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Comment by TheGrim999 | Hacker News Reader

I know this will be hard to accept, but no matter how many people tell me that minorities are being killed because of the color of their skin, I've noticed that not a single one of these people ever include any facts or data to back up that claim.

Sure, black people are killed by police. So are white people. So are people of every race. All the actual data I've seen is that black people are killed less frequently, in proportion to the violent crime they commit than white people are.

I believe your thought process is no more than a mind virus, a viral meme, that's wrapped up in emotion and pushed as hard as possible for political gain.

There's plenty of videos of white people being killed by police that you all just ignore. You don't look at the actual data or think critically, you're just driven by emotion and group think.

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You've brought exactly as many sources to bear in this conversation as the parent you've replied to, which is to say, none. When admonishing others for their lack of sources and making a counterclaim, you may want to consider providing the source yourself.

As for sources of evidence suggesting disproportionate use of force against black persons, here's one to consider:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black. Additionally, black individuals were unarmed when fatally shot more frequently than white persons.

>Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black.

That depends on what you take as a baseline. I would assume that police shootings mostly happen in response to violent behavior. I couldn't find any data on the violent behavior, however there is an open FBI dataset on homicide offenders by race [0].

If you assume a correlation between the number of homicide offenders and the general probability of violent behavior, it could very much explain the disproportion you pointed out.

[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The table you linked is a little confusing because it's focused on the murders, but the offenders are more relevant to your point. It also excludes a lot of murders where information about the offender is missing, so the overall numbers seem too low.

The following table is more relevant:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

And here's the one from 2018:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

So your point stands: when you talk about "disproportionate", you need a baseline. If you choose the proportion of the general population as a baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts blacks. But if you choose the proportion of known murderers as the baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts whites.

Note that there is a subtlety here: the baseline ratio is simply a ratio to use as a comparison point. I am in no way implying that all people killed by police are known murderers. Nor am I saying the ratio of known murderers necessarily extrapolate to the number of justifiable-use-of-force incidents.

EDIT: I am really just saying the baseline expectation matters, and that the general population is not the only meaningful baseline. I am not saying which baseline is the "right" one. That depends on which specific policy you are considering.

I think the GP would use your source to prove his point as well. An absolute disparity of 2.8x but it does not consider the level of violent crime a particular racial category commits.

Your source also suggests unarmed white people are nearly twice as likely to be shot than unarmed Hispanics. Doesn't that contradict the narrative of racist motive by white police?

I have to wonder how many people were killed by police. Was it 100 or 10,000? The difference in magnitude could see these racial biases diminish or worsen.

If you go to the WaPo database:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

And select 2018, you'll see a total of 991 people killed by police. If you also filter by race, you'll see that 229 were black and 454 were white. I'm using 2018 because it's the most recent year with good FBI stats to compare to.

According to the FBI, were 14123 murders in 2018:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

For blacks and whites, it looks like most murder victims are killed by a member of their own race:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

That table is excluding a lot of cases where there is missing information (that's why the numbers don't add up to 14123). It shows 2600 blacks were murdered by blacks out of 6570 murders with enough information to be included in the table. If you were to extrapolate to 14123 total murders, then you would estimate 5589 blacks were murdered by blacks in 2018; and 5754 whites were murdered by other whites in 2018.

That means blacks in 2018 were over 20 times as likely to be murdered by another black as to be killed (justifiably or not) by a police officer (black or white). Whites are about 13 times as likely to be murdered by another white as killed by a police officer. Note that "white" include latino in these numbers, but it doesn't look like the number of latino murders is high enough to have a major impact on the overall analysis (though feel free to dig in to that as well).

I'm not passing any value judgement here, but the data do seem to paint a different picture than the simplistic view of a racist police system. I conjecture (and am open to evidence that supports or refutes this claim) that the vast majority of problems blacks face in the U.S. happen long before risky police encounters, so police reform is unlikely to be very impactful by itself. In fact, there is a major risk that it will be counterproductive, if reform causes police departments to be less effective at their jobs and allow criminals to do far more damage.

Police brutality is one problem.

Systematic racism and segregation is another problem.

The first problem exacerbates the second. We have to fix both.

> There's plenty of videos of white people being killed by police that you all just ignore.

Two perfect examples are the videos of Daniel Leetin Shaver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc) and Tony Timpa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X4PUwrq8tA).

Ending qualified immunity, no-knock warrants, civil asset forfeiture, over-criminalization, mandatory minimums and militarization of police are not race specific issues. They affect all Americans.

I too was fooled by this mind virus until I got curious recently and looked at the stats. I was surprised at what I found and I felt played. The whole thing is a massive lie, and a highly successful manipulation by groups with radical agendas, and the well-meaning masses that they have managed to zombify.

I’ve noticed that, in defending your previous claim that affirmative action is as racist as it’s possible to be, you’ve chosen to dispute that police killings of black people are racist, but you’ve chosen to ignore legalized slavery. genocide, lynchings, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, WW2 interment, etc.

Affirmative action absolutely could be construed as racist, and one can reasonably debate whether it’s ethical or effective, but regardless, it’s nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be.

(I left the Holocaust out of the list above because I bet you’d reply either that there is insufficient evidence that it happened or that it wasn’t racist per se.)

Surprisingly little data in this post complaining about not seeing data.

From former Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. who is an expert in this area:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2807729

"in proportion to the violent crime they commit"

This comes across as tone deaf when people are talking about victims who were not committing violent crimes. For example, allegedly passing a counterfeit $20.

Furthermore, the violent crime statistics exist in the context of people not being able to trust the police, and to the extent they do, the police not doing anything in response to shootings.

So it's easy to see a causal relationship between police misconduct and the prevalence of violent crime in certain communities. People are trying to penetrate the mindset that it's intrinsic, and say, no, police corruption systematically produces the problem and racism saps the motivation to solve it.

I was just noticing that my Google News feed is reporting local shootings, seemingly in a different world than the rest of the news, but it's quoting the police response as basically saying "gee, we have no leads, we wish people would stop settling their disagreements with violence". With the most charitable interpretation, it's ineffectual and lends support to people saying "gee, why don't we just defund the police in favor of social workers".

This is ridiculous trying to pin the prevalence of violent crime in some communities as the fault of the police. What evidence supports this?

Maybe you can say that violent crime is an offshoot of poverty, but a lot of poor communities don't have the same violent crime as others..so that's tenuous at best.

The big experiment would be to reduce the poverty of all groups and see what happens to violent crime, maybe then we don't need police and can have un-armed social workers. But until then, the correlation is community with high violence...incites violence from police, suspicion is then generated against that group. Simple statistics.

Well, I wrote a comment and then I decided to delete it and start over, rereading what you wrote and studying it.

First you say it's ridiculous to blame the police.

Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.

Then you propose the experiment of reducing poverty.

But you don't believe that's the cause! And I don't either. So it seems to me like you're not providing an alternative hypothesis to blaming the police.

I think in order to select evidence, two alternative hypotheses are a pre-requisite. And if you think the one is "ridiculous", then it implies you have another one. You just haven't stated it so I am aware.

Also, your last two sentences really bother me, despite being far from an expert in statistics. Do you think it's reasonable to say that correlation is symmetric, while causality is not? And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility? It doesn't seem to me like the answer is simple or purely a matter of statistics.

>And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility

Not sure exactly what you mean here.

>Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.

I don't necessarily doubt it, but I find it curious that there is not a universal poverty == violence.

I think reducing poverty is more of a solution than blaming the police, I apologize if I wasn't as clear with my statement on poverty.

My hypothesis is something like this: I doubt police cause violence in communities (except perhaps violence against police). There seems to be a correlation with poverty and violence, it's not universal. Picking a group based on skin color and saying "we reduce this poverty and not other kinds" is fairly immoral, therefore the experiment is to flatten the problem of poverty and control to see if there are spikes of violence across this flat plane and to see in which communities it occurs. That would help to isolate a potential root cause of violence. Other experiments could be done.

I'm pretty sure the causality is baked into most people not being an expert in statistic, hence "simple" statistics. If the police are running a really basic pattern matching algo, the line between correlation and causation may not be perpendicular. What I mean is that if the situation on the ground "community A has % higher violence" then in situations interacting with A implies higher chance of % violence. The causality is reached because of the simple understanding. At least that's my take.

Logic and experience lead me to have an appreciation for how harmful and painful catch-22 or double-bind situations are.

When people are vocally backing the police at times like these, then I think it's obvious they are empathizing viscerally with the police who are subject to no-win situations, so they have that capacity for empathy.

But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions.

Have you ever been, in some sense, punished by someone with power or leverage over you, because you were less than trusting, and that made them distrustful or fearful of you? I tend to think this is common, whether or not it's exactly a conscious preoccupation for most.

There are things you can't explain, you have to demonstrate and/or experience.

"But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions."

How would you explain people who empathize strongly with the images that we've all seen on TV... but then look at the numbers a week later and realize that the narrative of police violence against blacks is highly misleading.

I haven't been watching TV for ages, but I've had interactions with the police over the years that demonstrate the difficulties that come with a lack of trust on both sides.

There doesn't have to be a specific amount of violence in order to prevent dialogue and trust in a community. It's much more significant where and how it's applied. When people are punished for trusting in the authorities, then it's a huge multiplier of the criminal activity that the authorities then blame on the community.

I recently learned something interesting about corruption in my state, not directly related to the police, but about how corrosive it is when people are punished for trusting the system. In NYC, rent is regulated in various ways. One thing is that, if a landlord wants to raise rent, they can justify it with a certain dollar amount of renovations, but they may fraudulently inflate that amount. If you are a victim of that and about to be evicted because your rent was doubled, then you can sue in housing court. However, whether or not you have a good case and win, it will be on record that you sued and the authorities subsequently sell access to the data to interested parties, which means, essentially, that if you exercise your rights you will be put on a blacklist and it will be difficult going on impossible to rent anywhere. Now, this sounds like some activist's tendentious characterization, but this idea that the government effectively runs a blacklist came from court documents. The courts are cognizant this is how the system works, and to some extent they try to compensate for it, by for instance granting injunctions to stop eviction early on.

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