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Comment by dirtnugget | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering how one could be so bad at estimating weight.

But yes, it’s a lot.

I would be really surprised if they estimated this poorly and would guess they were just irritated by him and decided to up the dose as punishment. If I am wrong then they receive zero training when estimating weight and multiple officers are terrible at it. To mistakenly confuse a 140lb for 220lb is poor judgement to the point that it strains credulity.

FWIW: My wife work in health care and just a couple of months or so told me how difficult it can be to estimate the weight of a person. She had recently seen some pictures with examples of persons and their actual weights and it had surprised even her.

It doesn't strain credulity for me. Most descriptions of the black victims of police brutality by law enforcement inflate them to a monstrous size, and use animal metaphors to describe their terrifying faces.

Never underestimate the degree to which racism is driven by actual, irrational terror.

There are actually documented cases of police officers in the early 20th century requesting heavier calibers and hotter loads from gun manufacturers because they believed their firearms were incapable of stopping an enraged <slur deleted>.

Biologically, this is utter nonsense. But the belief that black people are tougher, stronger, and more capable of withstanding pain and drugs is a surprisingly common belief. Doctors are notorious for downgrading black pain in clinical situations as compared to white patients, and administer less pain killers.

The uncomfortable truth is that authorities regularly misidentify black men as being bigger/taller/older/darker than they actually are. Whether that's an issue specific to police indoctrination or to American culture in general, it's clearly part of what happened here.

Apologies to the HN users who will be incensed at the notion of race playing a role in this situation.

> Apologies to the HN users who will be incensed at the notion of race playing a role in this situation.

No apologies necessary, receiving a dose of reality is good for them.

So true.

Even today a common misconception among white doctors is that black people have thicker skin than white people or even that their nerv endings are less sensitive.

https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patient...

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, cops in the early 20th century requested larger calibers and hotter loads from gun manufacturers because they believed black people survived gun shots better than white people.

How do you estimate the weight of a person?

I know how much I weigh, but I don't know how much anyone else weighs. I guess some other people don't even weigh themselves so don't even know how much they weigh.

How do you estimate it?

Height + bellysize + muscle size?

Right... how do I get a number from looking at those?

Compare those values to your own weight, and pay attention when you hear someone’s weight to see if it matches your heuristic.

> pay attention when you hear someone’s weight to see if it matches your heuristic

I don't think I've ever heard an adult male ever mention their own weight in public. You can see why it'd be hard to estimate when you don't have any data.

You’ll have to get a job at a county fair running the weight guessing attraction to get enough data. There’s no other way to do it, it’s how we all figured out how to estimate the weight of a human. I’ll call my friend Chucky, he’ll get you a gig in a traveling carnival for the summer.

Or simply any job that requires checking IDs. Bouncer, bartender, cashier in a store that sells alcohol/cigarettes, etc.

Huh, I have never seen weight specified on any ID.

Every US ID and driver's license I've ever seen (and I've seen many) list height and weight.

Watch a fair amount of boxing and practice that way.

> How do you estimate the weight of a person?

Practice. In theory if you're doing this a lot, you should be able do a decent job of estimating +/- 10%, which is more than accurate enough.

There are certainly other complications (some medications are dosed on "ideal body weight" (ignoring subcutaneous fat), etc...)

I'll second this. Climbers tend to get at least half-way decent estimating the weight of other climbers because it's pretty relevant if you're lead belaying somebody.

In fairness, we're usually estimating the weight of people of fairly fit builds, but with some practice estimating people of other builds, I agree that you'd get within 10%.

One more reason to leave drugs to qualified personell.

A very large part of police work is providing and reacting to descriptions of suspects. If there is no training on this provided then this seems to be a very large oversight. Based on the fact that police constantly arrest and harrass people who 'matched the description' perhaps there is no training, or perhaps the officers simply don't care and are just looking for a person that fits their bias.

Police in the U.S. are usually extremely overweight. They might not know that a healthy 5'10 adult should weigh 150 pounds.

That seems like an overly generalised thing to say.

There are FBI reports that say the same thing, referenced here:

https://inpublicsafety.com/2015/01/tackling-the-obesity-epid...

and here:

"FBI: 80 Percent Of Police Officers Are Overweight"

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/08/14/fbi-80-percent-of-police...

Why on earth would you come to challenge something without first checking if its true?

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