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It's quite hard to come up with reliable statistics for police killings in the US. It's not that deaths aren't counted, it's that they're misclassified. > Feld
by roywiggins 6y ago
It's quite hard to come up with reliable statistics for police killings in the US. It's not that deaths aren't counted, it's that they're misclassified.
> Feldman used data from the Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). That dataset, which is kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was found to have misclassified 55.2% of all police killings, with the errors occurring disproportionately in low-income jurisdictions.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/11/police-killings-counted-harvard-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/11/police-killi...
- beaner 6y agoSeems hard to make an argument either for or against racial disparities in police shootings then, if the data is unreliable. In which case the answer is to not make assumptions, but collect better data. A lot of people seem to take the approach of: the data's good if it says what I want; if it doesn't, it's probably wrong.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- roywiggins 6y agoHard doesn't mean impossible. There's been a lot of good reporting on this in the last half-decade. But it's required sustained effort from journalists, and insofar as statistics are getting better, it's not because the US has become more first-worldier than it was.
- beaner 6y agoAny argument becomes easier if you're willing to dismiss data to base it on.