Lifesaving advice from a black woman held at gunpoint by police

This was flagged away, but I vouched it back; I think it's interesting to hear a story which almost ended in tragedy, just like it's useful to hear about software bugs which almost resulted in data loss or security vulnerabilities.

This article makes a lot of claims about innocent black people being gunned down by police, but is there any actual evidence of this happening disproportionately to white people? Last year I trawled the 2015 Washington Post police shooting dataset and couldn't find any evidence, and a couple months later a black Harvard economist released a paper saying he couldn't find any evidence in the data he looked at. Between that and all of the bad reporting around the Michael Brown shooting, I'm beginning to believe that the only disparity is in media coverage... This story and its interest don't depend on this (in)accuracy, but it's such a common talking point and it doesn't seem to be substantiated.

In particular, I was expecting a lot more drama from a story of a black woman "surviving" an encounter with police. Here's a similar story about a white man in San Fran: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9.... This sort of stuff makes me think that race is perhaps a red herring, and that the quality of police (or police training) simply vary a lot in our country.

I also had to vouch it back, there appears to be a concerted effort to flag this.

Thank you, this was an interesting read.

On the tangent of arbitrary and unneeded flagging, there seems to be quite a great deal of it lately... it's not improving the site.

After I got off work, I tried to find a story that I'd noticed earlier and wanted to comment on, but it was completely gone from not just the front page but everywhere. A completely benign, tech-related story. Makes no sense:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14745430

Even if you believe that, the two core points of the experience stand:

> My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later.

> I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one who must remain calm. The legal system is asking untrained civilians to de-escalate panicky cops.