4 ms·

There are a preponderance of YouTube videos of encounters like this: > In one especially notorious encounter, police in 2009 arrested a distinguished black Har

There are a preponderance of YouTube videos of encounters like this: > In one especially notorious encounter, police in 2009 arrested a distinguished black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., at his own home in Cambridge, Mass., after a white woman called the police to report a possible break-in. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/public-outrage-legislation-follow-white-womans-call-to-police-about-black-man-in-central-park/2020/05/27/94b219a6-a049-11ea-9590-1858a893bd59_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/public-outrage-legis... Breonna Taylor was not only shot to death in her sleep, but was also not given critical aid for twenty minutes after they discovered she was injured: > Mr. Walker told investigators that Ms. Taylor coughed and struggled to breathe for at least five minutes after she was shot, according to The Louisville Courier Journal. She received no medical attention for more than 20 minutes after she was struck, The Courier Journal reported, citing dispatch logs. https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html That, I would say, is a "shortcutting" of police procedure. "Avoiding unnecessary animosity" is less important than facing the problem American society has with racism headlong. Given the evidence that we have, where is the data that it is not happening?

rbecker 6y ago
Before listing those two anecdotes, did you check that there's not also a large amount of similar incidents victimizing whites? And then compared the amounts? Or did you simply see it on the news, and assumed it was representative of a larger trend, just like someone watching Fox would assume blacks are more likely to be criminal, because (I'm assuming) the crimes Fox chooses to report on feature black perpetrators? Wouldn't it be better to rely on statistics, rather than cherry-picked anecdotes? For example, the number killed by police, normalized to some difficult to fudge measure of crime incidence, such as the homicide rate? How do those two examples measure up against the 406 whites and 259 blacks killed by police in 2019 [1]? [1] https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Well, black people constitute ~13% of the population versus white people's 73%. So there should be almost 6x as many white people, or ~1,500, killed by police as black people. Police brutality is a leading cause of deaths among young men, but especially so for young black men: > Among men of all races, ages 25 to 29, police killings are the sixth-leading cause of death, according to a study led by Frank Edwards of Rutgers University, with a total annual mortality risk of 1.8 deaths per 100,000 people. Accidental death, a category that includes automotive accidents and drug overdoses, was the biggest cause at 76.6 deaths per 100,000, and followed by suicide (26.7), other homicides (22.0), heart disease (7.0), and cancer (6.3). > [...] > For a black man, the risk of being killed by a police officer is about 2.5 times higher than that of a white man. “Our models predict that about 1 in 1,000 black men and boys will be killed by police over the life course,” the authors write. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/08/police-shootings-are-leading-cause-death-young-american-men-new-research-shows/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/08/police-sh... There are plenty of statistics if you look for them. Which is why, in my mind, the onus is on skeptics to prove that police brutality does not especially affect the black population.
  - rbecker 6y ago
    > black people constitute ~13% of the population versus white people's 73% https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends looks at whites and Hispanics separately. Non-hispanic whites are only 60% of US population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... You also failed to normalize to the crime rate. That kind of analysis would lead you to conclude that the police are shockingly biased against males, to a far, far greater degree than against blacks.

rbecker 6y ago

Before listing those two anecdotes, did you check that there's not also a large amount of similar incidents victimizing whites? And then compared the amounts? Or did you simply see it on the news, and assumed it was representative of a larger trend, just like someone watching Fox would assume blacks are more likely to be criminal, because (I'm assuming) the crimes Fox chooses to report on feature black perpetrators? Wouldn't it be better to rely on statistics, rather than cherry-picked anecdotes? For example, the number killed by police, normalized to some difficult to fudge measure of crime incidence, such as the homicide rate? How do those two examples measure up against the 406 whites and 259 blacks killed by police in 2019 [1]? [1] https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

faitswulff 6y ago
Well, black people constitute ~13% of the population versus white people's 73%. So there should be almost 6x as many white people, or ~1,500, killed by police as black people. Police brutality is a leading cause of deaths among young men, but especially so for young black men: > Among men of all races, ages 25 to 29, police killings are the sixth-leading cause of death, according to a study led by Frank Edwards of Rutgers University, with a total annual mortality risk of 1.8 deaths per 100,000 people. Accidental death, a category that includes automotive accidents and drug overdoses, was the biggest cause at 76.6 deaths per 100,000, and followed by suicide (26.7), other homicides (22.0), heart disease (7.0), and cancer (6.3). > [...] > For a black man, the risk of being killed by a police officer is about 2.5 times higher than that of a white man. “Our models predict that about 1 in 1,000 black men and boys will be killed by police over the life course,” the authors write. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/08/police-shootings-are-leading-cause-death-young-american-men-new-research-shows/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/08/police-sh... There are plenty of statistics if you look for them. Which is why, in my mind, the onus is on skeptics to prove that police brutality does not especially affect the black population.
- rbecker 6y ago
  > black people constitute ~13% of the population versus white people's 73% https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends looks at whites and Hispanics separately. Non-hispanic whites are only 60% of US population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... You also failed to normalize to the crime rate. That kind of analysis would lead you to conclude that the police are shockingly biased against males, to a far, far greater degree than against blacks.