Quote:
Originally Posted by revots33
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:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Heather MacDonald
A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing.
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
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fryer, 2016
Putting the results from the Stop and Frisk and PPCS datasets together, a pattern emerges. Relative to whites, blacks and Hispanics seem to have very different interactions with law enforcement – interactions that are consistent with, though definitely not proof of, some form of discrimination. Including myriad controls designed to account for civilian demographics, encounter characteristics, civilian behavior, eventual outcomes of the interaction and year reduces, but cannot eliminate, racial differences in non-lethal use of force in either of the datasets analyzed. (p. 21)
Moving on:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Heather MacDonald
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. 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.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Heather MacDonald
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ross 2015
The median probability across counties of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police}. The median probability across counties of being {hispanic, unarmed, and shot by police} is 1.67 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police}.
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.