Fixing this issue is more about will and resolve than quantifying the effectiveness of tactics. I mean if the Pope came out and said that due to their new strategy pedophilia in the Church is down 60%, I doubt many would take much solace in that.

Again, it's about effort more than effectiveness. As with life in general, if we feel we or others have done all that can be done to prevent a bad outcome but it happens anyway, the negative visceral reaction is much lower than if we didn't do much to prevent the bad outcome from occurring in the first place.

No, it's true. You don't get to just declare a fact false because you disagree with it. Show me reliable statistics that indicate blacks are committing a lot less than half of all violent crimes. I use murder because murder is reliably prosecuted (although even murder stats greatly underrepresents how much murder blacks commit because so many gang-related shootings go unsolved). Give me some robbery stats then, or whatever you think is appropriate. Until then, I'm sorry my facts upset your black-victimhood worldview. My sense is that there's no objective data that will ever change your mind—you'll just dismiss everything as being the result of racism. Show me that your position is theoretically falsifiable—what would it take to convince you that blacks aren't special victims of systemic police racism?

36% of arrests for violent crime according to the most recent FBI data I could find (2018). What do I win?

Also, how is that so hard that I have to be informing you of this? I found that page in two minutes with Google, are you versed in basic internet usage?

I mean, you did sort of provide him with the data to back up his assertion that they're underrepresented in death by cop than the other races, even if he exaggerated the initial claim.

Also a little odd that you'd round 37.4% down to 36%.

He exaggerated it a lot, insisting his side was factual and his opponents were operating on feelings, and insisted it was really important. He also never explained the connection between his thesis (that white people are the real disproportionate victims of police violence) and why the only number we're allowed to compare that to is violent criminals - still eagerly awaiting that one!

And you're right, it's 37, I wound up at table 43C (I think searching for specific terms) which was just arrests for ages 18+, where the number was a point lower.

It's curious that you are so willing to tell me what I don't get to do, given how willing you are to make assertions without providing any sources for them.

As a matter of fact, I was being charitable to you by assuming that you had only misspoken, and were already familiar with the official FBI sources that goofy linked (which are fairly consistent over the last 4 or 5 years, last I looked). I assumed that you would recognize your mistake when it was pointed out.

However, I'm a little little concerned now that you are either just fabricating your claims, or even worse trying to avoid admitting that the sources of your false claims are various white supremacist groups. I think you should cease to post in this thread if you are unable to provide a legitimate source for your claim. That too, is me being charitable to you.

I'd really love to see somigosaden's search history for the last month.

Part of the problem is the relationship between prosecutors and police departments. In the current setup, prosecutors have lots of incentives to avoid properly handling police misconduct and abuse.

there are two problems: 1. police abuse and misconduct 2. nothing happens to police who commit abuse and misconduct. Point 2. is a big part of the issue and hardly gets discussed. Look at the Ahmaud Arbery murder - the fundamental problem in the handling of the crime is that the local DA thought there was no need to even bring charges - it's a specific case, but there's a general pattern.

A few interesting statistical facts about police racism that I'm sure will be quickly ignored and disregarded by almost everyone...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myt...sm-11591119883

LOL. Was George Floyd an armed and violent suspect? She's like "don't any of these people who are out protesting the death of someone arrested for a nonviolent crime know the proper denominator to find TRUE BIAS is *digs through bucket of 20 statistics to find the one most favorable* those arrested for violent crimes?" You may note the bolded part says "police shootings" and George Floyd was not shot, but the first sentence said "those killed by cops". Which is it? Since she's just dropping FACTS on us all shouldn't it be pretty ****ing important to be specific? I couldn't get through the first paragraph of fact-dropping before encountering some clown-level bullshit like this.

I can't even finish that paragraph: the next sentence is "In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population." Huh, but as pointed out when somigosaden tried to go full racist last night, only 37% of violent crimes are committed by black people. Are you telling me this FACT-dropper is...cherry-picking the stats that make black people look the worst? Oh my, I'd never have guessed!

You are repeating the same white supremacist bullshit somigosaden tried out. And it's not terribly surprising since you're quoting an article by someone who's roughly a Charles Murray-level racist (I don't blame you for not knowing who she is, but you should really do better at picking sources). Get this trash the **** out of this thread, dipshit.

Expected reaction.

Why did you post an article full of such asinine bullshit that's so easily exposed and that you're completely unprepared to defend? No **** this is the expected reaction when you do that. I expect that kind of trolling from joe, I guess now I know to expect it from you too.

I mean those are the facts my dude. Sorry they don’t fit your narrative.

Did you know black people are a quarter of those killed by police but only 13% of the country's population? Makes u think, doesn't it?

Oh, do you not like that FACT? Does that not fit your narrative? Facts don't care about your feelings, snowflake.

revots' girl Heather Mac Donald famously created a stat saying that a cop's chance of being killed by a black person is 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black person getting killed by a cop. Her stat is actually dead wrong because she equated "killed by a cop" with "shot by a cop" (her data uses people shot by police; George Floyd was not shot by police!), but let's ignore that she's really bad at making FACTS and just roll with it. After all, conservatives love this "fact"!

What revots' girl Heather Mac Donald won't tell you is that a cop's chance of getting killed by a white person is 165x higher than the chance an unarmed white man gets killed by police. WHOAH! White folks are ****ing DANGEROUS! Don't like it? Sorry Jack, that's a FACT, and FACTS don't care about your feelings.

**** off with this childish bullshit, you dumbasses are weak.

Goofy touched on a couple of things that I think are important, but to restate them (and a few more), just going through the article:

This is false, and it's noteworthy that the author cites no evidence to support this broad claim. Instead, the article only talks about police shootings. But in fact the "solid body of evidence" exists to support claims about racial biases in the use of non-lethal force, as well as in stops/searches, bail and pre-trial release, plea-bargaining, jury selection and voir dire, and sentencing. I provided only a short summary of some of that evidence here, some of which comes from this textbook. Note that you can observe the dishonesty of this author in the fact that she makes this claim while later citing Roland Fryer's research, who in fact wrote that

Moving on:

Goofy is right, this is really cherry-picking statistics. Arrests for homicide account for 0.1% of all arrests (according to UCR). Robberies account for a bit less than 1%. As goofy mentioned, victims like George Floyd (or Ahmoud Arbery, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, etc.) were not killed while being arrested for any crime, let alone violent crime. Police have many encounters with citizens which are not represented by arrest statistics in general, let alone cherry-picked statistics. There are reasonable ways to try to model racial disparities in the context of police encounters (cf. Fryer, again, though see also the problem where his analysis of shootings uses data from a single police department), but this is not reasonable at all.

There's a more general issue here, though, which I think is worth mentioning. The reason for the level of outrage at the deaths of Floyd, Garner, Arbery, Castile, Tamir Rice, or others is not really that they represent some statistical anomaly. It's that their deaths are so unjust and unnecessary.

I quoted Fryer earlier, and I'll repeat again, that I think there is not particularly strong evidence of individual racial bias in police decisions to shoot people in the aggregate, but this also somewhat misses the point. That statistic don't measure the injustice of individual cases, many of which are not shootings. It does not measure the unfairness of police impunity to prosecution. Nor does it encompass the entirety of interactions with the police or the totality of problems in the criminal justice system, some of which were noted above. But certainly one reasonable statement is that there is a problem with the unjustified use of force that transcends race when we are considering police shootings specifically.

This is another cherry-picked argument that makes little sense. There is no actual methodology involved in comparing police involved shootings to other homicides. The problem is not just one of volume or proportion. It's also one of impunity. We rightfully expect the police not to commit crimes against the citizens they are sworn to serve and protect. The fact that people who are not police commit more murders than the police does not absolve the police for the murders they commit. Particularly given how difficult it is to actually hold police accountable for their own crimes. And, if we're going to discuss shootings of unarmed victims, then there are also important racial disparities.

For some other general comments on the problem with the author's approach to the question, which I think are probably more important, see this post. Particularly the point about the non-neutrality of arrest data (again, citing Fryer) and the relevance of larger issues of inequality. One very important point is that BLM protests are more holistic than critics tend to give them credit for. People are not on the streets because of some narrow criticism based in a single cherry picked statistic. They are reacting to the confluence of circumstances: mass incarceration, unjust policing, problems in the court system, segregation and concentrated poverty, discrimination in education, housing, education, and employment, and etc (see for example: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets). It all hangs together.

At one point (I think it was this forum, maybe not) I went down the statistical rabbit hole looking at police violence against blacks relative to thing such as crime, violent crime, violence against police, etc. etc. ; and I remember that relative to violent crime levels, including statistics of who is killing police officers, black were very under-represented in police killings.

Interestingly, whites were proportionally represented, and the group the police statistically discriminated against quite heavily was Hispanics. I remember finding that if you actually attempt to normalize data, pretty much any way you go about it the numbers indicated there was no discrimination against blacks or whites, and much discrimination against Hispanics.

And yes I understand the point that this is not a perfect apples to apples comparison; but I don't think it is rationally any less problematic than using the the raw "X race was targeted by police rate/100,000" stat, and not even attempting to normalize or contextualize the number at all.

The problem with your argument is that there is horrible anecdotal stories about police abuse with every race. It is just the ones about blacks that make the news cycle. We are fed what I believe to be a false narrative this is a black male problem specifically.

The statistics don't propagandize/lie. News media does. This is a big reason I am concerned reform isn't going to measurably improve the issue of police targeting blacks, or have an overall large positive impact on the black community.

Additionally, of all the problems going on in poor, urban communities (disproportionately black), I suspect police misconduct is actually a small rock very downstream of bigger systemic issues (that the news media amplifies with sensational stories with graphic pictures/videos), and I am not sure police reform will have much of an impact on the grand scheme of things.

So I suspect even if there is police reform that makes things marginally better for everyone at this downstream loci, there will still eventually be some horrific sensationalized anecdotal story, and there will be a charge of systemic racism against black males, and there will be no way to falsify it, and there will be another moral panic like the one we are in right now, and back to square zero.

Is this where you go back and try to claim, again, that no one ever heard of Daniel Shaver or Justine Damond (I know both of their names from memory) before you did?

It is late and I am tired and may have missed it, but it seems what is still missing from this whole conversation is any way for us to actually test and validate the narrative of police discrimination against black males, so we are left with an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Anytime someone makes a charge of systemic racism against blacks, there is absolutely no way to refute it.

Which I find a little ironic given the conversation me and Wookie had in the "Citations" thread. But I think the analogy/comparison is pretty good between the charge of police racism against black males and some theoretical theory of evolutionary psychology as unfalsifiable hypothesis, except obviously the social stakes are a lot higher in the former case.

Doesn't that prove my point? We would have to search a lot harder for the white cases because they get less media attention, but we could make lists of horrible anecdotal police encounters for every race.

So where does that leave us?

We still have the problem that we can't really measure police racism against black males, and we can't test it and falsify it is there, and if the data we do have doesn't match the narrative we just hand waive it away anyways, so how do we actually make sure this doesn't happen again?

I don't have that much to say about your media criticism, at least here. Partly because I don't have any solid data to rely on, and partly just because I don't really consume much of the media that you like to criticize, so I don't even have much of an intuition about it. I'm sure there are legitimate criticisms of big media outlets, both from the right and from the left. You tend to focus your criticism on what you perceive as left-leaning outlets, but it seems likely that right-wing media contributing to right-wing narratives (cf. that WSJ article) are also important.

I've seen at least some research on this. One of the most interesting pieces I've read was about the trend towards opposition to social safety net programs being associated with changes in media coverage of poverty in the 60s. The trend followed changes in the average depiction of poor Americans from being of mostly white people to mostly non-whites. I think that illustrates the fact that the role of media in shaping narratives and beliefs is certainly important and challenging. It's also harder to reform, clearly.

But that doesn't mean that meaningful reforms can't be useful, whether to policing, or to the criminal justice system, or even broader policies intending to address segregation or economic inequality. And I certainly agree that criminal justice is just one part of a larger problem (though I wouldn't underestimate the residual negative consequences from mass incarceration, e.g. on employment). But we don't have to fix every problem to make progress, and I do think that as important as media is, it doesn't completely overwhelm the actual experiences people have. The fact that we have evidence of successful reforms in specific police departments illustrates this.

And they commit ~37% of violent offenses and over 50% of homicides. And I don't remember the stats exactly, but at some point I went down the rabbit hole and looked and they committed MUCH more than 13% of homicides of police.

Makes u think, doesn't it? Who would ever guess that a group committing disproportionate crime, especially disproportionate crime against police, might proportional more negative interactions with police? Who in the world could see that coming?

The irony is that in a vacuum the real discrepancy that blows your mind is the difference between males and females as far as being "victims" of the criminal justice system. Except when it comes to this comparison, suddenly we understand that context and group behavior actually matters. We only forget that part when it is inconvenient to the narrative.

Could you imagine if we just simply compared male and female stats with no context at all? MASSIVE systemic discrimination against males top to bottom would be the only logical conclusion.

Those people being national stories proves your point? I don't really get how that works!

DAAAAAAMN mind blown, but I'm still pretty hung up on this 165x versus 18.5x disparity. Heather Mac Donald worked really hard to come up with that stat for black people and it was 18.5, and the same stat for white people is nearly 10 times that! That must make white people super dangerous, right?!

(if you haven't figured it out - which maybe you have or maybe you haven't, since my use of "Makes u think" was meant to be over the top sarcastic so this kinda reads like you're agreeing with me - my whole point is that anyone, including you and me, can come up with dumb, slanted numbers like noted racist Heather Mac Donald that sound smart at first glance and are actually hilariously dumb when you dig in to what they actually mean)

I didn't even read whatever you wrote about Heather McDonald. I am familiar with her. She is a right wing provocateur, and I put her at the same level as Vox (on the other side of the political aisle) as far as dishonestly manipulating statistics to push a narrative of choice. Maybe someone else in the thread was giving Heather McDonald derived stats, and if you want to argue with them about it be my guest. But if you are attributing her position to mine, that is a straw man.