Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x
The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers.
It's not just about getting killed - it's about getting unfairly fined, arrested, beaten, jailed, and so on. From my own life experience, the fear is warranted.
Of course not, because the police generally do not self-report when they victimize someone. Certainly the plethora of videos that have come out over the past few weeks, and the associated sales police reports describing those situations, indicate that the number is >0.
But as Erem points out, the situations are fundamentally different in that when one is victimized by a criminal, one has a number of options. When one is victimized by law enforcement, those options are severely limited, especially if you don't have money or influence.
But you do have to do a sanity check with the numbers at some point, and reconcile them with the feelings/beliefs/narratives you get from the media and pop culture
I am a black man, that lives in a poor city with high-crime rates. I've spent significant time in "dangerous" neighborhoods, as a resident and visitor. The number of times I've gotten the treatment I've described from criminals is 0. The number of times I've gotten the treatment from the police is >0. The same can be said for pretty much all of my minority acquaintances here. I, for one, am not getting this narrative from the media and pop culture, I'm getting it from life experience. Yes, that's not the same as carefully collected statistics, but it's not based on nothing.
Let's not compare fear of cops to fear of criminals just based on stats -- there are qualitative differences that matter too. For example, when criminals target you, you have recourse: calling the cops. Having that option can assuage fear.
However, when you learn through experience that cops themselves seek to harm you, then what? There is no recourse! Who will try the cops? If you do fight back publicly, who will stop them from endlessly patrolling outside your house seeking some minor infraction? Who will stop them from burying you in fines? Your elected representatives are your only option and good luck with that. I'll assert that in human psychology this helplessness reasonably magnifies fear beyond the statistics.
In fact, when you come through experience to fear the cops it also makes the _criminals_ more terrifying -- calling the cops becomes like running to the lions because you are being chased by wolves. So you just give up and let the wolves consume you.
And pure conjecture here maybe criminals know that, which emboldens them to preferentially predate upon black people thereby producing your original murder statistic.
Maybe you are right, but there is just not any evidence presented for any of that.
You are right that aggregated data is not the only thing that matters. It tends to represent only easily-quantifiable concepts.
But you do have to do a sanity check with the numbers at some point, and reconcile them with the feelings/beliefs/narratives you get from the media and pop culture.
On the other hand, statistics can be arranged and presented in ways that can be misleading. At some point, if enough people are saying something, you may need to take a step back and say “what am I missing here that isn’t represented in the data?”
White blindness to what is not only self-evident but completely proven out by arrest and incarceration numbers to at minimum 70% of black people if you look at polls is what BLM is fighting against.
The next step is that white people just say its all about economics. Its because they're poor. While being poor in america absolutely correlates to both committing and being a victim of crime, even when you take race out of it, there are countless instances of middle and upper class black people being treated like criminals in a way that absolutely NEVER happens to whites. A white person in an oxford shirt and khakis doesn't get arrested outside of their own home in Cambridge - it happened to a black professor.
FWIW I did not downvote anyone in this thread. I feel like the worst motivations are being assigned to me throughout this thread. If anyone cares, no, I do not have bad intentions. I saw some claims that were hard to reconcile with the data I had. That's really all. I don't want anyone to suffer, and I know blacks disproportionately suffer police violence and ordinary violence.
My takeaway here is that people simply care A LOT more about police violence than ordinary violence, something like 20X.
Black Americans care about police violence because we need to have a good relationship with authorities to help with the other problems (including, yes, black-on-black crime). That's why you see support in the black community both for "defunding" police and more police presence in high-crime neighborhoods.
> Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x.
I'm having a hard time figuring out the truth on this particular point. I've seen conflicting reports, such as this study from a black Harvard economics professor which found no racial bias [0].
Black people are certainly killed by police at a disproportionate rate relative to their population, that is an objective fact. This does not necessarily imply that there is racial bias by the police, however. For example if black people encounter the police 2-3x as much, you would expect them to be killed by police more frequently as well even without any bias.
> This does not necessarily imply that there is racial bias by the police, however.
A 2010 NY State report on police-on-police shootings, studying them nationally, found clear evidence of racial bias being a factor in suh shootings.
But I'm sure that either racial bias has been eliminated in the last decade or it somehow doesn't effect police interactions with people who aren’t unrecognized police officers.
Isn't this just a reiteration of the thing where more black people interact with the police and so there are disproportionately many shootings and people assume racism?
It's not that surprising that the same would apply to police officers, e.g. off-duty black officers live in black neighborhoods and black neighborhoods have a larger police presence or higher crime rates, so there are disproportionately many police shootings and black officers are no less affected than anyone else there.
The article seems to imply this:
> Of the 26 fatal shootings, 5, including Officer Ridley’s case, involved an off-duty officer who came across a crime in progress and moved to help other officers or a civilian, the report found. In five other cases, including the Edwards shooting, an off-duty officer was a crime victim and then tried to make an arrest or to take police action, the report found.
> In all but 2 of the 26 fatal shootings of officers that were examined, the victim was holding a gun and had it “displayed” when he or she was shot, the report found.
Sounds a lot like off-duty white officers may just be less likely to encounter situations in which they draw their weapons.
I think it is very probable that there is some amount of racial bias when it comes to police shootings, but police-on-police shootings is not very good evidence in favor of that. Not enough data (26 cases in 30 years), the data is from 40 years ago up until today, and it is a completely different situation that police on civilian.
Black people encountering police at a much higher rate than white people could be taken itself as evidence of systemic bias in policing.
A study found that white police are no more likely to shoot minorities than non-white police, but that is dismissed as flawed reasoning. [1]
Another study examining lethal and non-lethal interactions with police;
> In the raw data, blacks are 21.3 percent more likely to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn than whites and the difference is statistically significant. Adding our full set of controls reduces the racial difference to 19.4 percent.
> In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, we find no racial differences in officer-involved shootings on either the extensive or intensive margins. Using data from Houston, Texas – where
we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified – we find, in the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites. [2]
I think at this point the statistics can be used to argue both ways.
I think what’s left behind is the undeniable fact that certain inner cities are more like war zones than civilian population centers with the number of daily shooting and killings. Chicago just saw 18 murders in 24 hours, or nearly ~4,500 shootings per year. [3]
According to the Washington Post last year there were 9 fatal shootings of unarmed black people by police (19 of white people). Fatal police shootings in total were about 1,000 and ~25% were black, a number that under-represents black people relative to the rate of violent crime.
Compare to what the Atlantic describes as the “homicide plague afflicting black America“ of black on black civilian violence, which claims nearly 100,000 lives per decade. This is not whataboutism, this is flip sides of the same coin, because while “defunding” police can reduce the total number of armed and unarmed black people killed by police a maximum of ~2,500 per decade, what will it do to the 100,000 killed per decade in inner city gang wars?
In my estimation, the vilification of police as racist, declarations of “ACAB” and “Fuck 12”, and calling to abolish or defund the police is more likely to result in significantly more dangerous environments where the majority of black homicides are occurring.
> In my estimation, the vilification of police as racist, declarations of “ACAB” and “Fuck 12”, and calling to abolish or defund the police is more likely to result in significantly more dangerous environments where the majority of black homicides are occurring.
The vilification of police as racist is political. It's always political. The police being jerks to everyone somehow seems less unfair and more acceptable than the police being jerks to only black people, so the people who want change argue that it's racism even though that's basically a lie. Because if it's racism you can get people angrier about it. (The problem is it also alienates all the non-black victims of police misconduct who would otherwise be allies, and also allows opponents to pretend there isn't a problem if they can disprove the racism, even though the misconduct and mistreatment still exist regardless of whether they're racially motivated.)
But the less extreme calls to "defund the police" aren't actually that unreasonable. Because you don't defund the murder police, only the rest of it. Reduce their number by narrowing their scope to only investigating major crimes, so that there aren't as many police needed, so that you're less likely to interact with any of them and have a bad experience.
You basically do the opposite of the "broken window" garbage -- forget about broken windows and instead concentrate on solving ~100% of the murders. Which becomes easier when you discontinue having a million BS traffic stops for revenue extraction and stop and frisk, since they only increase community resentment of the police and make them less likely to cooperate in investigations of serious crimes.
The overall trend appears to be that racial minorities can expect more violence and shootings from the police, even though quantifying the exact numbers is difficult and subject to contextual considerations.
By "disproportionate" I was comparing to the general population as a baseline. You are right that it doesn't imply bias. See this other topic for a breakdown:
How confident are you that your numbers are accurate, given that police self-report their numbers?
For instance, I've been reading lately that black men have been found hanging from trees by nooses in California recently, and that the deaths were ruled suicide. Do you believe that these deaths were suicide?
I have quite a bit of faith in numbers related to deaths. There is a lot of paperwork involved, a body (with bullet holes), perhaps a 911 call, often a medical examiner or coroner's report, potentially lawsuits, funerals, etc. And now there are cameras a lot of places.
I guess there could be outright premeditated cold-blooded murders that are disguised as suicides, but I can't imagine that's very common. I mean, you can't bring a body in with a zillion bullet holes and tell the coroner it was suicide. And, as you point out, a noose is going to (hopefully) generate a lot of suspicion and a thorough investigation.
The main area of uncertainty is not the number of police killings, but the number of justified versus unjustified killings.
> I mean, you can't bring a body in with a zillion bullet holes and tell the coroner it was suicide.
But you can bring in a body that was in the backseat of your cop car, handcuffed behind the back, and with two shotgun wounds to the chest and tell the coroner it was suicide, and have it signed off on...
> I mean, you can't bring a body in with a zillion bullet holes and tell the coroner it was suicide.
Well, no, because “zillion” isn't a number.
But with actual numbers of bullet holes, yes, history shows that happens. And that the inconsistent injuries either get convenient explanations, or are left off the report as if they didn't happen. Now, when these things get additional public scrutiny, it's an embarrassment, but that usually hasn't happened, which is why there is a culture of impunity.
If you don't trust numbers from the washington post and the FBI, I'm not sure how we can expect to have a productive conversation.
That isn't to say that coverups don't happen, and numbers aren't occasionally wrong or manipulated. But how far off do you think these numbers really are?
And do you expect these numbers are manipulated even in areas with black chiefs of police, attorneys general, and distict attorneys?
Those numbers can be seen as the minimum, the same way the reported number of COVID related deaths are the minimum. The actual numbers are all but guaranteed to be more.
I used to have that faith too, but the stories that have been coming out recently have made me doubt almost all reports provided by police and coroners, even with cameras in place. What motivation do they have to provide accurate information, without any third party oversight?
Do you think that Black people are ONLY fed up with getting murdered by the police? That is not an isolated statistic.
How about beaten (see threads of hundreds). Arrested (in 2012 7% of black people were arrested vs 2.9% of whites). Sent to prison (2500 per 100,000 vs 450 for whites). How about being late to an important meeting because a cop saw you driving. People want freaking respect and your argument is minimizing it into just murders (which are absolutely HORRIFYING and TERRORIZE communities, which could've used a mention).
Please try to pay more attention to the actual arguments.
I think it's further exacerbated by the fact that the whole point of police is to protect people, so when they do the opposite, it's much, much worse.
Others have pointed out that it's about a 9:1 ratio of civilian killings to police killings, which is an absolutely appalling ratio, made even worse by the fact that there are far fewer police than civilians.
But something I have seen here yet occurs to me after typing that: Cops protect each other over everything else, so if you're the victim of a cop, you literally have nobody to turn to for justice.
> Others have pointed out that it's about a 9:1 ratio of civilian killings to police killings, which is an absolutely appalling ratio
It' important to note that it's about a 10:1 ratio of civilian murders to police killings. Murder is by definition wrongful killing, but some significant majority of police shootings are a legitimate use of force.
We would have to try to come up with numbers around how often beatings happen by police versus by criminals, to compare.
That might be interesting, but the numbers around those things are much less reliable. Numbers about deaths are usually better data, more objective, and easier to find.
Going to the beach increases your chance of getting eaten by a shark by 1000X.
My point is just that 2-3X of a small number is still a small number. It shouldn't affect your decision about whether to go outside or not when there are much larger numbers to worry about (like the risk of getting murdered).
