I'll repeat it again for you. Your appeal to raw numbers, i.e. (
it was ONLY "20") is completely besides the point that those in favor of police reform are trying to make. It's as dumb as when the president says COVID
ONLY killed 100,000 vs 1-2 mil so mission accomplished. There is a civil and moral issue that stands completely separate from how many tickmarks you want to put in ledger, but it's not surprising that many don't get that. It's also notable that you're highlighting the nominal figures from 2019 instead of 2015- without also highlighting that the rate decline in the last few years could be an anomaly given the sample size or perhaps the fact that something in 2014 sparked the impetus to reform police tactics. Furthermore, you should stop leaning so heavily on how nominally 'few' people have been killed by police when:
---------------------------------------------
The Washington Post began tracking the shootings after Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo. A Post investigation found that the FBI’s tracking system undercounted fatal police shootings by about half, because of the fact that reporting by police departments is voluntary and many departments fail to do so. The ongoing Post project relies on news accounts, social media postings and police a reports.
investigativereportingworkshop.org
---------------------------------------------
The ongoing Post project has found that police have shot and killed 3,309 people since 2015, or
more than twice as many fatal shootings per year as the average reported by the FBI. Of those killed, 231, or 7 percent, were not armed with guns, knives or other objects that could be used as weapons at the time of the shootings, according to the data.
---------------------------------------------
The actual numbers you posted aren't the Mickey Mouse part (although they might be since only counting fatalities likely significantly undercounts instances of non-fatal inappropriate force)- it's the interpretation of the statistics to make disingenuous points like the WSJ author did.
Do you acknowledge that a police officer is also more likely to get killed by an armed white male than an unarmed white male is by a police officer? If the answer is yes, then you'll finally understand the disingenuousness of trying to use the "18x" figure to rhetorically show how the poor widdle heavily armed police officers are the ones for whom we should reallly be afraid.
A couple things with the study you quoted:
1. It takes only one year into account: 2015
2. Much of their data makes no goddamn sense at all
Just look at this table:
View attachment 309459
That table shows that 'black civilian armed' has a lower odds ratio than 'black civilian unarmed.' I mean, if that's what this study was actually demonstrating it would certainly help my thesis but not even I think the result from that table is a reflection of reality. More likely, what it shows is the problem with using multivariate regression from a limited data set to retroactively answer the authors' question of "What factors predict the race of a person fatally shot by police?”
In fact, after I saw that table, I realized that someone had actually written a letter to the editor about the study:
---------------------------------------------
"
A recent PNAS article reports “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across [fatal] shootings” by police officers (ref.
1, p. 15877). This claim is based on the results of a regression model that suggested “a person fatally shot by police was 6.67 times less likely (odds ratio [
OR] = 0.15 [0.09, 0.27]) to be Black than White” (ref.
1, p. 15880).
The article also claims the results “do not depend on which predictors are used” (ref. 1, p. 15881). These claims are misleading because the reported results apply only to a subset of victims and do not control for the fact that we would expect a higher number of White victims simply because the majority of US citizens are White.
The published odds ratio of 0.15 is based on a regression model that made the intercept correspond to a county with 4 times more White (50%) than Black (12%) citizens. In addition, the intercept of the model corresponds to a country where White homicide rates equal 1) Black homicide rates and 2) Hispanic homicide rates and where victims are 3) average age (36.71 y) and White and Black victims are equally likely to 4) have mental health problems, 5) be suicidal, 6) be armed, and 7) attack an officer. We found that including suicidal as a predictor had the strongest effect on the intercept, which doubled the odds of the victim being White (
OR = 0.24 vs. 0.49). In contrast, adjusting only for differences in Black and White homicide rates left the intercept unchanged (
OR = 0.48 vs. 49). Thus, the main contribution of the regression analysis is to show that that the odds of a victim being White double when the percentage of suicidal victims increases from 11% in the actual population to 50% in a hypothetical population. The fact that older suicidal victims are disproportionally more likely to be White shows that not all victims of lethal use of force are violent criminals.
Although use of force with citizens who suffer from mental health problems is an important issue, another important issue is use of force for young, unarmed, mentally healthy (nonsuicidal) men.
To examine racial disparities in this group, we specified an alternative model that focused on young (age 20 y), unarmed male victims that showed no signs of mental health problems and were not suicidal in a county with equal proportions of Black and White citizens. The intercept of this model suggested that victims with these characteristics are 13.67 times more likely to be Black than White, 95% confidence interval = 6.65, 28.13 (Racial Disparity in Fatal Use of Force).
The stark contrast between the published finding and our finding contradicts Johnson et al.’s (
1) claims that their results hold across subgroups of victims. Contrary to this claim, their data are entirely consistent with the public perception that young male victims of fatal use of force are disproportionally Black.
Importantly, neither the original finding nor our finding addresses the causes of racial disparities among victims of deadly use of force. Our results merely confirm other recent findings that racial disparities exist and that they are particularly large for young males (2).
There is widespread concern about racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings and that these disparities reflect discrimination by White officers. Existing databases of fatal shootings lack information about officers, and past analytic approaches have made it difficult to assess the...
www.pnas.org
---------------------------------------------
Another bonus letter to the editor highlighting the Cesario study's inaccuracy. This one wasn't published unfortunately but it explains the statistical problem in simple terms.
---------------------------------------------
But say for a moment you didn't just cherry-pick one study that had serious methodological problems, let's see what the preponderance of the evidence shows (or at least skews toward):
---------
A 2018 study in the
American Journal of Public Health found that black and Hispanic men were far more likely to be killed by police than white men.
[102] A 2019 study by
Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that while there are no racial differences in lethal use of police force, blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to experience non-lethal use of force.
[103] A 2019 paper by Princeton University political scientists disputed the findings by Fryer, saying that if police had a higher threshold for stopping whites, this might mean that the whites, Hispanics and blacks in Fryer's data are not similar.
[104] Reports by the
Department of Justice have also found that police officers in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, systemically stop, search (in some cases strip-searching) and harass black residents.
[105][106] A January 2017 report by the DOJ also found that the Chicago Police Department had "unconstitutionally engaged in a pattern of excessive and deadly force" and that police "have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color."
[14] A 2018 study found that police officers more likely to use lethal force on blacks.
[107] A 2019 study in the
Journal of Politics found that police officers were more likely to use lethal force on blacks, but that this "most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force."
[108] A 2019 study in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that blacks and American Indian/Alaska indigenous people are more likely to be killed by police than whites, and that Latino men are more likely to be killed than white men.
[109] According to the study, "for young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death."
[109] A separate
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study found that there were no racial disparities in police shootings by white police;
[110] the findings of the study were disputed by Princeton University scholars who argued that the study's method and dataset made it impossible for the authors to reach that conclusion.
[111][112] Following the criticism by the Princeton scholars, the authors of the original PNAS study corrected their significance statement to read, "As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority."
[113] A study by Texas A&M University economists, which rectified some problems of selection bias identified in the literature above, found that white police officers were more likely to use force and guns than black police, and that white officers were five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly black neighborhoods.
[114] A 2020
American Political Science Review study estimated that 39% of uses of force by police against blacks and Hispanics in New York City was racially discriminatory.
[115] A 2020 study in the journal
Nature found that black drivers were stopped more often than white drivers, and that the threshold by which police decided to search black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for whites (judging by the rate at which contraband was found in searches).
[12]
Analysis of more than 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina showed that blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be pulled over by police for traffic stops, and that blacks were more likely to be searched following the stop. There were no significant difference in the likelihood that Hispanics would be pulled over, but Hispanics were much more likely to be searched following a traffic stop than whites. When the study controlled for searches in high-crime areas, it still found that police disproportionately targeted black individuals. These racial disparities were particularly pronounced for young men. The study found that whites who were searched were more likely to carry contraband than blacks and Hispanics.
[127][128]
A 2018 study in the
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies found that law enforcement officers in Texas who could charge shoplifters with two types of crimes (one more serious, one less so) due to a vaguely worded statute were more likely to charge blacks and Hispanics with the more serious crime.
[129]
A 2019 study, which made use of a dataset of the racial makeup of every U.S. sheriff over a 25-year period, found that "ratio of Black‐to‐White arrests is significantly higher under White sheriffs" and that the effects appear to be "driven by arrests for less‐serious offenses and by targeting Black crime types."
[130]
en.wikipedia.org
---------------------------------------------
And just think, this is all before we've even approached the inarguable systemic racism that is a part of the criminal justice system once the offenders are actually booked, tried, and sentenced.
