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Its difficult to quantify teleology, but people make the obvious judgements. What it does is track police initiated violence. What it's for, given the context

Its difficult to quantify teleology, but people make the obvious judgements. What it does is track police initiated violence. What it's for, given the context it exists in, is almost certainly to advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated. The writer furnished sufficient background to justify this inference, even if you're coming at this issue as a complete blank slate.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
> advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational. Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic. The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general. I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist). Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?
- vkou 10y ago
  When blacks are harassed, detained, arrested, and sentenced more frequently then whites, despite committing crime at a similar rate, why does it matter whether the cause is the colour of their skin, or their economic standing? Are you blaming this problem on black culture? Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I disagree that it's a similar crime distribution per capita, on the whole. Of course, many of those "racial" or "cultural" differences disappear once you control for other factors, mostly economic. That being said, we still need to control for if we're using "black" as a proxy for "poor" before we call the police racist, for example. (That would be classist, not racist, policing.) > Are you blaming this problem on black culture? In part, yes. It's not popular, but I think that black culture has developed "pathological" behaviors, similar to the defense mechanisms we see in children, were the behavior was actually adaptive at one point in time (and likely essential for survival), but has become maladaptive now that the circumstances have changed. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of the backlash over "microaggressions" is that people think talking about "microaggressions" before those maladaptive behaviors in unreasonable and unfair, but we're getting on a tangent.) > Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go? Sure. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice). My point is that you're getting like 10 variance points from what you wear, another 5-10 variance points from how you conduct yourself, and like 1-5 variance points from the color of your skin. I'm not convinced there's not a racial component to the policing either -- I just suspect it's much like the wage gap, where what we find is that it's mostly social issues we don't really want to talk about (women leaving work force to have children; men having more variance as a gender; men skewing slightly more competitive) and a little bit actual problematic bias (that last 3-5 cents). So I suspect we'll find a little bit of genuine bias in policing, but I think we'll find, once we dig further in to the numbers, that mostly what we're seeing is behaviors that correlate highly with facts that make us uncomfortable, and have to do with either economics, social class, or culture.
    - Mz 10y ago
      There are ways in which I am sympathetic to some of your points. I am white and have had people of color be assholes to me merely because I am white while claiming there is no such thing as "reverse racism" (and there is not -- a black person hating a white person merely because of their color is straight up racism), but a couple of things: A) no matter how well off they are, blacks have to put up with shit whites typically don't deal with and b) part of the reason blacks are so poor in the U.S. is because of hundreds of years of historical legacy, so it's kind of a huge fuck you to act like "well, it JUST the POOR blacks" or something. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice). This interesting piece was written by a well educated black lawyer living in a upscale neighborhood about being harassed by cops because his car broke down, so he walked home and a black man walking in his upper class neighborhood was reason enough to harass him: http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/Paul%20Butler.pdf http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/...
- maxander 10y ago
  Thank you kindly for directly demonstrating my point. You are exactly the target audience for the data the article is talking about. In most other aspects of daily life, people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial evidence without rigorous quantitative work- you don't demand a formal Bayesian analysis of the day's weather before you decide to take an umbrella with you. But in issues like this, people who don't want to deal with it will plead "lack of sufficient data" until someone does an iron-clad study with five-sigma-significance results. So, that's what they're doing! Public awareness proceeds onwards and upwards through this kind of rigamarole.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    > people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial evidence without rigorous quantitative work- you don't demand a formal Bayesian analysis of the day's weather before you decide to take an umbrella with you But I do do a Bayesian analysis rather than a naive one: it's cloudy without raining here too often to carry an umbrella just because it's cloudy. That would be a maladaptive response, even if naive analysis is "clouds -> rain; prepare!" Similarly, social issues tend to have enough complexity that you can't just resort to "clouds -> rain!" In this particular case, I'm just arguing that you need to control for background statistics rather than saying police shootings are randomly distributed across the entire population without any correlations. No different than thinking a little about how often it's cloudy without rain before grabbing an umbrella. And I dislike that people like you are just screaming "DON'T THINK! CLOUDS! GET UMBRELLA!"
    - maxander 10y ago
      And I'm arguing that, in any other issue, you would think "controlling for background statistics" in a formal sense is unnecessary. I'm not telling you not to think, quite the opposite. Think of this: In a country with a long history of terrible racial oppression and documented contemporary racist sentiment, a large body of people are convinced by their lived experiences [1] that police violence is racially biased, and this conviction is further supported by a massive number of known individual cases. Among the huge space of possible injustices that could be claimed, this one particular form has received tremendous attention and accumulated consistent material evidence across the entire nation. We as yet lack the huge amounts of data to settle the issue in a way that would satisfy a physicist. But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on. [1] Taking this as distinct from the large body of people who are convinced at a safe distance via their TVs.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

> advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational. Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic. The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general. I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist). Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?

vkou 10y ago
When blacks are harassed, detained, arrested, and sentenced more frequently then whites, despite committing crime at a similar rate, why does it matter whether the cause is the colour of their skin, or their economic standing? Are you blaming this problem on black culture? Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I disagree that it's a similar crime distribution per capita, on the whole. Of course, many of those "racial" or "cultural" differences disappear once you control for other factors, mostly economic. That being said, we still need to control for if we're using "black" as a proxy for "poor" before we call the police racist, for example. (That would be classist, not racist, policing.) > Are you blaming this problem on black culture? In part, yes. It's not popular, but I think that black culture has developed "pathological" behaviors, similar to the defense mechanisms we see in children, were the behavior was actually adaptive at one point in time (and likely essential for survival), but has become maladaptive now that the circumstances have changed. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of the backlash over "microaggressions" is that people think talking about "microaggressions" before those maladaptive behaviors in unreasonable and unfair, but we're getting on a tangent.) > Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go? Sure. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice). My point is that you're getting like 10 variance points from what you wear, another 5-10 variance points from how you conduct yourself, and like 1-5 variance points from the color of your skin. I'm not convinced there's not a racial component to the policing either -- I just suspect it's much like the wage gap, where what we find is that it's mostly social issues we don't really want to talk about (women leaving work force to have children; men having more variance as a gender; men skewing slightly more competitive) and a little bit actual problematic bias (that last 3-5 cents). So I suspect we'll find a little bit of genuine bias in policing, but I think we'll find, once we dig further in to the numbers, that mostly what we're seeing is behaviors that correlate highly with facts that make us uncomfortable, and have to do with either economics, social class, or culture.
  - Mz 10y ago
    There are ways in which I am sympathetic to some of your points. I am white and have had people of color be assholes to me merely because I am white while claiming there is no such thing as "reverse racism" (and there is not -- a black person hating a white person merely because of their color is straight up racism), but a couple of things: A) no matter how well off they are, blacks have to put up with shit whites typically don't deal with and b) part of the reason blacks are so poor in the U.S. is because of hundreds of years of historical legacy, so it's kind of a huge fuck you to act like "well, it JUST the POOR blacks" or something. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice). This interesting piece was written by a well educated black lawyer living in a upscale neighborhood about being harassed by cops because his car broke down, so he walked home and a black man walking in his upper class neighborhood was reason enough to harass him: http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/Paul%20Butler.pdf http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/...
maxander 10y ago
Thank you kindly for directly demonstrating my point. You are exactly the target audience for the data the article is talking about. In most other aspects of daily life, people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial evidence without rigorous quantitative work- you don't demand a formal Bayesian analysis of the day's weather before you decide to take an umbrella with you. But in issues like this, people who don't want to deal with it will plead "lack of sufficient data" until someone does an iron-clad study with five-sigma-significance results. So, that's what they're doing! Public awareness proceeds onwards and upwards through this kind of rigamarole.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  > people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial evidence without rigorous quantitative work- you don't demand a formal Bayesian analysis of the day's weather before you decide to take an umbrella with you But I do do a Bayesian analysis rather than a naive one: it's cloudy without raining here too often to carry an umbrella just because it's cloudy. That would be a maladaptive response, even if naive analysis is "clouds -> rain; prepare!" Similarly, social issues tend to have enough complexity that you can't just resort to "clouds -> rain!" In this particular case, I'm just arguing that you need to control for background statistics rather than saying police shootings are randomly distributed across the entire population without any correlations. No different than thinking a little about how often it's cloudy without rain before grabbing an umbrella. And I dislike that people like you are just screaming "DON'T THINK! CLOUDS! GET UMBRELLA!"
  - maxander 10y ago
    And I'm arguing that, in any other issue, you would think "controlling for background statistics" in a formal sense is unnecessary. I'm not telling you not to think, quite the opposite. Think of this: In a country with a long history of terrible racial oppression and documented contemporary racist sentiment, a large body of people are convinced by their lived experiences [1] that police violence is racially biased, and this conviction is further supported by a massive number of known individual cases. Among the huge space of possible injustices that could be claimed, this one particular form has received tremendous attention and accumulated consistent material evidence across the entire nation. We as yet lack the huge amounts of data to settle the issue in a way that would satisfy a physicist. But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on. [1] Taking this as distinct from the large body of people who are convinced at a safe distance via their TVs.