5 ms·

> Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense. This is so true. I've seen polling showing that large numbers

> Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense. This is so true. I've seen polling showing that large numbers of people believe that the number of unarmed black men fatally shot by American police every year is in the "thousands" or even "tens of thousands". And the further to the left the media people consume, the higher they're likely to believe the number is. The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen. Regardless of what you think about racism and police violence, this is a fact. People who think that "thousands" of unarmed black men are killed by police every year are not only numerous, they are wrong - so absurdly, wildly wrong by so many orders of magnitude that if you tell tell me that the number is in the thousands, I'm going to assume you're deeply uninformed on many other things, not just this one number. Yet in the current climate I'd be afraid to even correct people on this enormous, inarguable factual innaccuracy. (And good luck explaining to people that "unarmed" isn't synonymous with "innocent" - you can be unarmed and still give a cop a good reason to shoot you, for example by attacking the cop with your fists.) Is it really too much to ask that we leave this stuff out of the workplace?

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I upvoted you because I don't think you should be downvoted for expressing your opinion. But I also think we should wonder: how many white armed men were killed?
- yerwhat01010 5y ago
  Did I express an opinion? I'm pretty sure I just quoted a statistic. But since you asked: American police kill white men (including unarmed white men) at the same rate at which they kill black men, once you control for crime rate and poverty. But police killings of white men don't become national news. Tony Timpa died in near-identical circumstances to George Floyd. Ask yourself why you haven't heard of him. Or Ryan Whitaker, or Daniel Shaver. (Does the overrepresentation of black men among criminals and the poor have anything to do with racism? Obviously it does, and I'm happy to discuss it in good faith. But I've probably derailed the thread enough already.)
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    This is why I don't think you should be downvoted. As long as you express something in a civil way, you should be able to do it without repercussion. And you did.
    - yerwhat01010 5y ago
      Thanks. > As long as you express something in a civil way, you should be able to do it without repercussion. To get back the original topic of the thread: an increasing problem in our workplaces is that lots of people don't think this way. And maybe I'm wrong, but the impression I get is that those people are overwhemingly of a particular political persuasion. It's not even "left wing" but a specific type of ultra-leftism. The word "woke" has so much baggage but I'm not aware of a better label. It's impossible to have a good-faith discussion with these people. Any disagreement is immediately met with mind-reading accusations of bigotry. Professional and personal consequences are likely to follow, which I suppose is consistent: if I sincerely believed that someone was a literal white supremacist, I wouldn't want them in my company either. I don't know how things are internally at Coinbase or Basecamp, but I can sympathise with the general idea of their "no politics at work" policies. There are better and worse ways you can implement such a policy - some of the objections I've heard are totally fair, e.g. gay men saying "since gay marriage is a political issue, does this mean I'm not allowed to mention at work the fact that I have a husband?" I'm straight, but I wouldn't want to work at a place where gay people feel like they have to keep their sexuality a secret. But it's not always that clear-cut. Coinbase's initial "no politics at work" announcement said something like "we can all agree that something is a problem while disagreeing on the best way to solve it", and that's the key thing I think we're losing. You can believe that black lives matter without supporting the organisation called Black Lives Matter. You can oppose racism without agreeing with the policy prescriptions of Ibram Kendi (and there are black intellectuals who make such a case, e.g. Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter.) Maybe I'm wrong, and I don't claim to be an expert on any political issue, racism included. But can we at least have this discussion without my being called a white supremacist? To quote a famous victim of police violence: can't we all just get along? And if that really isn't possible, maybe we should just all shut the fuck up and stick to writing code. Really I think this is a symptom of a deeper rot within our political instutitions. In a more perfect world, we'd all be content to keep politics out of the workplace because it wouldn't be necessary: we'd be able to satisfy our political needs through the structures that are specifically in place to do so. If workplaces are being hyper-politicised, something is going wrong with democracy.
- eyko 5y ago
  The number of white armed men shot by police in 2019 was, according to the Washington Post database[1], between 388 and 398. The number of white unarmed men shot by police in 2019 was 26. According to this source, the number of black unarmed men shot by police in 2019 was not 13, but 12. The number of armed black men shot by police was 240, possibly 241. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    This is why spouting stats to make a point is dangerous, murky water. Tread carefully. Stats can give us quantitative views but give no opinion on the qualitative view.
    - dcx 5y ago
      I agree - interpretation is super important. The above is a good example; someone who isn’t paying attention might not take into account that there are 5-6x the number of white vs black people in the US, which puts a very different spin on the raw figures.
      - esyir 5y ago
        Then normalise for crime rates. Ah, the wonders of slicing and dicing a dataset.
        Flozzin 5y ago
        Yes. And crime and poverty is related. Also, when more crime occur, police tend to congregate. So if police are pulling people over for minor traffic violations, and then discovering drugs, the 'crime' rate goes up. This then exacerbates the stats. My point is, pure stats should never be the only source of information. One may not think the police are racist, and instead think that crime and poverty are related. But over policing of the poor doesn't magically make them wealthy. The policing issue in the US is complicated.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yerwhat01010 5y ago
(Someone commented that it's "insane" to say that you should be able to shoot someone if they attack you with their fists and I typed out a long reply, but they had deleted their comment before I could post it, so I'm going to post my reply here so I don't feel like I wasted my efforts) Yes, it absolutely is a valid reason to shoot someone, and anyone with training in firearms or self-defense would agree. You're not necessarily going to get shot for throwing a single punch, but you're increasing your chances of getting shot exponentially. First of all, a fist can be a deadly weapon. It's possible to kill someone with a single punch, or knock them unconscious, or do all manner of nasty and permanent damage. Cops know this, as does anyone who knows anything about violence. And this is crucial: every interaction you have with a cop in the US is colored by the fact that the cop has a gun on his waist. If you attack a cop with any kind of weapon, you've demonstrated that you're willing to use violence against him, and he has no way of knowing how far you're willing to take it. What if you get your hands on his gun? He knows that a single punch might be enough to disable him, even temporarily, and even a second's delay might be enough for you to grab his gun - and then he's fucked. Cops don't carry guns for the exclusive purpose of stopping other people with guns. The point of a gun is to make someone stop doing what they're doing, and sometimes you really need someone to stop doing what what they're doing, no matter what they're armed with. We can't expect cops to be champion bare-knuckle boxers: if someone's attacking you with their fists, they're potentially threatening your life, and it's not unreasonable to use whatever tools are at your disposal to neutralise the threat. Again: this doesn't mean that every use of fists should immediately be met with a death sentence. My point is just that guns can in some (not all) circumstances be a legitimate response to fists. And on the more general point, that's not the only case in which it's justifiable for an unarmed person to be shot. In some cases of "unarmed" men being shot by police, the perp was trying to ram the cops with his car. Conversely, not every case of an "armed" man being shot by police is justified either. Philando Castile had a gun in his car, but he didn't deserve to die.
- twic 5y ago
  This reflects a peculiarly American perspective. This is now how the police operate in other countries. It is now how they should operate in the US.
sharikone 5y ago
In things like that I think that more scientific-oriented workplaces would not create this fear. People with a hard science background respect factual information. And also the ethical implications of shooting 13 unarmed people in a year can still be a subject of debate.
zuminator 5y ago
"The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen." I think you mean, the reported number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen. (But surely we've learned that police reports are not necessarily completely accurate.) And I think that some people believe that a suspect's being armed is not justification for summary execution, barring extraordinary circumstances, so in their minds the caveat of "unarmed" is a distinction without a difference. Therefore they might be more concerned with the total reported number of black persons shot dead by American police, which is 235. As long as we're on that subject, here's an interesting (albeit somewhat misleading) fact I discovered that I haven't seen cited anywhere else. While 235 fatal shootings by officers doesn't seem like a huge number compared with the total population, consider that there were about 697,195 police officers in the US in 2019, meaning that each officer had a 1/2967 chance of killing a black person that year. Contrast that with the oft-cited black-on-black murder rate: 7484 blacks were murdered in 2019. Let's (erroneously) assume that every single one was killed by a black male. The total black population in 2019 was 46.8 million, 48% of them male which comes to 22.4 million black males. So the chances of a black male murdering another black person is only 1/2933. That's right, a random police officer is very slightly more likely to have killed a black person than a random black male is likely to have killed a black person. So if it's true that blacks ought to fear other black males, then the fear that some black people have of police officers as a class might be correspondingly justified.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tomjen3 5y ago
If this was really a fact, surely you have a source for it? Because if you are the one out of a group who comes up with a number drastically out of what other people estimate, it seems reasonable to assume you are the one who are in the wrong. And of course unarmed doesn't mean innocent anymore than being armed means being in the wrong. I am challenging you to a source for two reasons: to make sure you are not just making the number up, and because I want to see what the source defines as being unarmed and how they determine that.
- yerwhat01010 5y ago
  The Washington Post keeps a database of all reported police killings in the US. I can't see it myself without a subscription to the WP, but USA Today cites the WP database for the claim that 13 unarmed black men (and one unarmed black woman) were fatally shot by US police in 2019: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fact-check-how-many-unarmed-black-men-did-police-kill-2019/5322455002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fact... That's only the number who were shot dead by the police, not all police killings (George Floyd wasn't shot.) Also, as the USA Today article says, this data isn't 100% reliable, because the WP can only track reported police killings, and some might be unreported. But dude, I could be off by an order of magnitude and still not be close to "thousands". American police kill about 1000 people per year of all races (armed and unarmed, justified and unjustifiable); anyone who thinks that thousands of unarmed black men are killed by the police every year has no idea what they're talking about. > And of course unarmed doesn't mean innocent anymore than being armed means being in the wrong. Yep, and I already said the same in another comment. Not all shootings of an "armed" man are justified. I'll give a name: Philando Castile had a gun in his possession when he was shot dead by police officer Jeronimo Yanez. But, in my non-expert opinion, Castile did not do anything that warranted deadly force, and this shooting was absolutely unjustified.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I upvoted you because I don't think you should be downvoted for expressing your opinion. But I also think we should wonder: how many white armed men were killed?

yerwhat01010 5y ago
Did I express an opinion? I'm pretty sure I just quoted a statistic. But since you asked: American police kill white men (including unarmed white men) at the same rate at which they kill black men, once you control for crime rate and poverty. But police killings of white men don't become national news. Tony Timpa died in near-identical circumstances to George Floyd. Ask yourself why you haven't heard of him. Or Ryan Whitaker, or Daniel Shaver. (Does the overrepresentation of black men among criminals and the poor have anything to do with racism? Obviously it does, and I'm happy to discuss it in good faith. But I've probably derailed the thread enough already.)
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  This is why I don't think you should be downvoted. As long as you express something in a civil way, you should be able to do it without repercussion. And you did.
  - yerwhat01010 5y ago
    Thanks. > As long as you express something in a civil way, you should be able to do it without repercussion. To get back the original topic of the thread: an increasing problem in our workplaces is that lots of people don't think this way. And maybe I'm wrong, but the impression I get is that those people are overwhemingly of a particular political persuasion. It's not even "left wing" but a specific type of ultra-leftism. The word "woke" has so much baggage but I'm not aware of a better label. It's impossible to have a good-faith discussion with these people. Any disagreement is immediately met with mind-reading accusations of bigotry. Professional and personal consequences are likely to follow, which I suppose is consistent: if I sincerely believed that someone was a literal white supremacist, I wouldn't want them in my company either. I don't know how things are internally at Coinbase or Basecamp, but I can sympathise with the general idea of their "no politics at work" policies. There are better and worse ways you can implement such a policy - some of the objections I've heard are totally fair, e.g. gay men saying "since gay marriage is a political issue, does this mean I'm not allowed to mention at work the fact that I have a husband?" I'm straight, but I wouldn't want to work at a place where gay people feel like they have to keep their sexuality a secret. But it's not always that clear-cut. Coinbase's initial "no politics at work" announcement said something like "we can all agree that something is a problem while disagreeing on the best way to solve it", and that's the key thing I think we're losing. You can believe that black lives matter without supporting the organisation called Black Lives Matter. You can oppose racism without agreeing with the policy prescriptions of Ibram Kendi (and there are black intellectuals who make such a case, e.g. Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter.) Maybe I'm wrong, and I don't claim to be an expert on any political issue, racism included. But can we at least have this discussion without my being called a white supremacist? To quote a famous victim of police violence: can't we all just get along? And if that really isn't possible, maybe we should just all shut the fuck up and stick to writing code. Really I think this is a symptom of a deeper rot within our political instutitions. In a more perfect world, we'd all be content to keep politics out of the workplace because it wouldn't be necessary: we'd be able to satisfy our political needs through the structures that are specifically in place to do so. If workplaces are being hyper-politicised, something is going wrong with democracy.
eyko 5y ago
The number of white armed men shot by police in 2019 was, according to the Washington Post database[1], between 388 and 398. The number of white unarmed men shot by police in 2019 was 26. According to this source, the number of black unarmed men shot by police in 2019 was not 13, but 12. The number of armed black men shot by police was 240, possibly 241. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  This is why spouting stats to make a point is dangerous, murky water. Tread carefully. Stats can give us quantitative views but give no opinion on the qualitative view.
  - dcx 5y ago
    I agree - interpretation is super important. The above is a good example; someone who isn’t paying attention might not take into account that there are 5-6x the number of white vs black people in the US, which puts a very different spin on the raw figures.
    - esyir 5y ago
      Then normalise for crime rates. Ah, the wonders of slicing and dicing a dataset.
      - Flozzin 5y ago
        Yes. And crime and poverty is related. Also, when more crime occur, police tend to congregate. So if police are pulling people over for minor traffic violations, and then discovering drugs, the 'crime' rate goes up. This then exacerbates the stats. My point is, pure stats should never be the only source of information. One may not think the police are racist, and instead think that crime and poverty are related. But over policing of the poor doesn't magically make them wealthy. The policing issue in the US is complicated.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yerwhat01010 5y ago

(Someone commented that it's "insane" to say that you should be able to shoot someone if they attack you with their fists and I typed out a long reply, but they had deleted their comment before I could post it, so I'm going to post my reply here so I don't feel like I wasted my efforts) Yes, it absolutely is a valid reason to shoot someone, and anyone with training in firearms or self-defense would agree. You're not necessarily going to get shot for throwing a single punch, but you're increasing your chances of getting shot exponentially. First of all, a fist can be a deadly weapon. It's possible to kill someone with a single punch, or knock them unconscious, or do all manner of nasty and permanent damage. Cops know this, as does anyone who knows anything about violence. And this is crucial: every interaction you have with a cop in the US is colored by the fact that the cop has a gun on his waist. If you attack a cop with any kind of weapon, you've demonstrated that you're willing to use violence against him, and he has no way of knowing how far you're willing to take it. What if you get your hands on his gun? He knows that a single punch might be enough to disable him, even temporarily, and even a second's delay might be enough for you to grab his gun - and then he's fucked. Cops don't carry guns for the exclusive purpose of stopping other people with guns. The point of a gun is to make someone stop doing what they're doing, and sometimes you really need someone to stop doing what what they're doing, no matter what they're armed with. We can't expect cops to be champion bare-knuckle boxers: if someone's attacking you with their fists, they're potentially threatening your life, and it's not unreasonable to use whatever tools are at your disposal to neutralise the threat. Again: this doesn't mean that every use of fists should immediately be met with a death sentence. My point is just that guns can in some (not all) circumstances be a legitimate response to fists. And on the more general point, that's not the only case in which it's justifiable for an unarmed person to be shot. In some cases of "unarmed" men being shot by police, the perp was trying to ram the cops with his car. Conversely, not every case of an "armed" man being shot by police is justified either. Philando Castile had a gun in his car, but he didn't deserve to die.

twic 5y ago
This reflects a peculiarly American perspective. This is now how the police operate in other countries. It is now how they should operate in the US.

sharikone 5y ago

In things like that I think that more scientific-oriented workplaces would not create this fear. People with a hard science background respect factual information. And also the ethical implications of shooting 13 unarmed people in a year can still be a subject of debate.

zuminator 5y ago

"The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen." I think you mean, the reported number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen. (But surely we've learned that police reports are not necessarily completely accurate.) And I think that some people believe that a suspect's being armed is not justification for summary execution, barring extraordinary circumstances, so in their minds the caveat of "unarmed" is a distinction without a difference. Therefore they might be more concerned with the total reported number of black persons shot dead by American police, which is 235. As long as we're on that subject, here's an interesting (albeit somewhat misleading) fact I discovered that I haven't seen cited anywhere else. While 235 fatal shootings by officers doesn't seem like a huge number compared with the total population, consider that there were about 697,195 police officers in the US in 2019, meaning that each officer had a 1/2967 chance of killing a black person that year. Contrast that with the oft-cited black-on-black murder rate: 7484 blacks were murdered in 2019. Let's (erroneously) assume that every single one was killed by a black male. The total black population in 2019 was 46.8 million, 48% of them male which comes to 22.4 million black males. So the chances of a black male murdering another black person is only 1/2933. That's right, a random police officer is very slightly more likely to have killed a black person than a random black male is likely to have killed a black person. So if it's true that blacks ought to fear other black males, then the fear that some black people have of police officers as a class might be correspondingly justified.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tomjen3 5y ago

If this was really a fact, surely you have a source for it? Because if you are the one out of a group who comes up with a number drastically out of what other people estimate, it seems reasonable to assume you are the one who are in the wrong. And of course unarmed doesn't mean innocent anymore than being armed means being in the wrong. I am challenging you to a source for two reasons: to make sure you are not just making the number up, and because I want to see what the source defines as being unarmed and how they determine that.

yerwhat01010 5y ago
The Washington Post keeps a database of all reported police killings in the US. I can't see it myself without a subscription to the WP, but USA Today cites the WP database for the claim that 13 unarmed black men (and one unarmed black woman) were fatally shot by US police in 2019: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fact-check-how-many-unarmed-black-men-did-police-kill-2019/5322455002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fact... That's only the number who were shot dead by the police, not all police killings (George Floyd wasn't shot.) Also, as the USA Today article says, this data isn't 100% reliable, because the WP can only track reported police killings, and some might be unreported. But dude, I could be off by an order of magnitude and still not be close to "thousands". American police kill about 1000 people per year of all races (armed and unarmed, justified and unjustifiable); anyone who thinks that thousands of unarmed black men are killed by the police every year has no idea what they're talking about. > And of course unarmed doesn't mean innocent anymore than being armed means being in the wrong. Yep, and I already said the same in another comment. Not all shootings of an "armed" man are justified. I'll give a name: Philando Castile had a gun in his possession when he was shot dead by police officer Jeronimo Yanez. But, in my non-expert opinion, Castile did not do anything that warranted deadly force, and this shooting was absolutely unjustified.