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Comment by rbecker | Hacker News Reader

Your peers might be wondering why the only killings that become high profile, are those of people of color.

That was just an example of a controversial topic. I mentioned a spectrum of opinions that were observable amongst peers and on social media, and that is certainly one.

(The premises are false enough that it feels less like a "peers" opinion and more like a "social media rando who needs attention" opinion, but I guess that distinction illustrates the original point.)

Are you trying to cast doubt on the imbalance in the occurrence of these killings? That seems naive if I assume the best of intentions.

Could you quantify that imbalance? How many are killed by police, compared to the number of committed homicides (used as proxy for rate of legitimate police interventions), by race?

I am not going to reply to this because it’s a frustratingly crass response that lives up to the stereotypes of engineers. Is it that hard to believe that even in legitimate police interventions they are much more likely to use deadly force with a black person? “Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men.” https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

For the benefit of readers less willing to selectively ignore statistics: non-Hispanic whites are 2.4x more likely than blacks to be killed by police (2.7x more if counting only unarmed deaths), per committed homicide. Sources:

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

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