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Comment by x86_64Ubuntu | Hacker News Reader

Why do people always look at "shootings". The black experience with police extends to all interactions from fining, arresting, charging, overcharging, railroading all the way up to killings. That's like having a quality metric that ONLY considers times when production had to be shutdown, and never when people couldn't login, when transactions were lost, and when people got someone else's shopping cart's contents in theirs.

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Unfortunately leadership want to grab into the most salient examples and purposely use raw language like “police brutality”. Not denying there is police brutality because there is, but pointing out the leadership themselves are pushing this angle, so how do you expect people to look at the finer points?

But I get it, it’s not sexy, it doesn’t draw headlines, it doesn’t draw middle class protesters.

Shootings are both extreme enough and infrequent enough (though still all too frequent) that one could plausibly assemble a nearly complete national dataset, plus they are more likely to get covered in the news/on social media. I’m not familiar with the literature, but I’d bet there are dozens of high quality (though more limited) studies on the racial disparities in the interactions you mentioned for each study on Police killings.

Yea I just mentioned that in another post, I'd love to see studies like this that try to analyze police and biases towards minorities.

Are you aware of any?

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