4 ms·

I actually did a similar kind of back of the napkin + Google exercise the other night, here is what I wrote down: --- Recent MN incident is definitely horribl

by omonra 10y ago

I actually did a similar kind of back of the napkin + Google exercise the other night, here is what I wrote down: --- Recent MN incident is definitely horrible and seems unequivocally wrong, no questions about it. It's very sad. It's worse than Garner and totally different scale than other high-profile cases of late. It's the sort of incident that definitely supports claims made by BLM (as previous ones have not, at least to me). The clear racial implications prompted me to look at the overall country-wide figures to see if the actual stats for last few years reflect the narrative promulgated in the news (black people are disproportionately killed by the police). 1. "... roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic." (http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-whites-t…/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-whites-t…/) 2. "There were 511 officers killed in felonious incidents and 540 offenders from 2004 to 2013, according to FBI reports. Among the total offenders, 52 percent were white, and 43 percent were black." The ratio of african-americans among cop killers (43% of all incidents) to those who are killed by cops (30% of all incidents) is 1.43 - which does not bear out the claim that they are unfairly targeted as a group (of course this doesn't absolve the individual cops who wrongfully kill innocent people). The one obvious problem with this analysis is that the set of people who kill cops vs are killed by them are non-overlapping - but when country-wide stats over a few years are considered the numbers would sort themselves out (ie random white guy killed by mistake simply doesn't make the national news). I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could be wrong.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could be wrong. Not so much wrong as irrelevant to the main issue of concern. The issue isn't so much whether black people are more likely to be killed by cops, but whether they are more likely to be wrongfully killed by cops (and secondarily, whether absent activism by BLM, etc., there is less accountability for such wrongful killings. [0]) Unfortunately, actually analyzing this question is messy, because you can't grab quick-and-easy figures for it, and the fundamental base facts -- whether individual shootings are wrongful -- are often contested. The easy to analyze questions are poor proxies for the question of interest. [0] Actually, accountability is the primary reason for BLM existing, and its not limited to police-involved killings (in fact, the triggering incident was the Trayvon Martin killing, which was not a police-involved killings, its just that the first incidents BLM was noted for responding to after it got going were police-involved, which set the perception that BLM was primarily about police shootings.)
- omonra 10y ago
  Who decides who was 'wrongfully' killed? For example to me (as well as grand jury) MBrown was rightfully killed. To the BLM he was not - so we're stuck. Even if that can somehow be quantified, do we have statistics for the number of white people who are wrongfully killed by the police? One metric I saw (unfortunately don't have a source) is that this year 3% of whites AND 3% of blacks were killed while unarmed.

by omonra 10y ago

dragonwriter 10y ago

> I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could be wrong. Not so much wrong as irrelevant to the main issue of concern. The issue isn't so much whether black people are more likely to be killed by cops, but whether they are more likely to be wrongfully killed by cops (and secondarily, whether absent activism by BLM, etc., there is less accountability for such wrongful killings. [0]) Unfortunately, actually analyzing this question is messy, because you can't grab quick-and-easy figures for it, and the fundamental base facts -- whether individual shootings are wrongful -- are often contested. The easy to analyze questions are poor proxies for the question of interest. [0] Actually, accountability is the primary reason for BLM existing, and its not limited to police-involved killings (in fact, the triggering incident was the Trayvon Martin killing, which was not a police-involved killings, its just that the first incidents BLM was noted for responding to after it got going were police-involved, which set the perception that BLM was primarily about police shootings.)

omonra 10y ago
Who decides who was 'wrongfully' killed? For example to me (as well as grand jury) MBrown was rightfully killed. To the BLM he was not - so we're stuck. Even if that can somehow be quantified, do we have statistics for the number of white people who are wrongfully killed by the police? One metric I saw (unfortunately don't have a source) is that this year 3% of whites AND 3% of blacks were killed while unarmed.