Hacker News Reader

Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

I don't live in the US and I think the behavior of the police is rather... unsettling but even to me, this looks biased and sensationalist.

6x more black guys killed than white? That does not mean anything. What if there are x12 more black guys committing a crime?

"27 days without killing anybody" - if the country were to be 600M or 1B big, it would probably have just 1 day - it doesn't mean anything really.

99% cases of no accountability? This assumes that all the suspects were innocent old ladies.

Why do people mess up good ideas, with cheap sensationalism?

View on HN

>6x more black guys killed than white? That does not mean anything. What if there are x12 more black guys committing a crime?

this is adressed on the page, where it is noted that the rate of black people murdered does not correlate with crime rates in that area.

>99% cases of no accountability? This assumes that all the suspects were innocent old ladies.

Its an interesting number at least because it shows that regardless of what cops actually do, the justice system rarely/never holds them accountable for it. Perhaps you could say that 99% of the times that cops kill someone its "justified" but that number is very, very unlikely to be up there.

Regardless, I think this is more than simply sensationalism and presents some very interesting facts on a topic that is very relevant today.

> Why do people mess up good ideas, with cheap sensationalism?

Because it works.

It also increases the likelihood than someone will be “engaged” enough to forward the link into virality, and thereby increasing traffic.

Those which does not do this will be ignored and replaced by those who do. The data used in this project have been available to everyone, and many have undoubtedly done presentations about it. Have we seen those more reasonable versions here on HN or as viral features on social media? No. Because they’re not interesting enough. In order to be noticed, you have to crank your interestingness factor to the max.

>What if there are x12 more black guys committing a crime?

There's a difference between x12 black guys committing a crime and x12 black guys convicted of a crime.

>99% cases of no accountability? This assumes that all the suspects were innocent old ladies.

Yes, America presumes innocence.

>Yes, America presumes innocence.

Does the USA do trials for the dead people?

Presumption of innocence is a principle, not computer code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com