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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

There's a simple solution here- stop the police from murdering black people. If a house burns down it can be rebuilt, but you can't rebuild the lives ended by white supremacy in our police departments.

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Shouldn't you be arguing for fewer police killings, period? Last I checked more white people were being killed by police than black people.

Not as a percentage, which I'm sure you're aware of.

Indeed. Have you adjusted for police interactions though? How about poverty level and criminal history?

We can play statistics all day, which is kinda my point. It's pretty obvious there is a bias, but not so obvious (to me) what the root causes are. Racism and second degree soci-economic factors are definitely on the table. Labeling every single police event as racially motivated makes no sense though.

You're misinterpreting the facts. Black people are more likely to be killed by police - they're not more in number because they're only 13% of the population [1]. The problem is the power of police unions and qualified immunity which is a legal construct made to be abused.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-cle...

I misinterpreted nothing: more white people are being killed by police than black people [1][2]. Which part are you challenging?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

Again, adjust for population.

> Results: Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

You're right, but calling it a 'simple solution' is disingenuous. We have decades of structural racism, policing legislation, ill-considered training regimes, and cultural bias to correct for in a federated system whose stakeholders are notoriously contemptuous of top-down approaches, and who's legislative actors avoid being responsible for any decisions with consequences like the plague.

You might as well say solving conflict in the middle-east is as simple as turning every government there into a functioning liberal democracy.

You start by removing qualified immunity for people who murder. Not all police killings are murder but the ones we've seen show a systemic corruption that requires a systemic response.

I agree police reform is needed, but the rioting doesn't seem like a good way to deliver this message and will instead make enemies of those who could otherwise be allies.

I mean what does some guy who owns a furniture shop in Seattle have to do with a police officer shooting someone in Chicago?

At this point I fear that the good that could come from this is being drowned out by the violence and the destruction and if it continues it will be counter-productive to the movement.

So maybe do something less violent, like kneel during a football game. People will definitely unilaterally support that, right?

> So maybe do something less violent, like kneel during a football game. People will definitely unilaterally support that, right?

Yeah, get one of those famous players like Roger Federer. Or maybe the whole Detroit Redskins team.

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