Hacker News Reader

Comment by Foxheart | Hacker News Reader

"... and Black folk are still much more likely to die during police interventions."

Care to link to a source?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the stats say the opposite is true, but it really depends who's using the statistics to paint _their_ picture.

In this study run by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, it was found that African-Americans are 20% less likely to be shot and proportionally more likely to see use-of-force against them.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399

I didn't find anything unbiased in my quick search on "likelihood of death during interaction."

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

From Significance, right at the top: "(...) Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men."

The fact is that police shootings of unarmed African-Americans are still only 0.1% of all African-Americans killed. There are studies that find that no racial differences in lethal uses of force: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf

I try to do my best to assume good faith, but sometimes comments like this make it really hard.

In any case, here's two links. One's from Drexel University, the other is a meta-composition of resources by an organization connected to the Kennedy School at Harvard. Educate yourself.

[1] https://drexel.edu/now/archive/2016/December/Black-Men-3-tim...

[2] https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-...

I don't know if it's one of the studies you linked to, but I read a study a week ago that showed that black men were 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a cop, but 2.1 more likely to kill a cop (compared to whites).

The reason why this is contentious is because it relies on how you are defining 'a police intervention.' Very few people I see debating this issue dispute that blacks are killed at 2.5x the right whites are by the police. What they dispute is that this disparity exists because of police officer bias, and they point to differing crime and geographic factors that cause the disparity. In that case, blacks and whites might be shot at the same right within the context of a given police interaction, but what that specific context is and the frequency of that context between black and white populations differs.

The 2.5x number isn't really disputed, it is the reason for it & the policy that is proposed because of it that is contentious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com