[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.

[Mz]

I also think a lot of you are being uncharitable:

I am sorry you are feeling ganged up on, but I am an individual, not part of some group "lot of you." I am a medically handicapped woman with a shitty life who just likes talking with people and that's it. I was in no way judging you as an individual and I started out with stating that I have sympathy for some of your points.

But as a woman who has really had to deal with a lot of shit on HN and gets told all the time that I am basically imagining things, and as a homeless person who has very much experienced classism and exclusion while homeless, I think that "small percentage" that is attributable to the color of their skin is significant and not to be dismissed.

I try really hard to talk about just treating all people decently and in some places that gets my remarks routinely deleted. I am a white woman and part of my so-called "white privilege" is that I have a predominantly white genetic disorder that is the root cause of my poverty and homelessness and I get a whole lot of fuck you over that. With being homeless, I am presumed incompetent and people tell me to go seek out charity and are incredibly dismissive of my attempts to try to figure out how to establish an earned income that works for me in spite of my medical situation.

There are a lot of things I have dealt with in the last few years that are a huge head fuck and often make me suicidal because I feel strongly that my financial problems should not be anywhere near as bad as they are and are made far worse by classism and the assumption that a homeless person must be a total fucking loser with nothing of value to offer. And there are times when this just seems like an impossible trap that cannot be escaped.

I expect that I will escape it, but I have my moments where it just feels really hopeless because of the shitty attitudes and behaviors of other people unnecessarily compounding my problems.

So how do you propose to magically solve their poverty if that is "the real issue"? Because from where I sit as a homeless person, that comes across as an excuse to not deal with racism, which is real and does have an impact.

And maybe you can stop for a minute and think about how you are lumping me and others together because we happened to have all spoken to you in this one discussion and aren't all in agreement with you and that's the basis for this grouping and accusation that we all, as a group, are being uncharitable. And then wonder what that says about the personal experiences shaping people of color and other groups who do not know how to separate their color or other traits from persistent poverty.

If you have no solution for that poverty, how useful is it to say that is the "real" problem?

Thank you for replying.

[SomeStupidPoint]

The comment about being uncharitable was more part of the wider context of my comments, not directed at you in particular. (There were some common threads to complaints about my posts; I wanted to address them one place so I could reference it. The medium gives a certain incentive to "speak to the crowd" so your posts read as a consistent voice, rather than several conversations.)

> I think that "small percentage" that is attributable to the color of their skin is significant and not to be dismissed

It's not nothing, that's true. However, it's a smaller effect this decade than it was last decade, and the one before that. So it's going away if we just stay the course. We've got that problem not solved, but solving. (Well, as far as I can tell from the data, anyway.)

The issue of how the police respond to class is a much bigger issue (at present), which isn't getting better over time (and might be getting worse).

I can only deal with so much, so I think we should focus on the ongoing, growing problem that impacts everyone rather than the smaller, already improving problem that impacts just some people. I think the focus on "racism" in the policing is distracting from that -- it's treating the last 5% as the main 95% of the problem -- and worse, splits the two biggest demographics on a topic they really should align on.

It's not that the racist component is unimportant -- it's that it's just considerably less important than the underlying problem, so while they're right about there being racism, they're wrong about racism being the problem with the police. There'd still be a problem with the police killing blacks even if it were at the same per capita rate as whites! (And arguably, it already is under the "equal" rate, and police should kill more blacks to be "fair" or "not racist".)

> So how do you propose to magically solve their poverty if that is "the real issue"? Because from where I sit as a homeless person, that comes across as an excuse to not deal with racism, which is real and does have an impact.

I don't propose to magically solve their poverty. I expect to incrementally chip at the causes and traps while hundreds of thousands or millions suffer and die needlessly, because economic and social shift is hard. But there are economic policies we know of that can address poverty, and we are making in-roads at that problem, even if it's been hard.

My argument is that telling police who are already responding to economic and cultural incentives, not racial ones "don't shoot them because of their skin" does absolutely nothing, and worse than nothing if it discharges our emotional energy we might have used to tackle the real issues with class instead. In that way, correctly identifying the cause helps us even if we can't do anything about it directly -- at least we're still mad about it, instead of thinking it's all good when really, things will continue to deteriorate.