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I don’t know, the article says people today are just ignoring “the data”, but you can make “the data” support almost any story you want. You can (as this artic

I don’t know, the article says people today are just ignoring “the data”, but you can make “the data” support almost any story you want. You can (as this article does) point to crime statistics and say “see look, black people commit more crimes that’s why they are arrested by the police more”. Or you can say “look, the police are more likely to arrest black people even for minor offenses, which accounts for a difference in arrest statistics.” Same data, different story. I also take issue with how some of the data in the article is presented. It claims with certainty that exactly 17 unarmed black men were killed by the police last year, but data on police shootings are notoriously unreliable. The article doesn’t even address this issue.

bruiseralmighty 5y ago
Not the author, but even if 17 is undercounted, it seemed their argument was more about the perception that the number was closer to 1700; which is patently ridiculous. And the propensity for a single political team to believe that. Or, just as ridiculously, something like 2/3's of republicans believe The Big Lie(tm). Granting that an American election could be stolen, we might put the odds closer to 1%, but there is a perception that it is closer to 99%. I believe what the author is getting at is how far our perceptions our from actual facts on the ground reality. And further what is concerning that most people who are aware of this don't even seem to mind. Personally, I'm not sure what else we would expect, apes gotta have faith in something after all.
JPKab 5y ago
The issue isn't whether this number is precisely correct, it's that there is simply no concerted effort by the activists to pursue it. Just like how advocates for the invasion of Iraq were perfectly happy to allow Americans in 2002 to dramatically inflate their own sense of danger from terrorism, activists have an "ends justify the means" mentality of not being concerned with data unless it supports their cause, independent of whether said data reflects truth. The article links to the Washington Post's database, but a separate project that is run by activists who are relatively data literate is this one: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ I've dug through their dataset, and it's not bad. They tend to be a little too biased in the sense where they default to assuming unarmed or "allegedly armed", assuming that police reports of suspects having a weapon aren't trustworthy, which is understandable, but unscientific. Also, no flag for "resisting arrest". An unspoken reality in these activist circles is that getting killed by police when NOT resisting arrest is a relatively rare event. One of the stark things that stands out when looking through these databases is how the media's narrative bias has made non-Black victims of police shootings invisible. Felons with a violent history who are killed by police while resisting arrest get more media attention if their Black than do Latino victims of police shootings that were completely unjustified. The average HN reader looking at this comment can't name a single Latino person killed by police in the last 5 years. This is absurd and unjust, because there's no way that every Latino killed by cops is done so in a just manner, and without media pressure, the cops who killed them won't be brought to justice. Likewise for the single most horrific police killing I've seen (other than Floyd), Daniel Shaver. The cop who killed him got off with an early retirement and full pension.

bruiseralmighty 5y ago

Not the author, but even if 17 is undercounted, it seemed their argument was more about the perception that the number was closer to 1700; which is patently ridiculous. And the propensity for a single political team to believe that. Or, just as ridiculously, something like 2/3's of republicans believe The Big Lie(tm). Granting that an American election could be stolen, we might put the odds closer to 1%, but there is a perception that it is closer to 99%. I believe what the author is getting at is how far our perceptions our from actual facts on the ground reality. And further what is concerning that most people who are aware of this don't even seem to mind. Personally, I'm not sure what else we would expect, apes gotta have faith in something after all.

JPKab 5y ago

The issue isn't whether this number is precisely correct, it's that there is simply no concerted effort by the activists to pursue it. Just like how advocates for the invasion of Iraq were perfectly happy to allow Americans in 2002 to dramatically inflate their own sense of danger from terrorism, activists have an "ends justify the means" mentality of not being concerned with data unless it supports their cause, independent of whether said data reflects truth. The article links to the Washington Post's database, but a separate project that is run by activists who are relatively data literate is this one: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ I've dug through their dataset, and it's not bad. They tend to be a little too biased in the sense where they default to assuming unarmed or "allegedly armed", assuming that police reports of suspects having a weapon aren't trustworthy, which is understandable, but unscientific. Also, no flag for "resisting arrest". An unspoken reality in these activist circles is that getting killed by police when NOT resisting arrest is a relatively rare event. One of the stark things that stands out when looking through these databases is how the media's narrative bias has made non-Black victims of police shootings invisible. Felons with a violent history who are killed by police while resisting arrest get more media attention if their Black than do Latino victims of police shootings that were completely unjustified. The average HN reader looking at this comment can't name a single Latino person killed by police in the last 5 years. This is absurd and unjust, because there's no way that every Latino killed by cops is done so in a just manner, and without media pressure, the cops who killed them won't be brought to justice. Likewise for the single most horrific police killing I've seen (other than Floyd), Daniel Shaver. The cop who killed him got off with an early retirement and full pension.