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Comment by axguscbklp | Hacker News Reader

From your source, white/black people shot to death by cops in 2018 breaks down as 399/209. That's about 2x.

Now if I take a look at: https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2&selY...

And I focus on arrests made in situations such as incidents of weapons possession, aggravated assault, or the violent crime aggregate, I don't see much of a discrepancy versus that 2x. For example, for the violent crime aggregate it breaks down as 288620/187470. That's about 1.5x. That is, 1.5x as many white people as black people got arrested for violent crimes. Yet 2x as many white people as black people got shot by cops in that year.

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I don't see the relevance. Can you help me understand how this is relevant to police shooting and killing 3x more Blacks than Whites per year?

They don’t. They shoot more caucasians per year by a significant margin.

> They don’t. They shoot more caucasians per year by a significant margin.

Not when normalized. See my parent comment.

Or, reposting:

    Ethnicity | EOY-19 killed | July-19 pop est | humans per 10m

    ------------------------------------------------------------
    
    White, non-hispanic | 370 |     198,256,671‬ |          ~18.7
    
    Black               | 235 |      43,984,096 |          ~53.5

You're normalizing to raw population. You want to normalize to "armed conflicts with the police" or similar.

Using the above FBI 2018 homicide statistics, blacks committed 3177 homicides in 2018, while whites committed 3011---in other words, blacks account for ~50%, despite only being 13% of the population.

Taking that proportion as a rough "criminality index," and multiply 53.5 by 13/50, and things look very different.

The whole point of the comment you are questioning is to also normalize it to something besides total percent of population. The new comparison seems to say that if you are a violent criminal your chances of getting shot by the police are higher if you are white.

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