10 ms·

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 thos

by 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.
- 3JPLW 9y ago
  Then in that case, I suppose it all depends on who is doing the justification. Nearly every police shooting in America is "justified" — be it by a police review board, a prosecutor, a grand jury, or a trial jury.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    I agree, and unfortunately I don't have a good idea about how to audit the entire justice system. My gut says it's unlikely that an entire diverse industry is prejudiced against one particular racial group, and that thousands of laypeople are in on it. Hopefully we can get better data if it doesn't already exist.
    - Hnrobert42 9y ago
      You think it unlikely that there is a systemic bias? Bearing in mind that systemic bias isn't usually the result of an overt plan or even hidden conspiracy but instead the simple average of the bias of all the parts of the system.
      - weberc2 9y ago
        Something like that. I guess I don't think bias is as responsible or pervasive as we're lead to believe. Frequently when we look at a disparity, I find myself thinking "Why didn't they check if X, Y, or Z were responsible instead of bias?". One example is the gender wage gap; we now know that women make less than men because they elect into different careers, because they have different priorities. Different groups have different distributions of any given behavior, and not all behaviors have the same outcome. This is all just a hunch, so I won't defend it too much; it just seems more plausible to me than the current "everyone is subconsciously biased against one racial group" theory.
gozur88 9y ago
>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. Which is meaningless, since black people commit more serious crimes than white people. If you break it down by people suspected of having committed a felony, you're actually more likely to be shot as a white guy.
- extra88 9y ago
  > black people commit more serious crimes than white people. Convicted? Yes. Arrested? Sure. Commit? I don't know, maybe, but I bet if you factored in economic status there'd be a lot of evening out; i.e. poor people commit more serious crimes, black people are disproportionately poor, therefore more black people commit more serious crimes.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    As I understand it, there's no real question about whether or not black Americans commit more crime than other races (the data are all consistent, including that collected from victims and witnesses), but SES alone doesn't explain the gap IIRC. I suspect it has to do with the relative concentration of poverty, but that's just a hunch and I doubt it's all down to one simple factor anyway.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    Commit, yes. For serious crimes like murder and A & B there's a victim. The causes are irrelevant from the standpoint of police officers. Cops have to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.
    - extra88 9y ago
      That's assuming there's an officer involved at all. I also didn't have a specific definition of "serious crimes" in mind, whether it would only include violent crimes or also non-violent ones like burglary or fraud (of significant value).
jbmorgado 9y ago
> "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." And yet black people commit more than 50% of all murders/very violent crimes crimes so it makes perfect sense they are more likely stopped by the police than whites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

by apeace 9y ago

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.

3JPLW 9y ago
Then in that case, I suppose it all depends on who is doing the justification. Nearly every police shooting in America is "justified" — be it by a police review board, a prosecutor, a grand jury, or a trial jury.
- weberc2 9y ago
  I agree, and unfortunately I don't have a good idea about how to audit the entire justice system. My gut says it's unlikely that an entire diverse industry is prejudiced against one particular racial group, and that thousands of laypeople are in on it. Hopefully we can get better data if it doesn't already exist.
  - Hnrobert42 9y ago
    You think it unlikely that there is a systemic bias? Bearing in mind that systemic bias isn't usually the result of an overt plan or even hidden conspiracy but instead the simple average of the bias of all the parts of the system.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Something like that. I guess I don't think bias is as responsible or pervasive as we're lead to believe. Frequently when we look at a disparity, I find myself thinking "Why didn't they check if X, Y, or Z were responsible instead of bias?". One example is the gender wage gap; we now know that women make less than men because they elect into different careers, because they have different priorities. Different groups have different distributions of any given behavior, and not all behaviors have the same outcome. This is all just a hunch, so I won't defend it too much; it just seems more plausible to me than the current "everyone is subconsciously biased against one racial group" theory.

gozur88 9y ago

>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. Which is meaningless, since black people commit more serious crimes than white people. If you break it down by people suspected of having committed a felony, you're actually more likely to be shot as a white guy.

extra88 9y ago
> black people commit more serious crimes than white people. Convicted? Yes. Arrested? Sure. Commit? I don't know, maybe, but I bet if you factored in economic status there'd be a lot of evening out; i.e. poor people commit more serious crimes, black people are disproportionately poor, therefore more black people commit more serious crimes.
- weberc2 9y ago
  As I understand it, there's no real question about whether or not black Americans commit more crime than other races (the data are all consistent, including that collected from victims and witnesses), but SES alone doesn't explain the gap IIRC. I suspect it has to do with the relative concentration of poverty, but that's just a hunch and I doubt it's all down to one simple factor anyway.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Commit, yes. For serious crimes like murder and A & B there's a victim. The causes are irrelevant from the standpoint of police officers. Cops have to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.
  - extra88 9y ago
    That's assuming there's an officer involved at all. I also didn't have a specific definition of "serious crimes" in mind, whether it would only include violent crimes or also non-violent ones like burglary or fraud (of significant value).

jbmorgado 9y ago

> "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." And yet black people commit more than 50% of all murders/very violent crimes crimes so it makes perfect sense they are more likely stopped by the police than whites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...