6 ms·

This article makes a lot of claims about innocent black people being gunned down by police, but is there any actual evidence of this happening disproportionatel

This article makes a lot of claims about innocent black people being gunned down by police, but is there any actual evidence of this happening disproportionately to white people? Last year I trawled the 2015 Washington Post police shooting dataset and couldn't find any evidence, and a couple months later a black Harvard economist released a paper saying he couldn't find any evidence in the data he looked at. Between that and all of the bad reporting around the Michael Brown shooting, I'm beginning to believe that the only disparity is in media coverage... This story and its interest don't depend on this (in)accuracy, but it's such a common talking point and it doesn't seem to be substantiated. In particular, I was expecting a lot more drama from a story of a black woman "surviving" an encounter with police. Here's a similar story about a white man in San Fran: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9f53ef6a1c10 https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9.... This sort of stuff makes me think that race is perhaps a red herring, and that the quality of police (or police training) simply vary a lot in our country.

asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago
Even if you believe that, the two core points of the experience stand: > My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later. > I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one who must remain calm. The legal system is asking untrained civilians to de-escalate panicky cops.
- gpm 9y ago
  He acknowledges that in his comment > The story and its interest doesn't hinge on this (in)accuracy ...
apeace 9y ago
You didn't research very hard. From the Washington Post[0]: > White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. If you look at fatal police shootings so far this year[1], the numbers are the same. You should provide a link to the Harvard study you mentioned. Here[2] is one from Yale which someone once touted to me, which supports your claims. But they only used data from a limited number of police departments in Houston, TX. I'm not sure why anyone would look at that and not the national numbers. In the paper, of their own methods they say, "In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data!". There are many places to find this information online. It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fryer.pdf https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fr...
- asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago
  I believe The Guardian also ran a project to count people murdered by law enforcement because there are no strict requirements to record this across the country: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    Obligatory: "Murdered" != Killed.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    I think that was the same impetus as the WashPo dataset. I do wish the United States made it mandatory for agencies to submit their data to the FBI. I also wish Eric Holder's Justice Dept didn't withhold offender race data from the NCVS. Interestingly, the FBI's Unified Crime Report seems to cover about 50% of police-involved shootings, making it a pretty good sample (and the UCR is generally consistent with the NCVS which is a survey of victims). Leaving data collection up to the media is sketchy, notably because the media are more likely to report officer race if the suspect is black and even more so if the officer is white.
- ethanhunt_ 9y ago
  That's not the right comparison, statistically. You'd want to compare the number of police encounters vs the number of police encounters that result in death, broken down by race. The statistic that you quoted would skew if one race has less encounters with police than the other group (which if I recall is the case here. I think NYT and WSJ both ran articles several months ago about this.) Not that this changes the rough idea here which is that someone changing a license plate on a car shouldn't have a gun pointed at her and have to depend more on her de-escalation skills than the officer's.
- weberc2 9y ago
  > You didn't research very hard. From the Washington Post: Actually, that very quote was what inspired my research. I wanted to know if the quote was misleading in favor of one narrative, so I filtered out cases where the suspect was armed and otherwise viably threatening. Here's the link to the harvard study: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 > It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people. I don't dispute that. I'm skeptical that black people are unjustifiably shot more frequently than white people, or at least with the frequency the media would have me believe.
DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
I understand the issue is the loose definition of "innocent" - if you take it to mean someone shot by police who is absolutely innocent of any charge - or if you define it as someone who was doing something criminal or suspect but the situation did not initially warrant their shooting. Hence the emphasis on deescalation training. Consider a hypothetical: two separate scenarios of kids shoplifting, one white the other black: the white kid gets called out by an officer, is pursued and apprehended without arms drawn, the police officer writes-up a citation and the kid spends the night in jail as a warning before being released. A black kid does the same thing, but the officer decides to draw their sidearm and orders them to freeze - the kid turns around to look and is immediately shot by the officer (search online for "shot for turning around police"). The officer can (at present, justifiably) say they feared for their life because they thought they were about to be charged or expected their target to draw their own firearm. Or take the same scenario but both kids do actually fight back somehow - I believe the average white police officer would still be more hesitant to use lethal force against a white assailant than a black one. I won't deny the usual statistics ("blacks commit more crimes per-capita", etc) but don't think that's where I believe the problem is. I'm not content with the sentiment that "black lives matter" - I'd much rather it be "criminals' lives matter" (I'm aware of the straightforward racist implication - that's why I dare not say it too loudly).
- weberc2 9y ago
  Yeah, I was purposefully vague about "innocent" because I don't know what the most interesting, precise definition would be. I agree with you that comparing results to crimes is important in assessing the role race plays in these encounters. > I believe the average white police officer would still be more hesitant to use lethal force against a white assailant than a black one. I thought I heard about studies into this, but I can't seem to dig them up. I'll edit or reply again if/when I find them. > I won't deny the usual statistics ("blacks commit more crimes per-capita", etc) but don't think that's where I believe the problem is. I'm not content with the sentiment that "black lives matter" - I'd much rather it be "criminals' lives matter" If the discriminant is criminal behavior and not race, then (by definition), the issue isn't one of race (at least not in any meaningful way). It would be good to identify if this is the case or not, so we can focus our national debate on how to appropriately deal with crime and not on racism.
zzalpha 9y ago
Last year I trolled the 2015 Washington Post police shooting dataset In case this wasn't a simple typo, just FYI: It's "trawled".
- pmiller2 9y ago
  They're largely interchangeable in this context:http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/05/trolling-trawling-difference/ http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/05/trolling-trawling...
- weberc2 9y ago
  They're synonymous, but I edited my comment because I can't unsee the modern meaning of "troll". Thanks for that. ;)
mindslight 9y ago
Does it particularly matter? Even if the majority of the panic is due to the media fanning the flames of racism for profit (and I think it is), it still effects the victim's state of mind. It doesn't matter if the victim's narrative was that she was likely to get shot because she is black, but yet the reality is that cops are equal opportunity murderers. Either way, the victim is ultimately panicked because they're being assaulted with a deadly weapon.
- weberc2 9y ago
  I was very clear that the story doesn't depend on this. Why are you confused?
  - mindslight 9y ago
    I'm not confused and it seems we're close to being in violent agreement. But I'm pointing out that where one puts the emphasis is important. If OP has fallen into the narrative that she is especially at risk being black [0], then there is a fine line between trying to extract her from that possibly nonconstructive narrative and shouting down her entire story. This is the general problem with the identity politics tarpit - if one objects too hard at a certain collectivist narrative (in this case, racism), then they are easily pigeonholed into being the "other" in that narrative, fueling the unproductive fire. [0] Which given the location, is likely true regardless of the overriding distribution.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Good point, well said, and I apologize for my misunderstanding.
LyndsySimon 9y ago
I agree that the media coverage on this issue is pretty much garbage. The vast majority of cases, even those where the person killed was not committing the crime of which they were suspected, are much more complicated than "they were black." This belief puts me at odds with many (perhaps all) in the "racial justice" movement. All of that said, there is a core of truth here that I believe should not be overlooked, and that's that dark-skinned people are treated differently than light-skinned people. There is a great deal of scientific literature that supports this belief - generally speaking, people of all races view others with darker skin to be stronger, more aggressive, less innocent, and often older than they really are.
- weberc2 9y ago
  Maybe, but I'm skeptical. The data often point in both directions, and the literature often fails to look at obvious alternative explanations (prejudice is the null hypothesis). Besides, the field of sociology is politically homogeneous; I don't know how much their political ideologues contribute to confirmation bias, but I suspect the literature would look different if this weren't the case.

asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago

Even if you believe that, the two core points of the experience stand: > My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later. > I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one who must remain calm. The legal system is asking untrained civilians to de-escalate panicky cops.

gpm 9y ago
He acknowledges that in his comment > The story and its interest doesn't hinge on this (in)accuracy ...

apeace 9y ago

You didn't research very hard. From the Washington Post[0]: > White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. If you look at fatal police shootings so far this year[1], the numbers are the same. You should provide a link to the Harvard study you mentioned. Here[2] is one from Yale which someone once touted to me, which supports your claims. But they only used data from a limited number of police departments in Houston, TX. I'm not sure why anyone would look at that and not the national numbers. In the paper, of their own methods they say, "In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data!". There are many places to find this information online. It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... [2] https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fryer.pdf https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fr...

asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago
I believe The Guardian also ran a project to count people murdered by law enforcement because there are no strict requirements to record this across the country: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  Obligatory: "Murdered" != Killed.
- weberc2 9y ago
  I think that was the same impetus as the WashPo dataset. I do wish the United States made it mandatory for agencies to submit their data to the FBI. I also wish Eric Holder's Justice Dept didn't withhold offender race data from the NCVS. Interestingly, the FBI's Unified Crime Report seems to cover about 50% of police-involved shootings, making it a pretty good sample (and the UCR is generally consistent with the NCVS which is a survey of victims). Leaving data collection up to the media is sketchy, notably because the media are more likely to report officer race if the suspect is black and even more so if the officer is white.
ethanhunt_ 9y ago
That's not the right comparison, statistically. You'd want to compare the number of police encounters vs the number of police encounters that result in death, broken down by race. The statistic that you quoted would skew if one race has less encounters with police than the other group (which if I recall is the case here. I think NYT and WSJ both ran articles several months ago about this.) Not that this changes the rough idea here which is that someone changing a license plate on a car shouldn't have a gun pointed at her and have to depend more on her de-escalation skills than the officer's.
weberc2 9y ago
> You didn't research very hard. From the Washington Post: Actually, that very quote was what inspired my research. I wanted to know if the quote was misleading in favor of one narrative, so I filtered out cases where the suspect was armed and otherwise viably threatening. Here's the link to the harvard study: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399 > It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people. I don't dispute that. I'm skeptical that black people are unjustifiably shot more frequently than white people, or at least with the frequency the media would have me believe.

DaiPlusPlus 9y ago

I understand the issue is the loose definition of "innocent" - if you take it to mean someone shot by police who is absolutely innocent of any charge - or if you define it as someone who was doing something criminal or suspect but the situation did not initially warrant their shooting. Hence the emphasis on deescalation training. Consider a hypothetical: two separate scenarios of kids shoplifting, one white the other black: the white kid gets called out by an officer, is pursued and apprehended without arms drawn, the police officer writes-up a citation and the kid spends the night in jail as a warning before being released. A black kid does the same thing, but the officer decides to draw their sidearm and orders them to freeze - the kid turns around to look and is immediately shot by the officer (search online for "shot for turning around police"). The officer can (at present, justifiably) say they feared for their life because they thought they were about to be charged or expected their target to draw their own firearm. Or take the same scenario but both kids do actually fight back somehow - I believe the average white police officer would still be more hesitant to use lethal force against a white assailant than a black one. I won't deny the usual statistics ("blacks commit more crimes per-capita", etc) but don't think that's where I believe the problem is. I'm not content with the sentiment that "black lives matter" - I'd much rather it be "criminals' lives matter" (I'm aware of the straightforward racist implication - that's why I dare not say it too loudly).

weberc2 9y ago
Yeah, I was purposefully vague about "innocent" because I don't know what the most interesting, precise definition would be. I agree with you that comparing results to crimes is important in assessing the role race plays in these encounters. > I believe the average white police officer would still be more hesitant to use lethal force against a white assailant than a black one. I thought I heard about studies into this, but I can't seem to dig them up. I'll edit or reply again if/when I find them. > I won't deny the usual statistics ("blacks commit more crimes per-capita", etc) but don't think that's where I believe the problem is. I'm not content with the sentiment that "black lives matter" - I'd much rather it be "criminals' lives matter" If the discriminant is criminal behavior and not race, then (by definition), the issue isn't one of race (at least not in any meaningful way). It would be good to identify if this is the case or not, so we can focus our national debate on how to appropriately deal with crime and not on racism.

zzalpha 9y ago

Last year I trolled the 2015 Washington Post police shooting dataset In case this wasn't a simple typo, just FYI: It's "trawled".

pmiller2 9y ago
They're largely interchangeable in this context:http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/05/trolling-trawling-difference/ http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/05/trolling-trawling...
weberc2 9y ago
They're synonymous, but I edited my comment because I can't unsee the modern meaning of "troll". Thanks for that. ;)

mindslight 9y ago

Does it particularly matter? Even if the majority of the panic is due to the media fanning the flames of racism for profit (and I think it is), it still effects the victim's state of mind. It doesn't matter if the victim's narrative was that she was likely to get shot because she is black, but yet the reality is that cops are equal opportunity murderers. Either way, the victim is ultimately panicked because they're being assaulted with a deadly weapon.

weberc2 9y ago
I was very clear that the story doesn't depend on this. Why are you confused?
- mindslight 9y ago
  I'm not confused and it seems we're close to being in violent agreement. But I'm pointing out that where one puts the emphasis is important. If OP has fallen into the narrative that she is especially at risk being black [0], then there is a fine line between trying to extract her from that possibly nonconstructive narrative and shouting down her entire story. This is the general problem with the identity politics tarpit - if one objects too hard at a certain collectivist narrative (in this case, racism), then they are easily pigeonholed into being the "other" in that narrative, fueling the unproductive fire. [0] Which given the location, is likely true regardless of the overriding distribution.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Good point, well said, and I apologize for my misunderstanding.

LyndsySimon 9y ago

I agree that the media coverage on this issue is pretty much garbage. The vast majority of cases, even those where the person killed was not committing the crime of which they were suspected, are much more complicated than "they were black." This belief puts me at odds with many (perhaps all) in the "racial justice" movement. All of that said, there is a core of truth here that I believe should not be overlooked, and that's that dark-skinned people are treated differently than light-skinned people. There is a great deal of scientific literature that supports this belief - generally speaking, people of all races view others with darker skin to be stronger, more aggressive, less innocent, and often older than they really are.

weberc2 9y ago
Maybe, but I'm skeptical. The data often point in both directions, and the literature often fails to look at obvious alternative explanations (prejudice is the null hypothesis). Besides, the field of sociology is politically homogeneous; I don't know how much their political ideologues contribute to confirmation bias, but I suspect the literature would look different if this weren't the case.