[kemayo]

Mind, since ~70% of the US population is white, that does imply whites are less likely to be killed by the police.

Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races, and to what extent that figure is manipulated by conscious / subconscious bias on the part of law enforcement. (It's a swamp, and I don't feel like arguing about it tonight, I just wanted to acknowledge it's complicated.)

Edit to acknowledge: yes, it's more like 60% white if you're splitting out Hispanic-origin into its own category. Still, disproportionate.

[sangnoir]

> Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races

I find this argument (the one you are referring to) to be spurious. We don't calculate the number of rapes committed by men and there is no subsequent societal bias against men as criminal by default (or suspect by default). Not to mention the mindset leads to a feedback loop: "Of the bugs found during team code reviews, 50% were in Bob's code" will lead to everyone going through Bob's code with a fine tooth comb - and finding yet more bugs, while Stacy's code never gets a second glance regardless of its quality[1].

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...

[BurningFrog]

I think what's important about this is if the big problem is (1) race disproportionality or (2) general police brutality and unaccountability.

If the main problem is (2), but society mobilizes to solve (1), thigs won't get better.

[kemayo]

I feel that these problems are linked.

If we solved (1), everyone would be equally likely to suffer from police brutality. This would make us more likely to then go ahead and fix (2), because suddenly it would no longer be something which mostly happens to long-downtrodden minority groups.

Mind, if we fix (2) first, it's somewhat plausible that we might continue in a situation where minority groups are disproportionately targeted by the police, and we just go "eh, it's not that bad, we're not shooting them all the time any more".

[BurningFrog]

Your first point only works if we solve (1) by increasing the killings of whites.

[iopq]

Yes, but whites are less likely to be suspects in crimes (per capita, since whites live in nicer areas on average), so the polices won't stop them as often.

[jsf666]

> Mind, since ~70% of the US population is white, that does imply whites are less likely to be killed by the police.

The thing is most violent crime is commited by blacks even though they are about 13% of the population. So please don't act like evil cops just hunt them down for fun, that's the biggest gripe with BLM. They act like it's 1900 when that's just BS