind the case and its selection as news.
Exactly the same as the anti-racist knee-jerk I see which posts the same set of "Immigrants don't rape" refutation articles with the same lack of critical inspection.
> Given this level of suppressed information,
That is a problem. When our government lies to us it throws all semblance of civilian oversight right out the window and instantly becomes a dictatorship.
> "Blacks are disproportionately a victim of this, so obviously they are more invested in this conversation..."
while i actually agree with most of what you said, the focus on (disproportionate, but few) deaths by police is misdirectional. like much media reporting, it's premised on an emotional trigger meant to short-circuit rational thinking, which is decidedly a diservice to public discourse. arguments against racism can, and should, stand entirely on the merits of racism (systemic or otherwise) simply being unjust and irrational, not on outrage-bait like this.
that's to say that the murders of black folks by police should direct our attention towards racism, not the numbers of murders by police, because we'll end up trying to solve "murders by police" rather than racism, and then pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, when it was anything but.
> all police shootings were in cases of violent criminals attacking officers
I have seen at least three video's where the victim was shot without provoking police. I understand your angle but think you should re-consider "All" as that is certainly not true. Examples are good but the data are there to make a statistical argument.
> anything to do with racism.
Interesting. Would you take it further and say the history of racism (and slavery, etc) in America has no effect on today's black person in the US? Just trying to understand where the common ground may be.
> 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.
>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.
> Another week, another police shooting in the United States. So far this year, 569 people have be killed by US police, according to The Guardian’s count. Police brutality is a horrific normality and, in more ways than one, black men being shot by police has become the modern-day equivalent of lynching.
This is greatly exaggerated. It makes it sound like black men are being gunned down by police left and right, usually without justification, and it makes it sound like the majority of people shot by police are black.
Black men are being shot at a higher rate than other groups (except for Native Americans), but they are only about 1/4 of the police shootings. Here are numbers as of a few days ago:
Number shot in 2016:
• 10 Asian/Pacific Islanders
• 13 Native Americans
• 40 Other/Unknown
• 88 Hispanic/Latino
• 136 Black
• 279 White
Here are the rates per one million group population:
• 0.56 Asian/Pacific Islander
• 1.41 White
• 1.59 Hispanic/Latino
• 3.23 Black
• 3.4 Native American
To try to get a better idea of what is actually going on, I used a random number generator to pick 10 entries from the list of 2016 police killings at http://www.killedbypolice.net/ and looked at each and classified it as either "Justified" or "Not Justified".
KilledByPolice.net tries to keep a running list of all police killings in the US, and for each they give race/ethnicity, gender, age, state, and links to the news report on the killing and to the KilledByPolice Facebook post on the killing (which usually duplicates that news link, but also includes followup news stories).
Here were the 10 that I looked at, my summary of the facts as gleaned from the news reports, and my verdict as to whether it was justified or not justified.
Keep in mind that this was only a sample of ten. I'd be curious to see other people's sampling results (or even better, the results of someone with the time and interest to go through them all and classify them as justified or not).
The numbering in this list matches the numbering at KilledByPolice.net.
#94, black male. He was fleeing from an arrest attempt, slipped and fell, and a gun that had been concealed fell out. The officer told him not to reach for the gun. The suspect reached for the gun, and was shot. (It later turned out the gun was just a BB gun, but the officer did not know that). My verdict: Justified.
#110, white female. She was the wife of a reserve office. He was cleaning his gun in their home and it accidentally fired, shooting her. My verdict: Not Justified (although also not criminal).
#263, white male. Former officer, fell on hard times and turned to robbery. Killed 2 people during a robbery, and then was killed by police who arrived in response to that. My verdict: Justified.
#272, white male. Suspect was driving/parking suspiciously. Officer talked to him, then headed back to patrol car. Suspect started shooting at the officer, officer shot back. My verdict: Justified.
#328, latino male. Burglar, with knife holding a hostage when police arrived and shot him. My verdict: Justified.
#398, black male. Armed robber, shot at officers several times and hit one. They shot back. My verdict: Justified.
#446, white male. Man walking down the center of the street, bare chested, complaining of chest pains. Police and paramedics arrived to help and/or take him to the hospital. Man became combative and police handcuffed him. He then went into medical distress. CPR was given, but he dies on the scene. I'm unsure how to score this one...it is not clear it should even count as a police killing. However, if I'm going to rate every item as either "justified" or "not justified", then I'll give it: Not Justified.
#475, latino male. Shot a customer in an auto detail shop, then shot at responding officers who shot him. My verdict: Justified.
#505, white male. Police responding to a 911 call about gunshots and a woman yelling for help got the wrong address. The man who answered at that address had a gun, and ignored police orders to drop it. It's unclear whether or not the police identified themselves sufficiently, and there had been a home invasion next door not too long before, so I'm going to tentatively call this one Not Justified.
#535, white male. Reports of a drunk driver causing damage. Police find the car, but the driver is gone. While the officer was working on paperwork, the driver returned and pulled a gun out of his car. The officer struggled with him for control of the gun, and another officer arrived and jumped in to help. After over a minute of struggling, and dozens of commands to drop the weapon, one of the officers finally shot the suspect. (It later turned out the gun was just a BB pistol, but it looked like a regular gun). My verdict: Justified.
So...that's 7 justified, 3 not justified.
Of the three that I classified as not justified, only one remotely fits into the trigger-happy police narrative.
This is quite different from the impression I would have if I had relied solely on what the press is telling me about US police shootings.
> 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.
> In the last 5 years police in the USA have killed twice the rate of white people than black people
That's a misleading way to use the term "rate". If you adjust for relative population size, the rate at which police shoot black people in the USA is disproportionately higher (over 2.5 times) than the rate at which they shoot white people.
Right, so if they had the same level of police brutality you would have 60 deaths in the history of American police, or about 1 killing per year. Even if the police were racists and killed twice as many blacks, that would still just be one black dead every few years, then it wouldn't matter.
The rest of the differences are not important here. Racial diversity shouldn't be related to crime or shootings.
If you want to argue that this kind of violence affects certain races more, that's fine. But why downplay the fact that it affects all races? The percentages are higher for Black Americans, but White Americans still make up the majority of people shot by police[1]. If people actually cared about creating a broad coalition to address this, they would want to highlight both facts, not hide the latter fact.
You actually see the a similar attitude when racists attack social programs. If members of a minority group are more likely to benefit from a program, they treat it as a program for minorities, even if the majority of beneficiaries are non-minorities.
It's also interesting to see how people divide the demographic information. If you look at the breakdown by sex, you'll find that the divide between men and women when when it comes to these shootings is much, much greater than the divide between races. Yet the latter is talked about a lot all over the media, and while I don't think I've ever seen the latter treated as an issue. My guess is that we'd also see another large divide if we divided the numbers by wealth (and this article is a good example of that).
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
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