[austincheney]

Until very recently, and thanks to the likes of The Guardian’s The Counted, Fatal Encounters and Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence, the data to prove the systemic racism that results in the police killings of unarmed black people has not been widely available to the public.

It doesn't sound like, according to the article, the California initiative is to prove racism but rather track, identify, and reduce police initiated violence. Is this the writer's bias?

[dalke]

As you say, it isn't. But the author doesn't say that that's what it's for.

The author describes three stages in collection, from no data, to third-party collections, and now to government collection.

The given Guardian link shows that blacks are twice as likely as whites to be killed, on a per-capita basis. This is consistent with the hypothesis that there is systemic racism, which previously was mostly conjectural due to lack of data. In the Poppler viewpoint, the racism hypothesis made a testable prediction, which was shown to be true.

Beyond that, the question is about what level of evidence is required before you can say here is proof. Some might say this is evidence which supports multiple hypotheses, others might say it's proof.

Still others might use the term "weak proof" when there some supporting evidence which isn't conclusive. For examples, http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-... says "Horoscope is a weak proof of birthdate: Supreme Court" and https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251 says "When compared to injections without steroids, there is weak proof that epidural steroid injections may result in some improvement in radicular lumbosacral pain in the short term, when assessed between two and six weeks after the injection."

Is "weak proof" a type of proof? (Is "dwarf planet" a type of planet?)

In any case, the author shows why data collection can be useful to test a hypothesis, then describes how the State of California will now be collecting the data, but doesn't make the concrete connection that CA will be collecting that data for that specific purpose.

As to the legislative history of the bill, in the summer of 2015 senators Booker and Boxer proposed the PRIDE bill for better nationwide reporting. Booker writes, at https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-... :

> Almost half a century later, tragic events across the country — in New York, Ferguson, North Charleston and Baltimore — have reminded us how critical trust is to the fabric of our democracy. These incidents have raised the public’s awareness and sparked a long overdue national debate about how police and citizens interact and how they should interact.

and how it's hard to act without good data. This shows that PRIDE is coupled to the question of possible influence of racism in how police deal with people.

That's a proposed bill at the federal level. It's not the state bill. The history of CA AB-71 is at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... . That bill started a few months after PRIDE. The analysis for the bill includes specific references to PRIDE. It sounds very much like the same concerns of Booker are also behind AB-71, which includes knowing if there is a systemic racial bias in police initiated violence.

So while the bill doesn't say it outright, the reason for the bill seems to include gathering the information which can help prove (or disprove) systemic racism.

[SomeStupidPoint]

Just for clarification, blacks being shot by police at a rate of 2.5 times that of whites per capita is only evidence of racism if the shootings are random across the entire population.

If the shootings are correlated to, say, the demographics of murderers (which is probably more representative than the population at large), it might actually be evidence of racism against whites -- the number of murders committed per 10,000 people in blacks is about 8 times that of whites, which means if they're dying at only 2.5 times the rate per 10,000 people and the deaths are correlated to the murder rate, the police are killing white people disproportionately often.

I think that a lot of people, such as yourself, are being very dishonest when analyzing the police data because they're analyzing it against total population numbers while ignoring the correlations to crime demographics. Such as the Guardian numbers you cited.

I also think you're being racist. Against white people.

[dalke]

Me. Racist. Against white people. I think you might need more practice at your local comedy club's open mic night.

What I said was, there was a hypothesis, it made a testable prediction, and measurements support that hypothesis. This is sometimes called evidence.

I then pointed out that "proof" is not a simple concept. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(truth) :

> The concept applies in a variety of disciplines,[5] with both the nature of the evidence or justification and the criteria for sufficiency being area-dependent ... in jurisprudence the corresponding term is evidence,[10] with "burden of proof" as a concept common to both philosophy and law. ... Exactly what evidence is sufficient to prove something is also strongly area-dependent, usually with no absolute threshold of sufficiency at which evidence becomes proof

I then showed examples of how people use "proof" for something more like evidence than, say, how it's used in mathematical logic, including cases where the proof can be wrong.

Now it's certainly true that there are many ways to interpret the data. That's why I wrote "Some might say this is evidence which supports multiple hypotheses". You are in that group. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I actually agree that it supports multiple hypotheses, but I haven't looked at the data or any of the research on the topic. I haven't done the analysis. I am making the more pedantic point that it's not outside the bounds of established use to say "prove" here.

Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".

WP helpfully reminds us that in US law the lowest legal burden of proof is the far "reasonable suspicion". If you believe the data doesn't even mean that low burden of proof, then I certainly disagree.

[SomeStupidPoint]

> What I said was, there was a hypothesis, it made a testable prediction, and measurements support that hypothesis. This is sometimes called evidence.

If the hypothesis is "police are racist against black people when deciding to use force", then no, measurements don't support that hypothesis at all or too weakly to reject the null hypothesis -- we haven't measured the coupling to demographics to get a good prior estimate on the number of deaths. Without that, we need to sort of "average" over possible couplings, and end up with something like 0.5 to 2.5 times "appropriate number of blacks to number of whites being killed by police". Since that range includes 1, until we can refine the coupling between shooting distribution and demographics, we basically have a null result on our hypothesis.

> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".

> WP helpfully reminds us that in US law the lowest legal burden of proof is the far "reasonable suspicion". If you believe the data doesn't even mean that low burden of proof, then I certainly disagree.

I don't disagree that there's a "reasonable suspicion" of racism affecting the outcomes of policing -- but I think that's been the case for, oh, the entire lifetime of the country.

I disagree that there's a "preponderance of evidence" (which I'd argue is the lowest standard to reach a conclusion besides "we should check more" or "there isn't enough evidence to tell") that the dominant cause of the high number of black deaths is racism, that we even have a number of black deaths which are in some sense "in excess" of what we'd expect from "fair" or "not racist", and think people are likely a bit more... uh... "reasonable" than I am if they think there's a "reasonable suspicion" that racism is the dominant cause of the discrepancy between black per capita and white per capita death-by-police rates.

I'm not, however, against looking in to it more. People should totally do that, and I bet they'll get their name in some sociology book for proving the racist component exists.

I just think, you know, we should talk about the fact that police kill twenty people per state every year, rather than the few people in the entire country that happens to who happen to have it happen just because they're black. That is, perhaps we should talk about how POLICE ARE JUST BEATING AND SHOOTING TONS OF PEOPLE UNNECESSARILY, rather than about how we should fix it so that they do so to the same number of white and black people, who once you account for confounding factors, seem to get abused at a roughly even rate already (eg, +/- 10%).

> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".

I think that the "evidence" backing the claims hasn't even cleared basic Bayesian analysis, and is a case of people jumping on an emotionally charged things that sounds good.

It's not that I need 5-sigma to accept a social issue, it's that I need proponents to at least pass the basic threshold of "entirely statistical artifact". And right now, the rate at which blacks are being killed relative to whites is anywhere from 0.5-2.5x, which because it includes 1, is only a slightly skewed-basically-null result.

So with the police-are-racists claim hovering at "statistical anomaly", but the police-are-violent-psychopaths claim well documented, I think people who are focusing on the "racism of the police" are... well... misguided.

There's a very real, well-documented issue. It's just seems that it's a complex classism one, not a racism one, which is way less sexy to talk about.

[dalke]

I guess for you it's way more sexy to call me a racist against white people.

[SomeStupidPoint]

Well, yes.

But if you want to address one rhetorical flourish in calling you out for assuming a link between police shootings and demographics which supported your position without addressing equally valid and likely links which didn't support your position as "racist" merely because it involved you assuming that one race (by virtue of being that race) was the victim of racism, when the data suggests that it's possible either is the victim of racism, then you are correct, it's not strictly speaking racist.

But you're well in to very technical arguments about why that's not racist.

[mcguire]

According to the Mapping Police Violence site, fewer than 1/3 of the black suspects shot were suspected of a violent crime or armed. Randomly shooting people who match crime demographics seems a poor strategy.

http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

[tzs]

It was way more than 1/3 according to the Washington Post's database [1]. They have 258 black people shot by police in 2015 (out of 991 people total shot by police). Of those, they categorize 183 as involving "Attack in progress" (71%).

They have 63 categorized as "Other". I'm not sure what counts as "Attack in progress" because looking at those under "Other", it looks like about 40% [2] of them involve the suspect charging at officers with a knife, or threatening officers or a third party with a knife and refusing orders to drop it, or trying to run down officers with a car.

That fits in with what I've seen when I've picked a random sample at killedbypolice.net and sorted them into "justified" and "unjustified" piles. There I got something around 80-90% seemed reasonably justified, at least based on the data initially available.

Did police have to shot all these people who were threatening with knives and such? Probably not. Better training and techniques could probably have handled those situations without anyone dying or getting seriously injured.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

[2] Warning: I arrived at 40% by looking at around 25 of them, but it was the first 25, not a random sample of 25 out of the 63. Since they are ordered chronologically, if there is some seasonal variation in the circumstances under which people get shot by police it could affect my estimate.

[dalke]

(FWIW, The Guardian, at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... , lists 1146 people killed by police in 2015, of which 306 were black. Almost identical percentages, and it doesn't change your point.)

The tricky part is to look at how non-black people were treated in similar situations. If use of force would have been justified against white people, but non-lethal means were used instead, then it wouldn't show up in the resources you consulted.

[SomeStupidPoint]

Sure, it's a bad strategy, and we definitely should do something about the police violence.

But being biased towards violence when criminals match the demographics of violent criminals who previously have attacked you or your friends is an understandable human response, and not particularly racist.

My point is this: police are likely just violent douchebags who are actually trying to be a little anti-racist; they're violent psychopaths who escalate to fatal violence when someone who even vaguely matches a previous attacker resists their orders at all, but they actually respond that way slightly less to black people than the raw statistics of who murders who suggests they would, showing a sensitivity and attempt to tune that response.

Of course, this isn't an actual study or theory. It's merely pointing out that the narrative around the data was shaped before any real analysis of the data was performed (and by a group with a horse in the race), and there's perfectly coherent stories that aren't racist. I find it a little strange how quickly the orthodox view around the issue formed, and a little disturbing how viciously it's defended, even against moderate versions of the same view.

I don't think anyone is disputing that US police are unnecessarily violent, though.

[tbrownaw]

I think that a lot of people, such as yourself, are being very dishonest when analyzing the police data because they're analyzing it against total population numbers while ignoring the correlations to crime demographics. Such as the Guardian numbers you cited.

I think applying statistics to societal issues is a right pain in the ass to get right, and even more of a pain to explain concisely without accidentally becoming misleading.

It's not dishonest to get something wrong, when that something is unfeasible or perhaps even impossible to get right.

[SomeStupidPoint]

You're correct that it's not dishonest to get something wrong, and I regret targeting my comment as directly as I did.

However, I think places like the Guardian are being dishonest: they're telling stories with those numbers that the numbers don't really justify, and presenting those figures as if they're meaningful and carry some sort of utility, rather than just being random mishmash numbers that were easy to cook up.

[anon1385]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/campaign-zero-debunks-po...

>Among this larger statistical breakdown of police violence, Campaign Zero also discovered that there is no direct correlation between police violence and violence that occurs within a given community.

[SomeStupidPoint]

Just reading their report quickly, it doesn't look like they're controlling for a lot of things, and are measuring non-target cultural factors which skew their correlation. (Of course, they don't even mention their methods, because it likely would be such an obvious source of criticism with their conclusion.[1])

Which isn't to say I'm right either, and certainly raises a bigger question about it, but back to my point: we just can't tell, because there is a lack of detail in their analysis.

[1] http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/2015/

[dalke]

Their methods are listed under the "about the data" tab, which links to http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata/ :

> This information has been meticulously sourced from the three largest, most comprehensive and impartial crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 91 percent of all victims in the database.

It also lists their definitions for "police killing", "unarmed", "vehicle", and "allegedly armed."

They also make the data available for download, so you can verify it. The columns are:

  Victim's name
  Victim's age
  Victim's gender
  Victim's race
  URL of image of victim
  Date of injury resulting in death (month/day/year)
  Location of injury (address)
  Location of death (city)
  Location of death (state)
  Location of death (zip code)
  Location of death (county)
  Agency responsible for death
  Cause of death
  A brief description of the circumstances surrounding the death
  Official disposition of death (justified or other)
  Criminal Charges?
  Link to news article or photo of official document
  Symptoms of mental illness?
  Unarmed

[SomeStupidPoint]

I meant their methods of analysis for that specific report, not gathering their base dataset.

I did, however, already download their dataset to look through it later, when I have more time.

[mc32]

While racism may exacerbate the issue of violence and aggressive policing, we simply have too much aggressiveness and violence in policing. That said, it's going to be a while before we alter training and behavior meaningfully.

If we look at today's Philippines it's quite clear racism is not a necessary component of aggressive and violent policing.

[maxander]

Its difficult to quantify teleology, but people make the obvious judgements. What it does is track police initiated violence. What it's for, given the context it exists in, is almost certainly to advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated. The writer furnished sufficient background to justify this inference, even if you're coming at this issue as a complete blank slate.

[SomeStupidPoint]

> advance public acceptance of the fact that police violence is often racially motivated

I've never been convinced of this "fact", once controlled for economic/social class and culture. I've certainly never seen the numbers controlled for economic/social class, culture, and any residual correlation between crime and race, which is what would be needed to actually conclude that the police were acting racist rather than rational.

Most of the "evidence" for the racial motivation of the violence is based on appeals to emotion and simplistic explanations, both of which are unlikely to capture the reality of the situation, coupled with lots of buzzwords intended to actually shut down conversation about the topic.

The publicity certainly hasn't been enough to prove their point: if police shootings are evenly distributed by total population, a black man should be shot every other day; if police shootings are evenly distributed by violent crime demographics, a black man or two should be shot every day. We're hearing about stories much less frequently than that, which doesn't tell us anything about whether or not it's racist, as opposed to merely militaristic and violent in general.

I think we're a far cry from showing that blacks account for >50% of fatal police shootings AND the discrepancy not being explained by cultural factors (such as being more likely to flee or resist).

Of course, people "feel" things, so why let facts and analysis intrude?

[maxander]

Thank you kindly for directly demonstrating my point. You are exactly the target audience for the data the article is talking about.

In most other aspects of daily life, people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial evidence without rigorous quantitative work- you don't demand a formal Bayesian analysis of the day's weather before you decide to take an umbrella with you. But in issues like this, people who don't want to deal with it will plead "lack of sufficient data" until someone does an iron-clad study with five-sigma-significance results. So, that's what they're doing! Public awareness proceeds onwards and upwards through this kind of rigamarole.

[SomeStupidPoint]

> people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial evidence without rigorous quantitative work- you don't demand a formal Bayesian analysis of the day's weather before you decide to take an umbrella with you

But I do do a Bayesian analysis rather than a naive one: it's cloudy without raining here too often to carry an umbrella just because it's cloudy. That would be a maladaptive response, even if naive analysis is "clouds -> rain; prepare!"

Similarly, social issues tend to have enough complexity that you can't just resort to "clouds -> rain!" In this particular case, I'm just arguing that you need to control for background statistics rather than saying police shootings are randomly distributed across the entire population without any correlations.

No different than thinking a little about how often it's cloudy without rain before grabbing an umbrella. And I dislike that people like you are just screaming "DON'T THINK! CLOUDS! GET UMBRELLA!"

[maxander]

And I'm arguing that, in any other issue, you would think "controlling for background statistics" in a formal sense is unnecessary. I'm not telling you not to think, quite the opposite. Think of this:

In a country with a long history of terrible racial oppression and documented contemporary racist sentiment, a large body of people are convinced by their lived experiences [1] that police violence is racially biased, and this conviction is further supported by a massive number of known individual cases. Among the huge space of possible injustices that could be claimed, this one particular form has received tremendous attention and accumulated consistent material evidence across the entire nation.

We as yet lack the huge amounts of data to settle the issue in a way that would satisfy a physicist. But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on.

[1] Taking this as distinct from the large body of people who are convinced at a safe distance via their TVs.

[SomeStupidPoint]

> a large body of people are convinced by their lived experiences [1] that police violence is racially biased, and this conviction is further supported by a massive number of known individual cases

Okay, we know that there's an effect. No one is arguing that black people not only feel that way, but interact with (and are killed by) police at a higher-than-white per capita rate. That certainly should be addressed, and is a major social concern.

I think we agree on how to interpret the data at least this far -- that there's an effect, originally identified anecdotally by black people but supported by data, where black people are killed by police more often per capita. (Numbers I've seen are like 2.5x per capita -- but order of magnitude, I think we can agree on somewhere between 2x and 5x.)

Where we disagree, and I think we're just going to have to disagree, is that this is evidence that there's a lot of systemic racism going on. (Think "70 cent" wage gap, not "95 cent" wage gap.)

I think we're seeing a little bit of active racism, a lot of lingering economic effects of historic racism, a little bit of active cultural maladaptation, and a lot of general police violence. (That's me "thinking about the issue with an open mind" -- that distribution is basically the prior on social issue breakdown.)

You seem to suggest that the data suggests just "a lot of racism", which is where I disagree: I don't think the evidence is anywhere near moving the needle from the prior of "complex weave of the usual issues" to "outright, ongoing, systemic racism".

> But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on.

Finally, I just want to say, that this argument supports literally anything that sounds appealing, regardless of how likely it is to be true. There's a long history of creating new problems while attempting to solve problems by adopting solutions that make no sense upon detailed analysis, but sound good or appeal to our emotions in some way.

[vkou]

When blacks are harassed, detained, arrested, and sentenced more frequently then whites, despite committing crime at a similar rate, why does it matter whether the cause is the colour of their skin, or their economic standing?

Are you blaming this problem on black culture?

Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?

[SomeStupidPoint]

I disagree that it's a similar crime distribution per capita, on the whole. Of course, many of those "racial" or "cultural" differences disappear once you control for other factors, mostly economic. That being said, we still need to control for if we're using "black" as a proxy for "poor" before we call the police racist, for example. (That would be classist, not racist, policing.)

> Are you blaming this problem on black culture?

In part, yes. It's not popular, but I think that black culture has developed "pathological" behaviors, similar to the defense mechanisms we see in children, were the behavior was actually adaptive at one point in time (and likely essential for survival), but has become maladaptive now that the circumstances have changed. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of the backlash over "microaggressions" is that people think talking about "microaggressions" before those maladaptive behaviors in unreasonable and unfair, but we're getting on a tangent.)

> Have you ever actually asked any black people (Lower, middle, or upper-class) about how their interactions with police go?

Sure. There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice).

My point is that you're getting like 10 variance points from what you wear, another 5-10 variance points from how you conduct yourself, and like 1-5 variance points from the color of your skin.

I'm not convinced there's not a racial component to the policing either -- I just suspect it's much like the wage gap, where what we find is that it's mostly social issues we don't really want to talk about (women leaving work force to have children; men having more variance as a gender; men skewing slightly more competitive) and a little bit actual problematic bias (that last 3-5 cents).

So I suspect we'll find a little bit of genuine bias in policing, but I think we'll find, once we dig further in to the numbers, that mostly what we're seeing is behaviors that correlate highly with facts that make us uncomfortable, and have to do with either economics, social class, or culture.

[Mz]

There are ways in which I am sympathetic to some of your points. I am white and have had people of color be assholes to me merely because I am white while claiming there is no such thing as "reverse racism" (and there is not -- a black person hating a white person merely because of their color is straight up racism), but a couple of things: A) no matter how well off they are, blacks have to put up with shit whites typically don't deal with and b) part of the reason blacks are so poor in the U.S. is because of hundreds of years of historical legacy, so it's kind of a huge fuck you to act like "well, it JUST the POOR blacks" or something.

There's HUGE correlations between those stories and a) economic status (usually as conveyed by dress) and b) culture (usually as conveyed by language choice).

This interesting piece was written by a well educated black lawyer living in a upscale neighborhood about being harassed by cops because his car broke down, so he walked home and a black man walking in his upper class neighborhood was reason enough to harass him:

http://jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/...

[SomeStupidPoint]

My point with B was merely to say that if the issue is lingering economic after effects, rather than currently held racist attitudes, we should address the problem differently. The solution to a community being treated poorly because they're poor is different than a community being treated poorly because they're black.

I think of it like this: I don't want to be diagnosed sick, but if I'm sick, I want to be diagnosed. You can't treat what you can't accurately identify the cause of, in many cases.

I also think a lot of you are being uncharitable: I was involved with many of the civil rights issues before they came to mainstream awareness, and am merely frustrated with being spoken to about "facts" which are highly questionable, and usually detract from a deeper, underlying issue to draw attention to an easy-to-digest side issue.

That kind of sound-biting is insidious in that it is both a common human fault in thinking and a kind of control mechanism: it distracts us from deep, complex issues like the roles of social class and the police in the US -- which needs to be talked about, because it spans from violence to freedom and privacy to social control, and has reached dire straights -- and instead sidetracks us in the politics of race, at a time when race relations are the best they've been in hundreds of years and progressing in virtually every dimension we can measure.

As a black man once asked me, "Do you think it's coincidental we're talking about issues skin deep when we're both economic slaves?"

I don't think that there aren't race issues in the US, I don't think that there aren't issues with race and the police, but I do think that the modern movement about the two is a) likely going to go nowhere, because it's probably mostly not fresh racist attitudes and b) distracts from our deeper conversation about the role of police in the US, by making about racism, not police misconduct.

[dibujante]

Sounds like it. But the writer doesn't seem concerned with epistemic integrity. It's a neat project, though. Publishing use-of-force data seems like it's a sensible thing to do.