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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Edit: misunderstood what was posted, please disregard below comment. Not removing body for reference. See mrow84's comment if like me you are still waking up.

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Downvoted you for picking one sentence in the abstract that misrepresents the whole set of conclusions when taken in isolation.

HNers who are going to the comments first, please read at least the abstract to get a sense for the nuanced results. Example:

The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average.

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I understood that quote as meaning that you couldn't attempt to explain away the racial bias by saying that black people lived in higher-crime areas, and thus were more likely to be shot as a consequence of more intense policing. Perhaps I misunderstood?

How does that misrepresent the whole set of conclusions? It seems to simply explain that the 3.49X probability isn't explainable by localized crime rates...

Logged in for the first time in ages to say the thing that several people have already told you more eloquently than I can -- the top-level commenter was not misrepresenting the conclusions of the paper. The meaning of the quote was not ambiguous to me; they were saying that a 3.49x multiplier to the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is not explained away by any apparent local multiplier to the probability of {high black population, high rates of violent crime}.

OP's quote :

> the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates

actually means that there is racial prejudice, and it cannot be explained away by a higher crime-rate among blacks at the local level.

I would give him the benefit of doubt, and suggest he selected the quote to say just that.

It doesn't mean that there is racial prejudice; it only means that this particular variable doesn't explain away the gap. This does survey does nothing to say how much of the gap (if any) can be attributed to racial prejudice.

It is not clear to me how the parent comment is misrepresenting the conclusions of the article. I interpret that sentence to say "The difference between the shooting of unarmed blacks and whites cannot be explained by differences in crime rates," which makes racism a more likely culprit.

The sentence quoted by OP misrepresents nothing; it supports the idea that this discrepancy is caused by racism.

The observed distribution was just two races. The study never included hispanics, asians, pacific islanders, etc. etc. I suspect the contrast between african descent and hispanic descent would be surprising.

Hispanics were in the study (see the Research Objectives) and have similar results to blacks. They just were not called out in the abstract.

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