| HN Mirror

It's not a lie, you've been sold a lie about what the statistics mean. Police shootings are proportional to "encounters with violent criminals", regardless of race [2]. Black people are overrepresented in police shootings because they are overrepresented in the criminal population, eg. 49% of known murderers are black, despite comprising only 13% of the population [1], and other violent offenses track this disparity. There is simply no convincing evidence that a large percentage of shootings are racially motivated once controlling for violent encounters.

Some try to argue that black people are overrepresented in the criminal population because of over policing, but it simply does not follow that this would cause almost 50% of murderers to be black. It would require a lot of special pleading to explain the evidence, eg. ok, maybe most murderers are black but most other encounters with police are racially motivated, and/or police would have to be letting upwards of 10,000 white murderers go to reach demographic parity with black offenders. These epicycles are stupid, you need to let go of this left dogma that vehemently believes that all groups are necessarily the same and only oppression drives observable differences in outcomes. Whatever the ultimate source of the group differences, police action broadly following the distribution of criminality with no racial component is best supported by the facts (there are always individual exceptions of course).

Proper statistical arguments like this debunked claims that the 2020 election was rigged, so as I said, unless you think Floyd's murder by itself justified the protests and the riots and the ensuing death, injuries and destruction, then neither set of protests/riots were justified. But it's interesting that only one of these false narratives is amplified as true and is culturally taboo to question.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-an...