Total deaths in US caused by police. (2019, full year): 1112 [1]
Total deaths in US caused by coronavirus (last Friday, one day): 975 [2]
[1] https://www.theroot.com/here-s-how-many-people-police-killed...
Total deaths in US caused by coronavirus (last Friday, one day): 975 [2]
[1] https://www.theroot.com/here-s-how-many-people-police-killed...
Average daily deaths in US caused by heart disease: 1800
Average daily deaths in US caused by cancer: 1600
Average daily deaths in US caused by corona virus: 1000
https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death
Comparing oranges to oranges:
Total deaths in US caused by homicide (2019): 19510
Total deaths in US caused by police (2019): 1112
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Comparing apples to oranges:
> Total deaths in US caused by police. (2019, full year): 1112 [1]
> Total deaths in US caused by coronavirus (last Friday, one day): 975 [2]
But it’s also helpful to present the causes as well. Your roommate can’t cough on you and give you heart disease.
Yours wifes cooking can give you heart disease.
Poverty can give you asthma.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_poverty#Asthma]
I was not responding to pertinent points of the discussion, but to two statistics placed side by side without any further elaboration.
Should we now also imagine/project the homicide death rates if all civilians were peaceful and happy and compare it with that of the real deaths caused by the police?
Almost. We'd need to compare actual homicides to an imaginary world where everyone cooperated with the police while being arrested.
The police killing someone is, on the face of it, a significant problem. But some percentage of police-caused deaths are justified and would be acceptable after careful review of what happened.
I think everyone would prefer 0 police-related deaths, and all options are on the table to get there. But to compare oranges to oranges properly it would be necessary to split the category into police abuses of power vs unavoidable/reasonable uses of force.
What do you mean by almost? Just do it already. Then post all the imaginary/alternative stats here below.
And that is why an oranges to oranges comparison can't actually be done.
What do you mean how? Aren't you the one who came up with the suggestion in the first place? You go ahead and almost do it.
> And that is why an oranges to oranges comparison can't actually be done.
Classic straw-man argument. You just set up your own imaginary cooperative world of full of alternative stats, then shot it down immediately.
Your "oranges-to-oranges" comparison isn't. It compares homicides - which are overwhelmingly going to be negligent accidents or intentional crimes - with police caused deaths. The police are people we purposefully send into situations where violence is likely or respect for the law has broken down. It is expected that they will cause some deaths in the execution of their duty.
I can certainly see an argument that getting the deaths caused by police to 0 or close to is a worthy goal. But it isn't comparable to homicides because it is normal for the police to be sent in to uncontrolled situations. It'd be nothing short of a minor miracle if police-caused deaths were comparable to background rates given how seedy the US gets. We certainly can't get a feel for the justified/unjustified/negligent breakup of the figures which is germane to the debate.
In philosophy, there is a subject and an object. An object is what the subject observes. An object consists of of properties (has-a) and relations (is-a). Take an orange for example. An orange is-a fruit, and an orange has-a rind, flesh and seeds. It makes sense to compare oranges with oranges (a type of fruit); and orange seeds with orange seeds (the same parts of an orange fruit). Its a stretch to compare an oranges with orange seeds, as they are not the same type of object. Or to put it another way, its like comparing oranges to apples.
> Your "oranges-to-oranges" comparison isn't.
It is, because I'm comparing instances of the same type of philosophical object. Lets take another very relevant example: homicide.
A homicide is simply defined as "the act of one human killing another". So comparing homicides done by policemen with homicides done by civilians, in the same year and country is a valid oranges-to-oranges comparison. Regardless of the circumstances of the homicides, they are all homicides whether justified (e.g. self defense), unjust (murder) or unintentional (man-slaughter). My comparison is not concerned with the parts of the orange (rind, seeds, flesh), but the oranges as a whole. If you'd like to compare police acts of man-slaughter against civilian acts of man-slaughter, that's fine. That's a valid oranges to oranges comparison, just on a lower level of the conceptual heirachy. And even if you did present these statistics, my original point still stands. You cannot however, come up with an invalid comparison (oranges to orange seeds) then try and use it as a straw-man argument against my valid comparison (oranges to oranges).
Number of adults with diagnosed heart disease: 30.3 million [1]
People in the United States infected with corona virus: 1.9 million [2]
[1] https://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/NHIS/SHS/2018...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...
Those are just the kind of meaningful insights you get when you compare pears to pears, apples to apples or oranges to oranges.
– Total population of US (2019): 329 million [1]
– Total population of UK (2019): 68 million [1]
– Total deaths in US caused by police (2019): 1112
– Total deaths in UK caused by police (2019): 3 [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
Just wait a couple of weeks...
P.S.
It might already be higher: https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
Other countries manage to achieve numbers like 2 for Japan, 3 for the UK, 11 for Germany which is nowhere near even adjusted for population. American police kill more people per capita than almost every other country. Per 10 million people that's:
46.6 for the US
0.5 for the UK
0.2 for Japan
You're comparing the USA, which has about 100k shootings per year, 36k deaths involving guns of which 33% (~12k) are homicides, to the UK which has 50-60 cases of homicide involving a gun per year.
The fact is that the US police are far, far, far more likely to encounter a suspect with a gun in the course of their duty than the UK police are.
38 US police officers were shot dead in the line of duty last year. The UK had 3.
They're not equatable.
I believe the last number I saw said there were about 300 million guns in the US - one for each person.
There's no way to just make those disappear into government hands.
This has been done after wars for example (after WWII), and after many different conflicts in different countries in Africa. It would take a long time and would require tightening laws gradually and at the same time encouraging people to hand in their weapons.
This is not particularly difficult logistically, the only difficulty is in the American psyche apparently, which seems completely incompatible with this simple common-sense measure. The outcome would be fewer deaths by cop, fewer deaths in burglaries, and fewer mass shootings.
There is abundant evidence from around the globe that limiting the ownership of guns helps limit deaths.
Moreover, the Supreme Court has already ruled that total ban on firearms in common is unconstitutional[2][3]. Hence why DC and Chicago no longer completely ban handguns. I also don't think the in common use standard will hold since the Supreme Court more recently reiterated "the Second Amendment ex-tends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms"[4]. It is the opinion of some that DC v Heller was watered to get Kennedy on board. Moreover, as California has already argued, you cannot ban something then down the road argue that it's not in common use since the low numbers are artificial.
> To the extent that magazines holding more than 10 rounds may be less common within California, it would likely be the result of the State long criminalizing the buying, selling, importing, and manufacturing of these magazines. Saying that large capacity magazines are uncommon because they have been banned for so long is something of a tautology. It cannot be used as constitutional support for further banning. See Friedman v. City of Highland Park, Illinois, 784 F.3d 406, 409 (7th Cir. 2015) (“Yet it would be absurd to say that the reason why a particular weapon can be banned is that there is a statute banning it, so that it isn’t commonly used. A law’s existence can’t be the source of its own constitutional validity.”).[5]
[1] http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/about-us/highlights/2018/high...
[2] DC v. Heller 2008 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
[3] McDonald v. Chicago 2010 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1521.pdf
[4] Caetano v. Massachusetts 2016 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-10078_aplc.pd...
[5] Duncan v. Becerra 2019 https://michellawyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Duncan-...
Exactly how do you expect people to defend themselves from violent threats when the number 1 counterpoint of "call the police" is taken away or severely limited?
The defund/dismantle/disband movement is, as I understand the movement, more about replacing the police-as-an-institution with a fundamentally different approach or set of approaches to law enforcement, not reducing the total resources or number of persons assigned to law enforcement functions.
If someone manages to carry a "disarm and leave it to the police" argument with that evidence in recent memory it will go down in the history books as one of the great political accomplishments of the 21st century. Anyone who ever argued in favour guns in self defence was talking at least in part about moments in history like these.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/nyregion/nyc-looting-prot...
The UK has a population of 66 million people. The US has a population of 328 million. The UK has 123k police, the US has 687k.
They're not equal but I think you might be exaggerating the differences by comparing very differently sized countries.
There are also cultural issues - policing should be with the consent of the population, if you lose that trust and end up in an adversarial position, violence moves from the last resort to the first resort.
US police killed: 38 UK police killed: 3
If the rate in the UK was the same as the US, 6 policeman would be killed when actually only 3 were killed (123*38/687).
So in the US police are about twice as likely to be killed, yet they kill 500x more people.
You're right, they're not equatable _at all_.
British policing isn't without problems but the idea of (say) police barging into someone's house guns blazing without announcing themselves (as happened recently) is absolutely unimaginable in the UK.
British police operate on consent whereas American police operate on fear (is the stereotype)
In the long term that kind of doctrine is bound to have consequences on stats like deaths caused by the police, no matter how good / bad the intentions of individual officers are.
And it frames how the public reacts to events as well. Like if you are a cop and you shoot a person trying to rob a bank in the US your friends and family might congratulate you on a job well done, where as in europe you’ll be looked at with disdain by your loved ones.
If there are more violent crime its understandable that there would be more police killings,
Do you want to ignore the (non-lethal) evils of prejudice, and just play a numbers game with fatalities? From some back-of-the-envelope math, the average POC in America will still lose more years of their life from simply living in a racist society than from COVID-19.
Life isn't a pissing contest of "my problem is bigger than your problem".
(There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.)
COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly that many years. According to [2] (about 1.5 weeks old), 1 in 1850 (or around 0.05% of) black Americans have died from COVID-19. Even if this continues for the rest of the year, it still can't hold a candle to plain old racism.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/015.pdf [2]: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race
Joking aside, you can sometimes prove causality. It's just not as easy as proving a correlation. The most broadly accepted method would be a RCT (randomized controlled trial), though it is often unethical or unfeasible.
You can also build on causal assumption that everyone agrees on. (Like: A person's gender cannot be caused by a government policy. A person winning the lottery is not caused by anything other than playing the lottery.) From such knowledge you can build a causal graph, and (in some cases) draw new causal conclusions from statistical data.
Long story short: you cannot just dismiss a correlation as being useless for any proof of causality.
> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black 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. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.
Edit: these aren't the calculations you asked for, but should give you an indication of what they are thinking about.
> Systemic racism is way bigger than just police killings.
?
The second means "Even though you're trying to compare these problems, you've massively underrepresented the impact of systemic racism by simplifying it to the number of police killings."
A single protest movement isn't going to end systemic racism, no matter how large it becomes. Even revolutions don't end conservatism -- just ask Leon Trotsky.
However, the coronavirus epidemic is here today and it may well be gone in a year. This may be the worst possible time for a protest movement since the Spanish Flu.
Is your intentional action here to be purposely superficial in order to invoke to deeper discussion? It’s an interesting style that seems particularly suited to this forum.
83570 [1] excess deaths in 2002. Another study says AfAm likely death by 65 38-50%, white 20-33%.
That's direct deaths.
I personally would also include life lost in incarceration for basically nothing (way to many sad examples to list).
And all around lower life quality and total bullsh*t that systemic racism has inflicted on POC from the first Colonists.
1 https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.24.2.4... 2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052342/
1) Police Killings are low. 2) Covid deaths have bottomed.
In the context of police killings, that 1,000 figure doesn’t indicate if it’s innocent killings- sure some may be, but how many are suicide by cop? How many are due to hostage situations? Or how many are due to being fired upon first?
In regards to Covid deaths, 1,000 daily deaths is low compared to the 3,000 we saw at the peak.
So, what point is the parent trying to make?