[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."

[burkaman]

I agree with that. The study doesn't account for that because it doesn't make any sense, how could skin color make a person more likely to respond with violence? Can you explain the mechanism for how a racial demographic could be "more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence"?

[hackinthebochs]

The issue isn't skin color causing certain behavior, but whether skin color is correlated with certain behaviors. For example, it might be the case that black people are more likely to be poor, and poor people are more likely to respond aggressively to police authority.

[ryan93]

Compare the black and asian murder rate. But yeah you are obviously right that melanin isn't causing the violence.