[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.