you are cherry picking a small number of specific cases. The point being nobody should be surprised that blacks face a disproportionate degree of police aggression, and by disproportionate I mean at a higher frequency than their overall share of the us population - or at the least that this stat is indicative of bias. As you surely know there are more cases of non violent white and Hispanics killed by police. If you want to argue police are too aggressive, fine. If you want to argue they should have far better training and deescalation tactics, ok. But spare the BS narrative that innocent blacks are being unfairly killed moreso than any other race because it simply is not supported by any statistical measure.

It sucks we have this govt funded gang brutalizing people and we want to argue about what segment of the population they brutalize the most.

I very much agree. Unfortunately this is the divisive narrative that the media and many of our politicians are running with today.

Revisiting Camden

JFC
So can one bad apple = an entire police dept? 88 convictions overturned due to crooked cops?
So far seems like big steps in the right direction. Amazing what can happen when people are given a little respect and empathy.

(Lol at 30% sick days. What a bunch of dirtbags and **** leadership)

Crime has gone down across the board since 2013. Have crime rates in Camden fallen more than neighboring communities? I think this is important to tease out, if we are going to give Camden credit for ameliorating crime due to changes in policing philosophy.

That of course is an irony of both the left and right wing moral panic going on since Trump came into office. Generally things had been getting better for a long time, and the increased partisan divisiveness since Trump came into office appear to be eroding real progress, especially for low income persons.

It looks like if one is willing to work hard enough then it should be possible to do this analysis, e.g. from data from NJ Unified Crime Reporting. But the reporting isn't consistently by 1k or 100k people, so it would require some more work to track down population estimates for each year, in order to make something like a single graph.

But, if you follow links in the articles, you find this article, which has a table that shows a 41% decrease between 2010 and 2019 for Camden.



The article Tabarrok cited directly says 45%, but I think it's using a larger set of crimes. I liked the table so you can at least see data per year, and exact figures.

Philadelphia looks to have seen about a 19% decline for that time period. Note I'm just comparing the relative decline in each dataset, I'm not sure the raw numbers are directly comparable, because I'm not sure of the units in that first article. FBI data shows about a 9% decrease, nationally.

Now, it's also true that Camden's crime rate was really, really bad (You can see that it was also consistently high prior to 2012). The point isn't supposed to be that literally any police department or county or city could have the same results if they only did exactly what Camden did. I'm more interested in illustrating the fact that organizational problems matter, and that it is possible to fix them. The fixes will depend on the nature of the specific problems. I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution. But the sharp change in Camden does look to be very significant.

Fair enough.

Based on the abstract, it seems the main reform may have been structurally changing so that unions were no longer involved. It seems union abuse is believed to be a major theme of what is wrong with policing in the US today.

Which is a little ironic when you take into account declining union membership is probably a significant reason why wages for lower/middle class have stagnated so much over the last 40 years while the top 1% has gained tremendous wealth. And for whatever their problems, one thing police unions have done well is ensure police officers can live a comfortable middle class lifestyle with secure retirement that most Americans once had.
And removing one of the last strong unions remaining will probably shift that much more wealth to the top 1%.

Ironically, another one of the last strong unions (the teachers union) is perceived by many as being a major reason why the schooling system is so dysfunctional, for much of the same reasons. So it will be a little ironic indeed if "progress" requires removing a couple of the last bastions of union power left in the US today.

The answer to how we will know is when the police department is defunded/dismantled..

Minneapolis City Council Trying to Dismantle Police Department

Quote:

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety,” Bender wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he’d support “deep, structural reforms,” to the department, but not a complete abolishment of the agency, the Star Tribune reports.

However, major changes to the police department are not expected to come soon, Bender said discussions would likely take place later this year or next.

“To do this kind of big work, we need a deeper, broader conversation than we’ve ever had before,” Bender told the Star Tribune. “We need white people like me and my neighbors to show up in a different way.”

A call to action! Let’s talk about it!

Regarding defunding police forces. The NYPD devotes a lot of resources to community outreach (a fine idea imo) are we just stating that isn’t enough, a failure, something else? Btw Minneapolis PD community outreach seems to be much weaker than NYPD’s.

NYPD community outreach is pretty close to zero already.

It's their city. If the people vote for a social experiment that involves no formalized police department, then more power to them. That is how democracy is supposed to work.

Really, I know you live around that area so you'd know better than I would. I don't have the time to follow up now but I'll try to get back to this. We might be talking about two different things. I'll try and post more detail.

I agree but looking at the link they've agreed to talk more about it meaning they're not doing much actually.

Well, they are certainly free to talk a lot and not do anything too. FWIW, I would prefer they went the "abolish the police department route" just to see what will happen.

I don't get to why this is so controversial either?

Could just as easily point out that children under 5 and adults over 90 are underrepresented in police shootings too... The reason is obvious.

Here's another article written from the police's own perspective:

https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/...-race-numbers/

Police aren't machines and do make mistakes, but if 50% of their interactions are with the black community then it's pretty likely that 50% of their mistakes are going to happen to the black community too. I don't see why they should be demonised for this?

A good poker analogy would be the 100% VPIP maniac; it's pretty obvious by their frequency of "player on player interactions" that they are far more likely to get stacked than a 20% VPIP nit...

Juk

One thing which I think you're missing is the larger context, which is very much about why it is the case that black Americans have more interactions with the police. It's not possible to really grapple with this issue without confronting the larger problems of racial inequality.

Also, the problem with using specific arrest statistics as a proxy for police interactions has also been addressed previously (and also here). Murder accounts for 0.1% of all arrests. Robbery about 1%. All violent crime about 5%. And of course not all police interactions are even arrests.

To repeat myself, I agree that you can't answer every relevant question by comparing police killings to population, but you also ignore a lot if you refuse to look beyond comparisons to arrests. The implicit point in the comparison to population is that those numbers reflect the larger social problems that are involved, beyond just problems with policing specifically.

how to effect police reform. step 1. get rid of the union. problem solved. thank you.

Blacks account for 27% of arrests and are 26% of those killed by police. So what nuance am I missing when I see that blacks are killed by police at about the same rate they are arrested, and think maybe there is some correlation?

Do you think blacks account for less than 25% of police interactions? I would be seriously surprised. Obviously not everyone is interested in an honest conversation, but I think those of us that are realize that blacks have more negative interactions with police, and that is probably a big reason leading towards disproportionate negative outcomes (relative to total population share).

The contention seems to be whether the negative interactions are due to unwarranted discrimination or due to behavior. And as in most things the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. So it is very unlikely that interventions that only focus on the policing side will ameliorate the situation, and are very likely to increase it.

As things are going, I can definitely see a future where police "reforms" cause black negative outcome relative to the entire population to increase.

The leftist MSM isn't talking about it much because it isn't convenient to the narrative, but it appears the black specific murder rate has skyrocketed during the protests, and it isn't police officers doing the murdering.

I think your questions are missing the point of that post. My first paragraph in particular.

I don't think any analysis based solely in simple cherry picked descriptive statistics is going to be that useful in a vacuum.

And yet them moral panic of the day dictates we must uncritically accept the narrative police are targeting black men, or be labelled moral reprobates. I mean, if I made this post on social media in my own name I would likely be fired.

So, we aren't living in a vacuum. We are living in a totalitarian dystopia where the moral majority gets to cherrypick numbers to push their "truth," and have the moral authority to silence anyone who questions this "truth".

...not because of Donald Trump, not because of police brutality that is only starting to see consequences for the people who perpetrate it...

...but because of the LIBERALS. Bahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahah

Just nonpartisan objective thinking you guys, wake up sheeple

What would you say is the best way to evaluate/dispute what he says?

I think the general point he is making is that the MSM narrative is cherry picking stats in a way you accuse him of (pretty obviously true), and that's there's a deeper change that needs to be made outside of just "defund the police", but that's the only talking point right now, and if you disagree, you're immediately termed racist without any actual conversation.

Does the police union need eliminated? Yeah, probably. Does there need to be serious reform to education, social services, and mental health initiatives? Absolutely. But that's not the issue right now, and all three of those things are probably better long term issue for minority communities than defunding the police.

Why should we continue to pay people who either perpetrate or cover for abuse and violence?

Because it's a small percentage who do that, and the rest do a lot of good. Almost any solution is better than literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

All cops cover for abuse. All of them. Any that don't get fired.