> That is what the data shows, plain and simple. I'm not really interested in quibbling over vague claims that racism has little or nothing to do with it, as th

> That is what the data shows, plain and simple. I'm not really interested in quibbling over vague claims that racism has little or nothing to do with it, as that's clearly false. I understand why it feels that way, but all this data does is show correlation. As soon as you attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions about causation, the data is lacking. I think the focus on racism is detrimental to the truth because it forces a feedback loop: we're tracking the race of victims of police shootings so that we can show more correlation that feeds back into the same narrative that racism is the problem. There's no data that shows poverty level, education level, etc. in these shooting statistics. If being poor increased your chances of being shot by the police, it would certainly explain the numbers, but since we're only interested in the race variable, we'll never know.