[beaner]

"“When you call the police on a Black or Brown person, there’s a good chance you are putting their life in danger. I don’t think that is a thing one should do lightly.”

Statistically this is False. It's driving a lot of current policy pushes and the people who repeat it most are the ones who pay the most lip service to fighting dis/mis-information, but it's not actually true.

[post_break]

I'm sorry what? I don't know how you come to that conclusion. Time and time again we see someone get called on a welfare check only to be shot to death. People are weaponizing the police because they are not trained to deescalate and their rules are engagement are basically comply or die.

[beaner]

Sure, here's a thread with sources: https://twitter.com/leonydusjohnson/status/12674663458447400...

> Time and time again we see someone get called on a welfare check only to be shot to death

You really need to pierce your bubble and ask what else happens that might not be shown to you. The news isn't real. Not really, anyway. Every single outlet has a bias and "lying by omission" to shape a narrative is common.

For example, did you know George Floyd is hardly the first person to have died under the knee of the police officer? At least 2 times before it, it was a minority officer killing a white man. You can watch it with your own eyes:

Here's Tony Timpa being killed this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c-E_i8Q5G0

Here's Joseph Hutcheson being killed this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnsE6_lVkrE&list=LL&index=50...

Another thing that's been so sad to watch recently is peoples' disbelief in how different the reality of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation is from how it is presented to them on the news, when they simply watch the actual trial. E.g.: https://twitter.com/sarahbeth345/status/1458593872557133825

[dang]

> You really need to pierce your bubble and ask what else happens that might not be shown to you.

Please omit such swipes from your comments here. They're a form of personal attack, which is against the site guidelines and is really bad for communication, especially on difficult topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your comments have degenerated into outright flamewar below. We ban accounts that do that. Please review the guidelines and please don't do any more of that.

[burkaman]

> For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed

This is a weird way to frame the issue. Are black people arrested for violent crime more often? I don't know, but if they are, that changes the conclusion. This seems like an obvious thing I'd want to find out if I were posting that Twitter thread.

> I am showing that when you control for violent crime rate, the disparity vanishes.

No, arrest rate and crime rate are not the same. That's the whole point of the discussion about bias in policing.

If you ask a more straightforward question, like "how often are people killed when they interact with police?", the statistics look different. Here's a study that says:

> On average, there were large racial/ethnic inequities in the rates at which White and Black people were killed during police contact. Across all MSAs, Black people were 3.23 times more likely to be killed compared to White people (95% CI: 2.95, 3.54, p<0.001).

- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[beaner]

Ok sure, but in turn your comment ignores/doesn't contain any data on the statistics of crimes committed by race or what behaviors that lead to escalation appear more among different races.

The NYTimes however did research it and found that "this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of...

[burkaman]

I'll post the full quote for anyone that doesn't have NYT access:

> The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin. And police bias may be responsible. But this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter.

Absolutely agreed: using the FBI data in that NYT article, there's no way to tell why Black people are killed more frequently. All it tells you is that deaths are disproportionate. Using other studies with further data, like the one I posted, gives us a clearer picture.

> Ok sure, but in turn your comment ignores/doesn't contain any data on the statistics of crimes committed by race or what behaviors that lead to escalation appear more among different races.

Correct, I am taking it as a given that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit crime or somehow provoke an officer to murder them during an arrest.

[beaner]

TBH I don't understand what you're saying. I'm having the same debate on 2 threads now so here's my quote to the other person who posted the same link:

"I looked at it and the study doesn't account for anything. For example, if a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.

This is basic, the study (at least on my glance) appears to not account for anything like this at all."

[dljsjr]

That tweet you referenced is heavily cherry-picked: it talks about the results of violent-crime calls, and it doesn’t discuss location.

There are two issues with this:

1. Civilians are also murdered by police who are responding to non-violent offenses. A good example here would be the classic “shot during a routine traffic stop” situation. That won’t show up in the stat from your sources. Your source tries to say that by “controlling for violent crime, the racial disparity goes away” but that doesn’t make any sense.

2. Huge disparity across different LEO organizations. For example, according to this Harvard study, in Chicago the racial bias in the statistics is much stronger than in other areas: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-wh...

That same study also concludes that once you account for and amortize things, you are still 3x more likely to die in an encounter with LEO if you are non white.

[beaner]

The NYTimes, which is a left-leaning institution to begin with, released an infamous paper on race-based police killings itself in 2015 by a black researcher and author, and found that "this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter." [0] People were angry that taking a look into the data did not say what they wanted to here.

And as another poster said [1], even if there were bias, that does not equate to likely, in absolute terms. The idea that you're essentially sending a black person to death, or rolling the dice on their life, by calling the cops on them for nonviolent crime, is ridiculous.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200539

[dljsjr]

You’ve still completely ignored the peer-reviewed Harvard study. Also I don’t know what left or right social politics has to do with any of this.

[beaner]

I looked at it and the study doesn't account for anything. For example, if a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.

This is basic, the study (at least on my glance) appears to not account for anything like this at all.

Also the source isn't everything but its political leanings are somewhat-important as this type of misdirection that I've just showed here is used all the time to craft narratives around statistics, so even when you're crafting leans in a certain direction and you still can't tell the story you'd like, it's a strong indicator that the data more distinctly show certain patterns.

[OldHand2018]

The study you linked to above? I think it is highly informational, but drawing specific conclusions from it should be done very, very cautiously. The page you linked to has a Methods section and a Statistical Analysis section. They are quite informative.

1. They are using the Fatal Encounters dataset - probably the best, most complete, least biased dataset (GOOD)

2. It turns out that police aren't actually killing very many people (VERY GOOD), so there isn't a lot of data.

3. They are doing their analysis at the MSA level as a simplification to account for the fact that people move around and don't just stay at their house or only in their city. They state that they are doing it and why they are doing it (GOOD).

4. They are using a statistical process that assumes that everything (race/ethnicity, deaths, etc) is normally distributed within the MSA. In real life, this is not remotely true, but they acknowledge this fact (GOOD?)

5. Their analysis finds that many of the higher racial disparities found within MSAs occur in MSAs with the lowest rates of police killings and/or a lot of places with high rates of geographic segregation. In other words, places with the least amount of data and places where #4 holds the least.

I don't think anyone is going to claim that this is a bad study, or wrong, or anything like that. It looks pretty solid to me. It's just that you are trying to draw some conclusions from it that it can't support.

I would also like to point out that "If you are in a police encounter (traffic stop, arrested for theft, etc), what is the likelihood of being killed by the police?" is not a question being answered by this study. "If you live in this metropolitan area, what is the likelihood of being killed by the police?" is what this study provides the answer to. That includes such things as people in nursing homes, toddlers in daycare, etc. Saying "You are 3x more likely to die in a traffic stop if you are black" is, sadly, probably very true - but it is not what this study is about nor what it proves:

> We use population denominators to align with, and allow comparisons to, previous demographic work in this area, and because using race-specific crime or arrest counts—themselves shaped by racial bias and segregation—yields estimates of a different and potentially biased contrast than the rather simple ones we answer here: in which metropolitan areas are people most likely to be killed by police, what is the difference in these rates by race, and how does this vary across MSAs?

[tashi]

Is Sendhil Mullainathan the "black researcher and author" you're talking about? I'm trying to get a sense of how much fact-checking you've put into this.

[beaner]

Hm, no, good correction. I might be thinking about a separate article from the same time period that I've lost track of.

[devtul]

> so sad to watch recently is peoples' disbelief in how different the reality of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation is from how it is presented to them on the news

I feel pretty positive about this actually. This will be the tipping point for many to finally question all the info they get from the corporate media.

For a long time I saw garbage reporting on subjects that I had the slightest familiarity but I still blindly believed their reporting on any other subject, until something clicked in my mind and now I can't unsee it. I'm sure many are experiencing this click due to the trial.

[beaner]

> This will be the tipping point for many to finally question all the info they get from the corporate media.

Only if they actually get to see the reality presented to them somewhere. I fear that most people still won't. If they've been in the bubble for years, there will be nothing indicating to them that they should venture outside of it this one time.

[dnissley]

Gell-Mann amnesia

[squidlogic]

Probably referring to this Washington Post data set:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

If you query the data set it looks like 38 unarmed black men were shot by police in 2015.

To determine likelihood of a random “black porch pirate” being shot by police, we should look at the % of police encounters that end in unarmed shoots.

I found a random quota post [1] that says the number of police encounters in 2015 was around 53,469,300.

Back of a cocktail napkin numbers show that we’re talking about something in the neighborhood of .00006% of encounters end in an unarmed black person being shot by the police.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-estimated-number-of-police...

[bellyfullofbac]

Shoddy math alert.

If there's a virus that hit a billion people, where 100 of them are people with blue hair, and there were 110 deaths, 90 of them being blue-haired people and 20 from the rest of the billion, if you had blue hair would you be extra worried?

sure it only kills 0.0..something..09% of people, but...

Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Of course the numbers are exaggerated, but it's to make a point.

If you want to do some maths, please give a percentage of black police encounters that end up with the black person being shot, and compare that with other races. The first number is probably very low as well, but my instinct is that the comparison will be shocking.

In any case, police in the US are woefully undertrained hotheads. In contrast, I saw a video today from Europe where a suicidal woman had a knife and officers around her. One of them pepper-sprayed her, it didn't work, and suddenly another hit her with a big fencepole that he pulled out of the ground. She was a threat to mostly herself, and luckily they didn't neutralize the threat by a bullet that could've been fatal.

[insickness]

The number of instances you've seen news reports or social media posts of people shot to death due to calling police is in no way indicative of the percentage of times it happens when someone does call the police.

[jjwiseman]

Could a mod try googling "beaner" and look at what the top results are?

[NoImmatureAdHom]

+1. The police in the U.S. only kill about 1000 people a year, out of 330,000,000. That's 0.000303%. To put it in perspective, there are about 50,000 suicides, 35,000 car crash deaths, and 30,000 people die from just falling down.

[angio]

A thousand deaths per year is still an astronomical number considering police kills less than 5 people per year in the UK.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I think this viewpoint, commonly cited, is wrong. 1000/330m vs 5/60m (England and Wales)

36x (adjusting for population) a really small number is still a really small number. While all else equal I'd like to see the number reduced, there is much lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.