Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person

I agree with that. There are always shades of grey to every argument.

However the point that I'm trying to make (maybe badly) is that the Police are different to most other organisations. They're probably closest to healthcare in that the population, or maybe even distinct communities of a country needs to be able to trust the entire police force has its interest at heart.

From an outside perspective, this is failing in a bad way in the US. It is more than likely the actions of a few that is causing it.

That failure has bad repercussions, things get worse because people start taking justice into their own hands ... it leads to riots, clashes and worse. That's why you can never tolerate any corruption in a justice system.

I've witnessed first hands the riots here in London that resulted from questionable Police actions (we still don't know the full story of those events). It feels like society is crumbling when things get that bad.

Look at the data from the data source used in that stack exchange.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

    white killed by police: 495 (49.5%)
    black killed by police: 259 (26.1%)
    hispanic killed by police: 172 (17.3%)
    other: 67  

About 13% of the US population is black, and 12.5% is hispanic. Both groups ARE over-represented in police shootings, with black people being about 2x more likely to be killed than their population figure would suggest. Compared to the way this is portrayed in the news, however, I would suggest that these figures already run contrary to the narrative that this is primarily dictated on the basis of racist behavior by police. The fact that there are more white people killed by police annually ALONE (despite their larger representation in the population) is a fact that most people would be surprised to hear.

What really offsets the data is once you begin to include racial statistics on crime. Obviously police officers aren't just taking individuals out of the population and random and killing them (isolated outliers not included), so it would be irresponsible to just compare the racial component of police shootings with population representation. This data, however, varies greatly by area. However, in urban environments in particular, the racial component in crime is enormous. In Chicago, for example 75.3% of homicide was committed by black people, 24.6% by hispanics, and 3.5% by white people. To expect equal representation in police shootings, given those crime statistics, would be completely insane.

So the long story short is: given a straight comparison to population distributions, there is an overrepresentation of black/hispanic shootings by police. With the inclusion of racial participation in violent crime though, the motivation for police fatalities cannot responsibly be attributed to a racial motivation without a serious multivariate analysis.

Your entire claim is a red herring, unless you're claiming it's somehow better that cops murder non-black people and get away with it.

This is like the game where you can say a sentence where emphasis on different words changes the meaning, i.e. "I don't agree that cops murder black people" versus "I don't agree that cops murder black people." In text you can be ambiguous, and if anyone disagrees with your defense of cops, you just back off into the weird statistical claim about race that isn't that important.

So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.

> Your entire claim is a red herring, unless you're claiming it's somehow better that cops murder non-black people and get away with it.

It's not a red herring. The implication that "police murder blacks" is that there is a racist component in police murder, but the data show that this isn't the case, at least not in the last decade. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this is better or worse.

> So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.

No, of course I'm not defending murder. I'm posting because fixing problems requires properly understanding them. I understand that many people have no qualm with worsening the problems they purportedly care about so long as it lets them get a punch in against some group of people they dislike; however, that's not really my style.