Why do you think minorities have a higher rate of police encounters?
I would disagree with the usage of the term "minorities" here. What I'm talking about doesn't apply to all minorities. For instance, Asians are considered a minority in the US, but they are drastically underrepresented among those who get arrested (~6% of the US population, but only ~1% of total arrests, according to
Table 43A of the FBI's "Crime in the USA" publication).
The primary reason that blacks have higher rates of police encounters relative to whites is that blacks commit more crimes, per capita. Because they are more likely to commit crimes, they are more likely to be encountered by police. Also, police officers try to actively patrol high-crime neighborhoods, because their job is to prevent and stop criminal activity; those neighborhoods often have primarily black residents, so if a proactive police officer stops a potential witness for questioning or approaches somebody to inquire about suspicious behavior, it's frequently going to be a black person.
Because so many people are quick to misconstrue my point above, I now have to emphasize something that should be completely obvious: most black
individuals are not criminals, and many are peaceful, hardworking contributors to society. I'm strictly talking about
group trends and averages.
My comment already assumed that you're both correct to say the discrepancy is driven by higher crime rates. What is the explanation for the higher crime rates in different groups? It was offered in the post I quoted that this is the result of racist policies. Even if I take your arguments at face-value (I don't), you haven't made the case that the issue can't be traced back to racism in any of its forms.
The explanation for
why there are differences in crime rates among racial groups is largely irrelevant to what we've been talking about: racial discrimination in policing. The primary job of police officers is to prevent crime and to catch criminals, regardless of which sociological theory best explains why crime rates differ among groups. As long as a disproportionately high number of blacks commit serious crimes, police officers will arrest a disproportionately high number of black suspects, and that's not an inherent problem with the police.
How do you account for the difference in police encounters? An example from the
Boston Globe, discussing these statistics: "Suppose, hypothetically, that a white suspect is killed by police in one out of 100,000 traffic stops and nine out of 10 shootings. And imagine that Black suspects are killed by police after 20 out of 1,000,000 traffic stops and in 10 out of 10 active shooter incidents. In each kind of incident, Black suspects are killed more often than white suspects. In aggregate, though, the percentage is higher for white people: 10 out of 100,010 white people are killed vs. 30 out of 1,000,010 Black people, because the white people tend to encounter the police in more grave situations."
In a majority of cases in which police officers used lethal force between the years 2009 and 2012, we know that the suspect was involved in the commission of a crime (80.5%), with the crime being assault, homicide, or another violent offense in 63.4% of cases of lethal force. Also, in a majority of cases, we know that the suspect was deemed to be a threat to the police officer and/or civilians (87.7%). This is based on a
table published by criminal justice researchers at CUNY, titled "Characteristics/Circumstances of Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force in 17 NVDRS States, 2009–2012". Unfortunately, this is the most recent published data set I'm aware of that describes the circumstances surrounding cases of lethal force; if somebody can find more recent data, please do share.
My point is that, excluding individual cases of excessive force and unfortunate accidents, police officers aren't using lethal force during random encounters with compliant, law-abiding individuals. They're usually using lethal force against criminal suspects who are on the verge of getting arrested or are already under arrest, and who are posing a threat of death or bodily harm to them and/or to civilians. If a large proportion of those being subjected to lethal force by police are criminals, then it makes sense that the black population would be disproportionately affected.