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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

I support the protests, and believe they can be done safely, but we can't forget about the virus. A quick googling gives me numbers between 300 and 1000 people dying of police violence per year. Call it 1k-2k per year. If we eliminate 50-100 years of that, we match what coronavirus has done in a couple months.

However, places are starting to relax the shelter-in-place rules already, so people going out now isn't comparable to people going out a month or two ago.

I do wish it weren't an either/or. Protest with your mask, and keep distance. To most people I know, this is how the protests they've been to have gone, so that's great and we should stop giving them shit, the same way as we shouldn't label the whole movement by the actions of some looters.

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I don't agree with the comparison of dying of a natural cause, which Covid is, to being murdered in some cases, killed carelessly in others, by people you and fellow citizens pay and give special privilege to so they would prevent crime rather than commit it.

Is that 300-1000 unjustified deaths, or does it also include situations where the use of deadly force may have been reasonable?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Filtering for "2019, black, unarmed" you get:

15 people shot and killed by police match your filters (less than 1%)

Change that to "2015" and you get:

38 people shot and killed by police match your filters (1%)

A similar amount die from tasers, then you have ones that die from chokeholds etc like Floyd, and then you have the ones that "die in police custody".

People are also marching for deaths caused by other citizens that were first swept under the rug, like Ahmaud Arbery.

I guess it’s certainly “possible” that US cops justifiably shoot and kill more people every year than most counties have done of the last hundred (assuming they have ever done it at all), just not very possible.

More citizens are armed in the US. Deadly force is required more frequently because of that.

It is important to note that this isn't just about police brutality. There are a number of racial disparities that result in more black deaths. From the letter:

> lack people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress.

So 1k-2k per year would be a low estimate. Some will correctly point out that that 1k-2k killed by police includes people that are committing violent crimes (ie, killing them may not be unjust). The response to that argument is to look at the intersection of poverty and race to see how systemic racism drives crime in black communities.

Indeed, white people in the US on average live 3.5 years longer than black people in the US.[1]

Did you know that an even greater health/life expectancy disparity exists between men and women?

One gender on average lives 5.1 years longer than the other.[2]

>decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress.

Likewise all of these issues affect men disproportionately compared to women.

Why is it so popular to talk about these same issues as systemic oppression against group X (relative to group Y), while ignoring or the fact that those same issues affect group XY, often to an even greater degree (relative to group XX)?

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_health_in_the_Unite...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex...

To be perfectly upfront with my own beliefs, I believe economic disparities is the mother of all other disparities and that many of these statistics that show disparities in outcomes for whites vs blacks are just echos of that economic disparity. That, I think, is the core disparity and the core way in which "the system" oppresses people across generations.

That being said, I don't think gender is a good counterpoint given that biology does have a significant role in some disparities in outcomes for men & women (for example life expectancy). With race, as cited in the letter, biological explanations aren't enough to explain the differences.

> Why is it so popular to talk about these same issues as systemic oppression against group X (relative to group Y), while ignoring or the fact that those same issues affect group XY, often to an even greater degree (relative to group XX)?

Speculatively, with respect to blacks in America, I'm going to guess that it isn't any single issue that is concerning, but the totality of them. Yes, a given issue X might affect group Y more than it does blacks, but blacks in the US as a population are affected by multiple such issues and I can't think of many areas where they have a leg up over other groups.

>To be perfectly upfront with my own beliefs, I believe economic disparities is the mother of all other disparities and that many of these statistics that show disparities in outcomes for whites vs blacks are just echos of that economic disparity.

I agree my friend, thank you for the measured response.

>given that biology does have a significant role in some disparities in outcomes for men & women (for example life expectancy)

How do we know biology is the most significant factor that causes women to live longer than men?

How do we know biology is not a significant factor that causes white people to live longer than black people? It's a biological fact that black people in the US suffer greatly from vitamin D deficiency[1]

[1]https://www.cooperinstitute.org/2019/09/24/african-americans...

I don't know, numerically, if the large protests ongoing now are hugely more contributory to existing open<state> protests. For one, the large protests currently are highly masked, while the open<state> protests were highly unmasked (plus they put pressure on states to relax containment standards without any plan for contact tracing or similar).

Agreed, that's why I followed the numbers with a big "however." I'm trying to get better at writing clearly.

Death is one metric, but what about feeling safe participating in normal daily activities? With COVID-19 that fear will be gone in a year for some people once a vaccine has developed. From what I hear from pretty much all of my black friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, the threat of murder, violence, harassment, or unjust arrest from police is something they have been dealing with for their whole lives, and will continue to deal with long after a vaccine is found (unless we take start taking meaningful actions). People rightly talk about the toll of lockdown and fear of the virus on mental health. Now is a good time to start conversations about how fear of abuse of the criminal justice system affects mental health.

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