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Comment by bluntfang | Hacker News Reader

I dunno man, are black people systemically killing other ethnic groups in America right now? Do they have a history of genocide and slavery on the scale of white people? Do we see a bunch of black people doing the black equivalent of Nazi salutes on the side of the road around the country?

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Is there any group that is "systemically killing" any other group in America right now? Please bring data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...

Stop and Frisk is widely believed to be proof that police are disproportionately targeting black people, and it seems interactions with police end in death more for black people than white people.

There are many other reasons some groups may have higher interactions with the police than others, including high rates of absentee fathers, drug addiction and poverty.

Sure, and the war on drugs delivered crack to black people and got them addicted and put them in jail. You're being obtuse if you think black people are more likely to be absentee fathers, drug addicted, and impoverished by the nature of their genetics.

I didn't state that it was because of genetics.

A link to a Wikipedia article about stop-and-frisk in NYC is not exactly compelling data for the extraordinary claim of one racial group "systemically killing" another. But fine, let's take a cursory look at this article: search for the words "murder", "death", and "kill". All hits yield no references to systemic murder of black people by another racial group. There is, however, a discussion about how minority groups are disproportionally represented as both victims and perpetrators of violent crimes in NYC. Furthermore, the NYC police force is majority minority. [1]

> interactions with police end in death more for black people than white people.

There are high quality studies which provide compelling evidence against this claim [2][3], in both absolute and statistically "controlled for" terms. What's more, the killing of black people by police is extremely rare: 0.0033% or 33 per 1 million. [4]

It is stunning and scary to me that people are so willing to (rightly) call out Trump for distributing misinformation, and yet, on the other hand, are perfectly willing to traffic in it themselves on certain topics. The end result of both is stoking unnecessary, divisive, and dangerous fear in people.

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_inform...

[2] Johnson, David J., et al. "Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.32 (2019): 15877-15882.

[3] Fryer Jr, Roland G. "An empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force." Journal of Political Economy 127.3 (2019): 1210-1261. APA

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Are you actually saying stop and frisk isn't compelling data for systemic racism? Damn man, that's pretty much common knowledge at this point.

You claimed that there is a racial/ethnic group in American that is systemically killing another racial/ethnic group, which was outright nonsense. That is what I was addressing.

But, yes, since you bring it up, I don't believe stop-and-frisk is compelling data for systemic racism. And your appeal to common knowledge is a logical fallacy.

As Bloomberg said, there are ethnic/racial groups that are responsible for a dramatically disproportionate share of the crime in NYC. (By the way, the victims of those crimes are almost always within the same ethnic group as the perpetrator) This is especially true of violent crimes and crimes involving guns. So how do you get those guns off the street and protect people? Make it clear to the individuals who carry guns and are at risk of committing guns crimes that they will be caught if they are carrying (via stop-and-frisk).

I often wonder, for people who object so vociferously to things like stop-and-frisk, do they really think the hassle of getting stopped by a police officer exceeds the risk to the lives of people of color?

Taking any demographic and extrapolating the actions of a few to the whole, then basing policies around that is "systemic racism". But not if you're white. News flash, you're not looking for equality with that mindset.

As an intellectual exercise, and looking at the data, what's your cutoff murder ratio for considering any one group to be "systematically killing" another one?

5:1? 10:1?

No, yes, and maybe.

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