Minneapolis

[Winston OBoogie]

Edit:  Removed.  Fuck it.

 

[JohnRoberts]

According to FBI they do, and for over a year the FBI has been collecting local data into a federal database.

https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/use-of-force


Yes and if you scroll down the page you can read that it is *not* mandatory for law enforcement agencies to participate in this  program to collect data and, as of 1 Jan. 2019  the  "National Use-of-Force Data Collection and community participation to report data will likely continue to evolve"
In other words, the data thus far collected is incomplete.

But as I'm sure you know, there are  independent databases that track this information. 

I'm almost tempted to ask to see your math... but no never mind...you know me so well. 

John, if you were truly interested in more complete  data, you'd have already Googled it.
Both The Washington Post and The Guardian have been compiling data  for several years already and both tally very closely.

Again,  black and minority folks are 2.5 (some graphs show it as high as 3.0) times as likely to be killed as white folks.

I didn't want to go down this rabbit hole, lies, damn lies and statistics, but you are making me. I don't use google (any more).

I found the rationale for your 2.5x number

According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

A little mathematical gymnastics but that's statistics for you...

In absolute numbers, more white people than black people are killed in police shootings, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.  :

OK this is probably a right wing site  (media bias calls them pretty far right) but  https://www.dailywire.com/news/7-statistics-you-need-know-about-black-black-crime-aaron-bandler

-93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks.
-Blacks committed 52 percent of homicides between 1980 and 2008, despite composing just 13 percent of the population. Across the same timeframe, whites committed 45 percent of homicides while composing 77% of the population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
-In 2013, the FBI has black criminals carrying out 38 per cent of murders, compared to 31.1 per cent for whites. The offender’s race was “unknown” in 29.1 per cent of cases.
-Over the last three years of data – 2011 to 2013 – 38.5 per cent of people arrested for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault were black.
-in Chicago, IL, blacks committed 76 percent of all homicides, despite composing 35 percent of the city’s population. Blacks also accounted for 78 percent of all juvenile arrests. Whites, who compose 28 percent of the city’s population, committed 4 percent of its homicides and 3.5 percent of its juvenile arrests. Hispanics, who compose 30 percent of the city’s population, committed 19 percent of its homicides and 18 percent of its juvenile arrests.
-only 26 percent of murder cases were solved in Chicago.
-Blacks are 10 percent of the population in Los Angeles, CA, but commit 42 percent of its robberies and 34 percent of its felonies. Whites make up 29 percent of the city’s population, and commit 5 percent of its robberies and 13 percent of its felonies.
-In New York City, blacks committed “75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime,” despite only composing 23 percent of the population
-2009 Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers show that in 2009, “blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties.”
-There were almost 6,000 blacks killed by other blacks in 2015. By contrast, only 258 blacks were killed by police gunfire that year.
====
I feel a little dirty after posting all that one sided data... but you know statistics.. I suspect at least some of that data is accurate. :

We should be looking at the root causes that I still believe are economic, some blame the breakdown in family units, I was raised by a single parent after my father died, so I don't buy that excuse as too simplistic. 
-----

This is untoward to play dueling statistics while the nation is still mourning George Floyd...I apologize. His death is a tragedy felt by everybody and something positive damn well better come from all this political drama played out large.

JR

PS: In a rare show of common sense the democratic establishment is distancing themselves from the defund police movement. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how badly that would play out as an election issue in Nov with moderate voters. 

 

[Winston OBoogie]

Sigh...  Removed. 

 

[fazer]

Two movies.

 

[Recording Engineer]

How about US population statistics compared to prison population statistics? Maybe it’s an undeniably strong indicator the systemic problems being talked about?

 

[john12ax7]

A little mathematical gymnastics but that's statistics for you...

In absolute numbers, more white people than black people are killed in police shootings, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.  :

It's not gymnastics at all. Per capita is the logical way. Using absolute numbers instead of per capita is actually kind of ridiculous. I would expect more reasoned discussion on this forum.

 

[Winston OBoogie]

  Edit:  Removed.  Fuck it.

 

[scott2000]

I randomly clicked on 4 of the deaths on that interactive map:  2 were black, 1 was hispanic, and 1 "unknown" whatever that means.    All said "allegedly" armed.  I couldn't find any reports of actual evidence of  them being armed however.

Yeah... I am not sure I ever found any evidence of someone being armed either. Just the news stories. Even then I suppose there could be corruption in any reports...

Here's one "unknown race"

Kevin Jenkins  Leitchfield  KY
"Kevin Jenkins, 52, of Leitchfield, Kentucky, formerly of Morgantown, Kentucky, passed away Thursday, Aug. 8, 2019 at the Breckinridge Memorial Hospital in Hardinsburg, Kentucky. He was born Sept. 14, 1966 in Butler County, Kentucky to Truman Jenkins and the late Alice West Jenkins. Kevin was a registered nurse at the Breckinridge Memorial Hospital and enjoyed hunting, fishing, was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed getting his hands dirty and loved helping others. Other than his mother, he is preceded in death by his grandmother, Carmen Richardson"

https://gcnewsgazette.com/Content/Default/Obituaries/Article/Kevin-Jenkins/-3/17/1672

https://www.wave3.com/2019/08/09/man-shot-killed-by-law-enforcement-breckinridge-county-identified/

I looked into a few other unknown races and found out their race and stories within seconds......

Guess a bit of laziness on the AI or something going on.....

 

[Winston OBoogie]

  Edit:  Removed.  Fuck it.

 

[JohnRoberts]

It's not gymnastics at all. Per capita is the logical way. Using absolute numbers instead of per capita is actually kind of ridiculous. I would expect more reasoned discussion on this forum.

Per capita makes a powerful talking point and is mathematically computed correctly.

The real question is what is your or my chance of being killed by police today? There is a documented DWB (driving while black) phenomenon, but I have been stopped by police more times than I can count because of my heavy right foot. What happens after the stop matters. I learned long ago, if stopped by police at night to turn on my interior light and put both hands on my steering wheel so the police officer does not perceive me as a threat and get stressed. I don't retrieve my license until he asks me to. I can imagine such interactions going vastly differently if I was argumentative and abusive with the officer, or tried to resist. I recall when I first moved down south, getting stopped by a black state trooper while speeding, in my non air-conditioned former yankee car.  I gave him respect and he was wrestling with what to do, then I remarked that I wished I had air conditioning in my car like he did. I got released with a warning (either white privilege, or air conditioning guilt).

One smart point made by Scott Adams (dilbert guy) was that anybody would have a bad attitude when dealing with police if stopped repeatedly for no apparent reason. When I was a kid I was stopped by police frequently (with good reason) because my car had a loud exhaust system and was obviously a kid's hot rod. Back then I was trying to avoid tickets, not physical harm but I learned that disrespecting authority was unproductive in such situations.

I do not deny that there are some obvious examples of police misconduct, and I know that racists still exist. I live in the deep south where truly horrible things happened in the past. That said the worst racists I ever encountered personally were in a bar in Cambridge, MA so go figure. The racism I perceive in my older southern neighbors is more subtle and won't go away until they die off. The whole process of desegregation is to fix the kids with exposure to all races in school, and let the insensitive parents age out.

Pitting black against white may benefit some divisive politicians, and the usual suspects were large and in front of the cameras over recent weeks. Try not to take the bait. Black and white Americans are both outraged by the George Floyd death, but we don't make the same leap that all police are the enemy and should be defunded/disbanded. This will hurt the poor communities disproportionately and they are already suffering. Who do you think the police are protecting? (rhetorical... everybody).  If you defund the police, people who can will raise private security forces, like many wealthy already use. Even worse we may see more examples of vigilantism (like those white men in NC who shot and killed a black jogger, where's his parades?).

We are in the heat of a controversial presidential campaign so this emotional rhetoric is even more inflamed than normal.

JR

PS; I made an obvious strategic mistake by posting a list of examples, the smart way to discredit the entire list is refute the weakest one and extrapolate that the entire list must be bogus, that generally works in debate. You can figure out which one(s) to discredit. I'm surprised nobody has challenged my framing this as an economic issue. How come the minorities have weaker economic communities? (I feel like I am arguing with myself.... I can't win doing that.)

 

[midwayfair]

PS; I made an obvious strategic mistake by posting a list of examples, the smart way to discredit the entire list is refute the weakest one and extrapolate that the entire list must be bogus, that generally works in debate. You can figure out which one(s) to discredit. I'm surprised nobody has challenged my framing this as an economic issue. How come the minorities have weaker economic communities? (I feel like I am arguing with myself.... I can't win doing that.)

I'll use my city as an example.

Baltimore used to have redlining, which was the completely legal practice of roping off neighborhoods to prevent black people from buying in (literally codified on a map: https://blogs.library.jhu.edu/2017/09/the-baltimore-redlining-map-ranking-neighborhoods). Certain neighborhoods were also sundown communities, meaning that someone could be arrested, based on the color of their skin, for being in that area after sundown. A black person could become a prominent lawyer and earn enough money to buy a house in a neighborhood that could refuse to allow them to buy, at first legally and then "in practice" even if it was illegal for the housing agent to act in such a way. This resulted in black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. Businesses and public services (including schools) would favor white neighborhoods, which systematically increased their value while black neighborhoods were mostly limited to entrepreneurial businesses and also generally fell into disrepair in part due to neglect by the city government, which depressed their values. Again, this continued even after redlining and sundowning was illegal. Because owning housing is a primary way the middle class is able to build generational wealth, the result of this is that generations of black wealth were stagnant against inflation, while white families' wealth increased. A lot of Baltimore's neighborhoods are still highly segregated. (I've lived in mixed neighborhoods the entire time I've been an adult, but the one I'm in now used to be white: A friend of my wife's grandmother, upon learning where we lived, said during lunch one day, "They didn't used to let ******* live in your neighborhood." I asked that we please never have lunch with her again afterward.)

Anyway, a group that included black churches, community leaders, and activists then started a process known as "block busting," where they would try to buy a house on a single block in a white neighborhood for a black family. (It took extra effort because one of the means of preventing black families from buying into these neighborhoods is that they would be given a different, and higher, price for the house than a white family would.) This would sometimes cause the most racist people there to leave, while others would leave because the flight would cause a market glut and depress the housing values in the neighborhood. (Book on this: https://www.amazon.com/Blockbusting-Baltimore-Edmondson-Village-Story/dp/0813109353.) This had mixed results: On the one hand, it would create mixed neighborhoods. On the other hand, if the neighborhood instead "flipped," the houses would be worth less than the black families had paid, and their values would stagnate, and everyone was right back where they started, except the city as a whole (which used to be one of the largest cities in America with over 1M people until the 50s) lost half its population to the county. Those people still commuted to the city and expected city services to be rendered to them but crashed the city's tax base. So while blockbusting probably improved peoples' lives a little, it didn't result in a homogeneous mixture and stable growth of wealth for all groups.

School bussing was a similar effort to lift everyone up and is very, very closely tied to housing issues, because students are expected to go to school where they live. Further, school funding was (and still is in many ways) tied to the district's tax take, which resulted in a systematic detriment to black communities' schools. There are many other factors that play into a student's success in school, but you can probably guess that not having enough textbooks to go around has a bad outcome. Before it was ended, studies were done that showed that bussing improved the test scores of black students with no negative effect on white students -- but somehow the argument was successfully made that it was hurting the "better" students, so schools went back to being segregated. Since education is closely tied to economic success in many industries (especially STEM), the backslide resulted in another generations-long blow.

This is just *one* aspect of systematic problems. The war on drugs disproportionately affects black people for arrests, trial, and sentencing, causing a skill and economic drain on black communities.

Now, I'm not a historian; I'm just repeating the history that I've read that was written by people who have actually examined the long term effects of this and based on the critical concensus of historians whose expertise is in this area, and I've never heard or read and serious, well-sourced arguments disputing anything I've written above, even by people who argue that the effect might be less drastic or unknowable than what I've said. Frankly, I would be surprised if anyone on this board was a professional historian. I'm sure a couple people are going to reply to part of this post with their own opinions, but maybe we should all read more and talk less about things we don't study professionally.

Per capita makes a powerful talking point and is mathematically computed correctly. 
The real question is what is your or my chance of being killed by police today?

For instance, John, you seem to have posted multiple times on this page where he seems to argue that per capita should not be used even though everyone was talking about the disproportionate rate at which one group (black folks) is shot by police. I would say that if it's been so long since your last probability and stats lecture that you can't work out that this is the precise situation in which "per capita" must be used, or you don't understand your own sources, maybe you shouldn't use Twain's words about statistics. The answer to your question is "less often if you are white" based on every available data point. I can find no survey literature presenting evidence that this is an economic problem, so your gut feeling that this is an economic and not race issue is not based on available evidence. Fryer at Harvard is probably your most even-handed source for this, because he refuses to draw a conclusion due to lack of data but even he argues that the perception of bias is as detrimental as if the bias actually existed (disclaimer: I haven't read anything new from him since 2018 or so). Boston School of Public Health concluded that race was a significant factor as recently as 2018. There are other actual studies to read, so you don't have to rely on your personal conclusions that don't seem to be based on any analysis of the data.

And frankly everyone here, as usual, would do better to read sources by people who actually study this for a living than lengthy posts written on this forum by people in completely unrelated disciplines.

----
I'm also not going to argue it at length, but you've seized on "dismantling the police department" but don't seem to have actually read and understood the legislation being debated. No one is getting rid of the police. If you think that, reconsider where you get your news.

 

[boji]

Strictly speaking on the math:

If it's a "killer cop" issue we are trying to identify, then when a cop of any race kills a citizen of any race, that data should be included in numbers of deaths by race. However if the data includes citizens killing citizens (of any race admixture) shouldn't those numbers be removed when making the point about police brutality? Has this happened when getting at the 2.5%?  Honest question, I really don't know as I'm terrible at math.

 

[living sounds]

https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-chicago-police-looting-popcorn-20200611-je3afw3lxbhknicv37ijnncgkq-story.html

 

[boji]

The most detailed accounts that are available are the ones collected here:

Thank you!

 

[Rocinante]

I am not going to get into this too much as it's my daily life and something I have worked with for nearly 2 decades now. I'm just going to give an example.
In the last 10 years I have been pulled over twice. Once cause I went left on red (I was distracted by something on a podcast) and another time when my wheel was going flat and they thought I should know (although they were dicks about it).
Many of my African American friends have been pulled over a dozen times a year. Philandro Castille was pulled over 45 times in 5 years. That is typical and often called 'driving while being black'
This has been an important issue for me for a long time and I still consider it to be the most important issue in America followed by the incarceration rate of African Americans. We need to care about this. We can't ignore it anymore. It has to start to matter to us. Yeah I am a liberal turd with a degree in music .
These kids come from a depravity know words can describe. They were born into a racist culture that harasses and attacks them every waking moment of their life. Their parents have to explain to them what to do if police come up so that their child won't be killed. I know for so many they can't see what they are going through. Or dont care. They had no choice. Or chance. And fuck all of you who think black on black crime is part of the problem. The problem is the injustice the boys have to go through every day. The courts, the system, the prisons are all rigged against them. In the end they can't get a job, an apartment, or anything because they have a record. Often when a white person commits the same crime they will get community service where an African American will get a year in prison. Then while in prison they will get into a fight then their sentence is extended another 2 to 3 years. They shouldn't be burning down just Target. They should be burning down your comfy suburban neighborhoods.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I'm shocked, but when I went to my cupboard I found a half dozen sprouting jars but zero seeds (time flies).  I just ordered a couple pounds of the usual suspects (alfalfa, broccoli, sunflower....). Thanks for reminding me of what I was missing.

JR

My seeds for sprouting showed up today so I have them soaking in water right now...  Thanks again for the reminder

JR