Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mrburkins 1970 days ago
I think the issue isn’t just police killing unarmed black people but also an incredibly large disparity in use of all physical force which your stats allude to:

>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities.

1 comments

Further down in their comment they cite statistics about variant violent crime rates by race, where African Americans commit more than 50% of violent crime, which seems in line with your cited non-lethal force rates. Violent criminals receiving proportionate rates of violent force doesn't stand out as a disparity.
>African Americans commit more than 50% of violent crime,

Out of curiosity, I understand that you're simply citing statistics from a source but I'd like to know if you think this reflects reality? If so, what reason would you suggest creates this?

Statistics, measurements, are the only lens on reality that we have. It's something we have to be able to talk about.

Be very wary of someone who thinks their intuition is stronger than our best pursuits of data. And, based on what, Reddit r/videos and Twitter?

That’s fascinating. I personally haven’t found any statistics on how many crimes of any type are committed that didn’t include estimates, only statistics that count arrests(1) since those are discrete and easily countable.

I agree that statistics are an incredibly powerful tool to understand the world but I disagree that they’re the “only lens on reality” since in some cases, ideologues are able to summon numbers that fit a preconceived notion.

Edit: oops, forgot the link (1) https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

I believe it reflects reality, or is at least a strong approximation of reality.

I think the cause to first order is economics. Second and third order terms with much less but still contributing importance are political (decades of policy failures like the War on Drugs and welfare expansion, for-profit prisons, etc), and cultural (there is far too much celebration of crime culture, gang culture, and respect culture that normalizes the state of things in the black community).