Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
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.
I was thinking more about this exchange between goofyballer and revots last night.
If the larger concern is disparate use of force against minorities or, stated more broadly, disparate policing, then focusing myopically on the data related to police killings (or, even worse, police shootings) to draw conclusions seems misguided.
If you start with the entire universe of cops, there is a subset of cops who, consciously or unconsciously, treat minorities differently than white people. Let's call them the Disparate Treatment Subset. Within the Disparate Treatment Subset, there is a subset of cops who, consciously or subconsciously, use force more readily against minorities than they do against white people. Let's call them the Disparate Use of Force Subset. Within the Disparate Use of Force Subset, there is a subset of cops who, consciously or unconsciously, are serious risks to kill a minority in a situation where they would not kill a white person. Let's call that group the Disparate Use of Lethal Force Subset.
The number of police officers in the Disparate Use of Lethal Force Subset who actually kill someone in a given year of course is very small for obvious reasons. First, the number of police killings every year isn't a huge number. It's too high for sure, but it isn't enormous. Second, the Disparate Use of Lethal Force Subset is not close to 100% of all cops. I have no idea what the exact percentage is, but common sense suggests that it is not a huge. (I say this mainly because racists are not devoid of self-interest. Some non-trivial percentage of racist cops are probably not a big threat to wrongfully kill someone because wrongfully killing someone is a pretty risky behavior, even for a racist cop.) This means, inevitably, that a lot of police killings will be perpetrated in any given year by police officers outside the Disparate Use of Lethal Force Subset. And this means the effect of racial bias in policing will be hardest to observe in the data on police killings.
But the important point, and the point that a lot of guys like revots are completely missing, is that the relative difficulty of proving racial bias by looking solely at data on police killings (and I use the term "relative difficulty" advisedly because I don't think it is THAT difficult and I certainly don't think it is impossible) is not dispositive evidence of the absence of a problem. In fact, it is not even remotely suggestive of the absence of a problem.
If you had reliable data on the use of force generally, which is harder to come by because many uses of force are not reported, I strongly suspect that the evidence of racial bias in policing would be much more obvious. And if you had reliable data on all police encounters, which is impossible to obtain, I strongly suspect that the evidence of disparate policing would be smashingly obvious.