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chillwaves

> killing dozens of people

Do you have a citation for that because I have only ever seen research pointing to the opposite.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...

As far as I know, the body count of police killing unarmed black people far outstrips any body count of BLM protests.

> The Post’s data shows police fatally shot 13 unarmed Black men in 2019.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...

> Over the past five years there has been no reduction in the racial disparity in fatal police shooting victims despite increased use of body cameras and closer media scrutiny, according to a new report by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

...

> Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of white people (146 total killed).

https://news.yale.edu/2020/10/27/racial-disparity-police-sho...

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Unfortunately I don't see anyone successfully publishing a study critical of BLM when you can get fired merely for mentioning a past study, as David Shor did[0]. I don't think studies are going to change anyone's mind when the allowed outcomes are politically determined.

We're limited to collections of news stories. The collections seem pretty broad - the criteria is basically "killed during a BLM protest"[1][2]. PolitiFact goes with 12-19 by June[3]. The Guardian counts "at least 25" by October[4]. (I don't have a count for the past three months). This counting of deaths of course opens the door to all kinds of quibbles over which deaths "count", e.g. it's not possible to prove one way or the other whether this woman in Minneapolis[5] would have been raped and killed without the cover of the rioting.

Is this sourcing acceptable to you, or do you really need a proper study?

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/george-floyd-protests-deaths_... [2] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/07/0... [3] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/aug/07/facebook-p... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill... [5] https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/05/29/woman-found-dead-i...

It's a bit tendentious to fail to mention that some of those folks were shot by the police.

I did emphasize the criteria, and it seems reasonable to expect any informed person to already know that there was violence from police, protesters, and counter-protesters. But the Guardian source says "All but one were killed by fellow citizens.", so I didn't find it particularly worth emphasizing that 4%.

One of the pieces you quoted said that two were killed by police.

Which would make it 8%?

How do we know that it’s police racism and not some other factor that correlates with race which drives this disparity? For example, I would expect violent criminal behavior to significantly increase one’s chance of being shot by police, and as I understand it, criminologists pretty much agree that black Americans commit violent crimes at considerably higher rates even than white Americans. And no doubt there are good reasons for why black Americans commit more crimes; legacy of systemic racism and all that, but that doesn’t suggest that they are dying due to police racism, which is the whole BLM thesis (ACAB and so on). Surely we would answer this question decisively and publicly before we would go marching through the streets and burning neighborhoods to the ground (or perhaps for those in the higher social classes, merely cheering on or justifying the violence—perhaps with miscontextualized MLK quotes—on social media)?

> burning neighborhoods to the ground

This kind of hyperbole discredits anything else you would have to say.

I mean, the rest is basically just unmasked racism, so it also discredits itself. So there's that.

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