[JL2010]

> "cops are disproportionately killing black kids", then that was disproven

Was that disproven? The studies that I've read have shown disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among African American men, especially in the unarmed case when adjusted for population. [1]

The unarmed case is the one I pay attention to the most as I think that it (mostly?) filters out cases where shootings were justified.

I'd like to keep an open mind so I welcome any reading that has disproven the disproportionate argument.

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

[weberc2]

When I looked at that data source last year, I read through every case of unarmed black males killed by police. Many of them were actually armed, but with a tree branch or some other blunt object which weren't considered to be weapons. Some were truly unarmed but clearly attacking police (think Michael Brown). A few others were bystanders hit by a stray bullet as police shot at armed suspects (clearly not racism). If memory serves, there were only 12 national police shootings of African Americans where the police shooting was likely malicious. I think the number for whites was comparably low, and I think these are both too low to be statistically useful.

Other studies have found no bias in police shootings, including this one by black Harvard economist who set out with the assumption that police disproportionately killed Blacks: https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...

There have been a few others as well. I should also clarify that my use of "disproven" is too strong. I should have said "the bulk of the evidence supports a contradictory conclusion" or some such.

[cgriswald]

> The unarmed case is the one I pay attention to the most as I think that it (mostly?) filters out cases where shootings were justified.

An armed person can be shot and it can still be unjustified. The presence of a gun does not mean there was any danger or even the appearance of danger.

An unarmed person can give the appearance of having a weapon or may pose a clear threat regardless and such a killing could be justified.

I think mostly paying attention to the unarmed case allows the armed case to mask any potential problems, while also includes the implicit assumption that unarmed cases are mostly unjustified will exaggerate the appearance of problems.

[bogositosius]

>when adjusted for population

Have you adjusted for crime rates?

[hwillis]

You really can't, because black people are arrested, tried and convicted WAY disproportionately to the actual rate of crimes. eg white people smoke weed as much or more than black people, and are arrested at a far lower rate for it.

[malandrew]

Only take into account violent crime rates, which by definition involves a victim.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

These statistics don't involve a trial or conviction. It's based entirely on the police report when the crime was reported and only includes the race of the offender when that information is known.

[hwillis]

A minority of police shootings involve violent crime. You will also notice that nonviolent crimes are the biggest issue, with BLM most concerned about things like Eric Garner or Tamir Rice, who was twelve years old.

"Perusal of Table 4 reveals that suspects were an average age of 36, with whites somewhat older than blacks. Thirty-nine percent of the suspects were involved in a violent crime, 17% in a property crime, and 5% in a drug crime. Hispanics were less likely to be involved in a violent crime, while blacks were more likely to be involved in a property crime than whites or Hispanics. Blacks are least likely to be armed."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189

[weberc2]

Per my sibling comment, laypeople often assume the UCR cannot be trustworthy because it is collected, compiled, and analyzed by policing agencies; however, it's data are supported by the national crime victimization survey, whose data comes from victims and is collected and compiled by the justice department. So your point is even stronger than you made it out to appear. :)

[selllikesybok]

That's an arrest chart, right? I think a conviction chart might be more appropriate to making your point.

[weberc2]

The national crime victimization survey largely agreed with the FBI's Unified Crime Report (on matters of race and violent crimes, anyway). The latter is data collected by policing agencies and the former comes from victims. If law enforcement discriminated against Blacks, we would expect a discrepancy between these reports (it's possible that the victims are simply "equally racist", but given that the victims of black offenders are themselves overwhelmingly black, this is unlikely). Also, there have been a few other studies like this one[1] which don't find anti-black bias in sentencing, conviction, etc. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that the conclusion of a racist criminal justice system is not entirely supported by the evidence.

One anecdote about the weed thing, since that comes up so often--I live in Chicago and apart from festivals, I never see white people strolling around downtown smoking weed, but I do see this probably once a month, and the user is consistently black. The white people I know who use marijuana do so at home and out of public view. This is just an anecdote, but cultural differences in usage could better explain the arrest discrepancy than police racism. At least I would like to discontinue the trend of assuming that every gap is necessarily and automatically attributable to discrimination.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256079484_No_eviden...

[hwillis]

"The Times analysis found that among the largest police departments in each of those four states, black drivers were between 1.5 and 5.2 times more likely to have their cars searched than white drivers. These searches occur with the consent of the driver, so the officer doesn't need to meet any legal standard, like probable cause, to initiate one. [...] More recent figures from 2014 and 2015 published by the New York Times show blacks who are searched are around 20 percent less likely to be carrying contraband than whites who are searched. "

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/08/the-b...

[weberc2]

Neat, I guess. Not sure what conclusion I'm meant to draw or how it relates to the thread.

[fdsfsafasfdas]

Have you adjusted the crime rates for racial profiling?

[malandrew]

This.

Studies have also shown that disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among men when adjusted for population (50% of the population are men but 96% of those shot by police are men).

Violent crime rates are the more useful base rate than the general population. This is the best study I've seen to date that attempts to take into account rates of violent crime: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399