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Statistically you are more likely to be the victim of excessive police violence if you are black. That being said, we may get further with this issue if we broa

by api 6y ago

Statistically you are more likely to be the victim of excessive police violence if you are black. That being said, we may get further with this issue if we broaden it and point out that it’s a general problem that affects everyone. I won over a few more right wing people on the George Floyd case by reminding them of the Ruby Ridge case. The circumstances are very different but in the end both cases are about not just unnecessary but seemingly malicious police violence and the difficulty of holding anyone accountable. There is actually one detail that both cases have in common too. George Floyd had a drug problem while Randy Weaver apparently had unsympathetic views on race, and in both cases defenders of the police used these facts to effectively imply that they deserved it. The implication is that only “bad people” get lynched by cops, sort of like “why are you worried about surveillance if you have nothing to hide?”

hirundo 6y ago
It's a lot easier to get good statistics on police violence than on "excessive" police violence, since that's so open to interpretation. Assuming that association also holds for police violence in general, then we have to ask whether black victims tend to be proportionately more violent or threatening than white victims ... another hard statistic to gather. If not, then there's a good argument that racism is involved.
- MikeUt 6y ago
  > we have to ask whether black victims tend to be proportionately more violent or threatening than white victims ... another hard statistic to gather. A closely related statistic has been gathered, on violent crime perpetrators. By the police and FBI, as well as through victim surveys, that don't involve law enforcement, so are immune from bias due to over-policing that is frequently used to justify ignoring those statistics.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  > another hard statistic to gather. It's not that hard. Here are the statistics on police feloniously killed, over the past decade. https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-42.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-42.x...

by api 6y ago

hirundo 6y ago

It's a lot easier to get good statistics on police violence than on "excessive" police violence, since that's so open to interpretation. Assuming that association also holds for police violence in general, then we have to ask whether black victims tend to be proportionately more violent or threatening than white victims ... another hard statistic to gather. If not, then there's a good argument that racism is involved.

MikeUt 6y ago
> we have to ask whether black victims tend to be proportionately more violent or threatening than white victims ... another hard statistic to gather. A closely related statistic has been gathered, on violent crime perpetrators. By the police and FBI, as well as through victim surveys, that don't involve law enforcement, so are immune from bias due to over-policing that is frequently used to justify ignoring those statistics.
SamReidHughes 6y ago
> another hard statistic to gather. It's not that hard. Here are the statistics on police feloniously killed, over the past decade. https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-42.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-42.x...