If police shootings were systemic, we should see similar rates (i.e. Average police killing per 1M) across multiple jurisdictions. This does not occur.

What explains the difference? Racial composition, and subsequent racial bias?


The highest rate of killings occur in St. Loui at 17.9 police killing per 1M.

St. Louis Demographics:
Black or African American: 46.92%
White: 46.25%
Asian: 3.24%
Two or more races: 2.27%


The Demographics of Detroit (Which has the highest ratio of black people):

Black or African American: 78.64%
White: 14.55%
Other race: 2.92%
Two or more races: 1.95%
Asian: 1.57%


Detroit PD has a really low number of 2.6 police killing per 1M. So, the city with the nation's highest ratio of black people have one of the lowest police killinger per million out of the top 100 cities in the US.

Maybe higher concentration of black people actually lowers any sort of racial bias. So, let's check the city that has the most black people. The Big Apple:

White alone, percent: 42.7%
Hispanic or Latino, percent: 29.1%
Black or African American alone, percent: 24.3%

NYC does really good, relative to the top 100 cities, with a 1.3 police killing per 1 million (they are number 3, in fact).

Maybe NYC does not have a big racial bias problem. Let's check out Chicago (the second largest amount of black people):


45.3% white
32% black
28% Hispanic


They come in at 4.0 police killing per one million.


For context, big city average (top 100 cities) is 4.6.


I don't think systemic racial bias can explain the disparate outcome in police shootings per one million between the top 100 cities. There has to be a reason why one PD does better than another. This also does not lend to the idea that police shootings are a systemic issue, but rather how specific police departments are policing (which those worse performing police departments could have a racial bias). I think a reasonable goal is to get the worse performing police departments down to the average of 4.6.

Maybe the problem comes from the racial bias of people policing other races.

2013 breakdown of gender and race in the D.P.D.:[14]
* Male: 75%
* Female: 25%
* African-American/Black: 63%
* White: 33%
* Hispanic, any race: 4%
* Asian: 0.4%
(Does not equal 100 percent due to rounding)
The Detroit Police Department has one of the largest percentages of black officers of any major city police department, reflecting current overall city demographics. Lawsuits alleging discrimination stemming from the influence of affirmative action and allegations of race-based promotional bias for executive positions have surfaced repeatedly.[15][16][17] As of 2008, the majority of upper command members in the Detroit PD were black.[18]

St. Louis:

The composition of the department's total personnel, according to the 2018 annual report, was:[11]
* Sex — Male: 84%, Female: 16%
* Race — White: 66%, African-American/Black: 30%, Other: 4%


I don’t think my analysis is much more complex than your simple deduction in the OP but perhaps when Blacks police Blacks there are les shootings than when Whites police Blacks?

Chicago:

2017, the composition of the department's sworn personnel by gender was 77% male and 23% female.[26] In 2017, the composition of the department's sworn personnel by race was:[27]

50% non-Hispanic White
25% Hispanic (of any race)
21% African American
3% Asian American/Pacific Islander
1% other

Are you using metro area or city limits? An extreme example is Atlanta, City limits are around 500K, metro area is around 5 million. The "city" looks demographically very different depending on what you take "city" to mean.

Similar observation applies to St Louis, Detroit, etc. Are you sure you are comparing comparable data?

The police killings per 1 million are all from the same source. Demographics are from the wiki pages. I don't know for certain.

"Systemic" such as in "systemic racism" does not depend on their being exactly one nationwide system. No liberal is surprised that different cities have different cop killing rates. Rather than trying to knock down "systemic" "racism" based on your own, unique definitions of "systemic" and "racism" which have been repeatedly shown to be radically different from how your opponents use them, maybe you should take some time to learn what your opponents think they mean, and then argue against that. Because right now, you're just making nonsense arguments against your own nonsense definitions.

The point is not to "knock down systemic racism". The point is to demonstrate variables outside of race, and that police shootings are not a systemic issue. I'm not talking about systemic racism.

I know what you think you're doing, but you're held back by the fact that your definition of what a "systemic issue" is doesn't line up with how the vast majority of people use it, so your demonstration is nonsense.

Find a single source that validates this premise. I argue that there is none.

relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part. But you are right, it does not follow whatever critical theory says systemic is.

Since when is "most" a measure of "concentration"?

They have the most black people, and the highest population density, by far. I could be off, but it stands to reason they have the most black people per square mile, which means the highest concentration.

And, they had some problems until a few years ago with profiling.

You do realize that the stat you're using shifts dramatically on a year to year basis even in the same jurisdiction right?

Do you expect a single person to be surprised that there're elements other than race that contribute to police shooting stats?

That's the average....between 2013-2019.

yes, and each year that contributes to that average varies wildly, where one year can shift the average quite a bit - especially for any city that isn't at the top where there tends to be 1 or 0 death by police officers a year.

but the problem isnt that the number is too small to reliably predict what the overall death toll will be one year to the next or even a rough estimate of the racial breakdown (over a large enough number of years). it's that the extent to which the racial breakdown varies as a function of something like percentage of officers who are x race is miniscule relative to the total variation and so to figure out how those two things are correlated would require more data than you'd be able to get.

as is you're just reading into the tea leaves.

and even if you could prove (for instance) that how close a police forces demography resembles the population it serves is associated with a disparity in deaths at the hands of police officers it wouldn't really prove that hiring more blacks as officers in areas that they're under represented is going to fix the problem. it could just be that police departments that have people in managerial positions who are racist are less likely to hire blacks. throwing a couple of black guys into the fire might dilute the problem but it's not going to change the mentality.

The point of the post is not to disprove racial inequality when it comes to police shootings. The point of the post is to demonstrate there is no systemic issue with regards to police shootings, but rather a few PD's are having some serious issues. Also, if racial bias was a significant factor in police shootings, systemically, you would see similar rates of police shootings in similar population demographics.

Police departments are systems.

This seems like a poor assumption.

It sounds a bit like saying "If the US truly has good climate for agriculture, we should expect to see suitable annual precipitation anywhere I choose to look" or "If the US truly has an average wage of 900$ per week, we should expect that no region varies from this".

Systemic doesn't mean "universally uniform". It doesn't even mean that there are no exceptions. Demographics and culture being large and unruly things, it would be strange if we did not find such things.

Just want to nominate tame_deuces for POTY again.

Brevity is indeed the soul of wit.

So many good posts as well. Every thread I'm reading right now, TD has posted in 2-3 paragraphs what I wish I could have said, and I doubt I could do it in 3,000 words.

And it has always been thus

Hm, now take this sentiment to its logical conclusion.

Instead of making absurd demands like defunding the entire institution or making widespread systemic reforms, maybe focus instead on the outliers - the actual instances of death by the hands of police. What makes those instances different than the countless millions of other police interactions where nobody was at risk of death?

"All cops" aren't the problem. The policing system wasn't and isn't built with violent outcomes in mind. Anyone who truly believes otherwise is either not paying attention, or is too far gone as to even be worth arguing with.

As long as we have websites like this being #1 hits on Google, there can't be a productive discussion: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/states

Statistics can tell whatever story you like.

If there are 10 questionable shootings a year by police, that may be 10 too many, but only serves to prove that they get it right 99.999% of the time.

I'll say it again, Inso. If you've got 10 cops who murder people, and 1000 cops back up those murderers, you've got 1010 bad cops, and all of them are the problem. Also, murders are only the most prominent example of police violence. Disparate beatings for "resisting arrest" is also unacceptable.

This is such a gross oversimplification of the issue. It might make you feel better about hating all cops, but it shows zero nuance of thought.

You might have a case against the very small group of people who decide on soft disciplinary outcomes for specific "bad shootings", but hardly the rank and file.

Ultimately, your beef is with the union. Admittedly, most unions don't deal with many cases of potential wrongful death, but the mechanisms that protect the "bad cops" in this case are at the core of what labor unions do.

You're handwaving away extensive evidence that individual cops cover for bad cops. There are zero cops speaking out that the murderous ones should be prosecuted. Like, if I worked on some job, and one of my coworkers murdered someone while on the job, and he wasn't fired, I would quit that job and go do something worthwhile like stock grocery shelves or put solar panels on roofs.

To add, we're actually seeing the opposite: when police officers are held accountable for their unacceptable violence, their fellow officers are resigning or abdicating duties in shows of solidarity with the murderers and an insistence that they be allowed indiscriminate violence.