Police use-of-force data is finally coming to light

> a large body of people are convinced by their lived experiences [1] that police violence is racially biased, and this conviction is further supported by a massive number of known individual cases

Okay, we know that there's an effect. No one is arguing that black people not only feel that way, but interact with (and are killed by) police at a higher-than-white per capita rate. That certainly should be addressed, and is a major social concern.

I think we agree on how to interpret the data at least this far -- that there's an effect, originally identified anecdotally by black people but supported by data, where black people are killed by police more often per capita. (Numbers I've seen are like 2.5x per capita -- but order of magnitude, I think we can agree on somewhere between 2x and 5x.)

Where we disagree, and I think we're just going to have to disagree, is that this is evidence that there's a lot of systemic racism going on. (Think "70 cent" wage gap, not "95 cent" wage gap.)

I think we're seeing a little bit of active racism, a lot of lingering economic effects of historic racism, a little bit of active cultural maladaptation, and a lot of general police violence. (That's me "thinking about the issue with an open mind" -- that distribution is basically the prior on social issue breakdown.)

You seem to suggest that the data suggests just "a lot of racism", which is where I disagree: I don't think the evidence is anywhere near moving the needle from the prior of "complex weave of the usual issues" to "outright, ongoing, systemic racism".

> But if you think about the issue with an open mind, you're still going to feel pretty damn confident about what's actually going on.

Finally, I just want to say, that this argument supports literally anything that sounds appealing, regardless of how likely it is to be true. There's a long history of creating new problems while attempting to solve problems by adopting solutions that make no sense upon detailed analysis, but sound good or appeal to our emotions in some way.

Police don't even do this. If I am a gun owner and I want to go buy a new gun, I am under more strutany than a police officer who received his training and psych evaluations 20 years ago. Disallowing guns won't stop violence, but it will make for an easier police state. While I am not a gun owner, I do think it's a little amusing that a few bad people (comparative to population) have used guns for harm and now after centuries they are bad. No one had an outcry during the olympics rifle competition - so does that mean only "good people get guns"? It's a no win argument on both sides.

(FWIW, The Guardian, at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... , lists 1146 people killed by police in 2015, of which 306 were black. Almost identical percentages, and it doesn't change your point.)

The tricky part is to look at how non-black people were treated in similar situations. If use of force would have been justified against white people, but non-lethal means were used instead, then it wouldn't show up in the resources you consulted.

The comment about being uncharitable was more part of the wider context of my comments, not directed at you in particular. (There were some common threads to complaints about my posts; I wanted to address them one place so I could reference it. The medium gives a certain incentive to "speak to the crowd" so your posts read as a consistent voice, rather than several conversations.)

> I think that "small percentage" that is attributable to the color of their skin is significant and not to be dismissed

It's not nothing, that's true. However, it's a smaller effect this decade than it was last decade, and the one before that. So it's going away if we just stay the course. We've got that problem not solved, but solving. (Well, as far as I can tell from the data, anyway.)

The issue of how the police respond to class is a much bigger issue (at present), which isn't getting better over time (and might be getting worse).

I can only deal with so much, so I think we should focus on the ongoing, growing problem that impacts everyone rather than the smaller, already improving problem that impacts just some people. I think the focus on "racism" in the policing is distracting from that -- it's treating the last 5% as the main 95% of the problem -- and worse, splits the two biggest demographics on a topic they really should align on.

It's not that the racist component is unimportant -- it's that it's just considerably less important than the underlying problem, so while they're right about there being racism, they're wrong about racism being the problem with the police. There'd still be a problem with the police killing blacks even if it were at the same per capita rate as whites! (And arguably, it already is under the "equal" rate, and police should kill more blacks to be "fair" or "not racist".)

> So how do you propose to magically solve their poverty if that is "the real issue"? Because from where I sit as a homeless person, that comes across as an excuse to not deal with racism, which is real and does have an impact.

I don't propose to magically solve their poverty. I expect to incrementally chip at the causes and traps while hundreds of thousands or millions suffer and die needlessly, because economic and social shift is hard. But there are economic policies we know of that can address poverty, and we are making in-roads at that problem, even if it's been hard.

My argument is that telling police who are already responding to economic and cultural incentives, not racial ones "don't shoot them because of their skin" does absolutely nothing, and worse than nothing if it discharges our emotional energy we might have used to tackle the real issues with class instead. In that way, correctly identifying the cause helps us even if we can't do anything about it directly -- at least we're still mad about it, instead of thinking it's all good when really, things will continue to deteriorate.

> What I said was, there was a hypothesis, it made a testable prediction, and measurements support that hypothesis. This is sometimes called evidence.

If the hypothesis is "police are racist against black people when deciding to use force", then no, measurements don't support that hypothesis at all or too weakly to reject the null hypothesis -- we haven't measured the coupling to demographics to get a good prior estimate on the number of deaths. Without that, we need to sort of "average" over possible couplings, and end up with something like 0.5 to 2.5 times "appropriate number of blacks to number of whites being killed by police". Since that range includes 1, until we can refine the coupling between shooting distribution and demographics, we basically have a null result on our hypothesis.

> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".

> WP helpfully reminds us that in US law the lowest legal burden of proof is the far "reasonable suspicion". If you believe the data doesn't even mean that low burden of proof, then I certainly disagree.

I don't disagree that there's a "reasonable suspicion" of racism affecting the outcomes of policing -- but I think that's been the case for, oh, the entire lifetime of the country.

I disagree that there's a "preponderance of evidence" (which I'd argue is the lowest standard to reach a conclusion besides "we should check more" or "there isn't enough evidence to tell") that the dominant cause of the high number of black deaths is racism, that we even have a number of black deaths which are in some sense "in excess" of what we'd expect from "fair" or "not racist", and think people are likely a bit more... uh... "reasonable" than I am if they think there's a "reasonable suspicion" that racism is the dominant cause of the discrepancy between black per capita and white per capita death-by-police rates.

I'm not, however, against looking in to it more. People should totally do that, and I bet they'll get their name in some sociology book for proving the racist component exists.

I just think, you know, we should talk about the fact that police kill twenty people per state every year, rather than the few people in the entire country that happens to who happen to have it happen just because they're black. That is, perhaps we should talk about how POLICE ARE JUST BEATING AND SHOOTING TONS OF PEOPLE UNNECESSARILY, rather than about how we should fix it so that they do so to the same number of white and black people, who once you account for confounding factors, seem to get abused at a roughly even rate already (eg, +/- 10%).

> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".

I think that the "evidence" backing the claims hasn't even cleared basic Bayesian analysis, and is a case of people jumping on an emotionally charged things that sounds good.

It's not that I need 5-sigma to accept a social issue, it's that I need proponents to at least pass the basic threshold of "entirely statistical artifact". And right now, the rate at which blacks are being killed relative to whites is anywhere from 0.5-2.5x, which because it includes 1, is only a slightly skewed-basically-null result.

So with the police-are-racists claim hovering at "statistical anomaly", but the police-are-violent-psychopaths claim well documented, I think people who are focusing on the "racism of the police" are... well... misguided.

There's a very real, well-documented issue. It's just seems that it's a complex classism one, not a racism one, which is way less sexy to talk about.