Comment by morpheos137 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morpheos137 | Hacker News Reader

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Has any rigorous study shown that blacks are more likely to die in police encounters after adjusting for income level and crime rate of where the encounter takes place?

If so please provide a cite or link.

Although out of thousands of cops in the USA I am sure there are some genuine racists the notion that in 2020 cops would be killing blacks intentionally at a higher rate seems ridiculous. 99.999% of cops want to have an easy shift, get a donut or two, write a couple tickets, watch the years go by, retire early and collect a pension. Plenty of poor and middle class whites have been killed by abusive individual cops over the years and yet the reaction is not tribalism, rioting or generalising the actions of few bad cops to the police force as a whole. I agree America has massive problem with overly militarised police but this is not a racial issue. It stems from the drug war and the ease with which criminals can get high powered weapons in America. See North Hollywood Shootout.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver

The reason we just had the largest civil rights protests in American history this summer has as much or more to do with the everyday experience with the police as it does the extraordinary events such as deaths. Deaths were the spark, not the fuel.

The grinding oppression of every day life in terms of policing has been shown in study after study. It is disproportionately felt by black people, mostly men, but it has been steadily expanding to all demographics for decades now.

| Plenty of poor and middle class whites

Yeah and a lot of poor and middle class white people were out supporting the protests because of their own experiences too.

Daniel Shaver's death is not argument against BLM's goals, it's an argument in favor of them.

So what would be the problem with changing the name of the movement to ALM all lives matter and making the focus against police militarisation rather than some divisive narrative of racism?

The vast majority of Americans understand that Black Lives Matter is an inclusive statement, not an exclusive one.

Those who make hay out of the name and have ignored the movement itself for almost a decade now are a small, ineffective minority.

The largest civil rights protest movement in American history doesn't need to spend its time focus-grouping and hand-wringing about people like that.

No, the vast majority of Americans do not believe that at all

After 10 years of a movement that culminated in protests in 2000 cities in all 50 states and 5 territories that had supermajority support in polls, the people who are still ignorant enough, feigned or otherwise, to say BLM means Black Lives Only Matter are numerically and politically insignificant.

No movement has ever changed anything by seeking to get 100% of everyone on board, least of all those most uninformed, hostile, and acting in bad faith.

> The vast majority of Americans understand that Black Lives Matter is an inclusive statement, not an exclusive one.

Do they? I'm not sure what leads you to think that. I have no evidence other than anecdote, but from what I see, I'm not sure that your claim is true.

Imagine you are at a dinner party and haven't eaten for a couple days. The guests don't realize this and are delaying dinner to chat, play games, what have you. Then finally someone says "hey morpehos137 is starving" and a large group of the guests dismiss this and say "We are all hungry" and continue to go about their business.

> Daniel Shaver's death is not argument against BLM's goals, it's an argument in favor of them.

Exactly. I've seen far more outrage about the death of a white man from those who say black lives matter than from those saying all lives matter.

Mhm. December 10, 2017. Two days after the video was released.

  #BLM Activists Call Attention To Graphic Video Of Daniel Shaver's Death At The Hands Of Arizona Police
  Black Lives Matter is against police brutality of all forms and against all people.

https://blavity.com/blm-activists-call-attention-to-graphic-...

Shaver isn't the only non-Black victim of police violence that BLM has been involved in supporting either. While their focus has always been Black people, they have never operated in an exclusive way at all.

> after adjusting for income level and crime rate of where the encounter takes place

Please stop with this racist skewing of statistics. There are thousands of factors involved. A bad faith person will always be able to stack them up in a way that favors their cause. Experts in criminology pretty much agree that racial justice is a problem in urban and sub urban USA, including police violence. The only reason to disagree and to skew the statistics in your favor is to entertain racist believes.

>Experts in criminology pretty much agree that racial justice is a problem in urban and sub urban USA, including police violence.

Because if they don't they are racist. Right?

To me racial justice means that you are not treated differently simply because of your race. In 2021 in America there is no evidence that people are treated differently just because of their race. There is plenty of evidence that people living in high crime areas, engaging in suspicious activities like passing counterfeit money while high on meth and fentanyl are treated differently from your average joe regardless of skin colour.

> Please stop with this racist skewing of statistics. There are thousands of factors involved.

But that's the whole point. If black people are disproportionately shot by police because police are racist, that's a problem with police. If it's because "thousands of factors" cause black people to have disproportionately more encounters with police, but the police themselves are acting with neutrality, then it's a problem somewhere else and you can't fix it through police reform.

The answer is fundamental if you actually want to solve the problem. But not evaluating it is convenient if you just want to keep using it as a political bludgeon forever, because by not even looking in the right places for a solution, the problem is never solved and you can run for office on it over and over.

I am not an expert on criminology. I only have a layman understanding of psychology from university so I can not tell you how the experts have reached a consensus on racial justice in urban USA is skewed against black people (but I bet there are other people on HN that can; if they are willing to spend the effort; which I doubt, since I am almost over this already).

But my layman understanding of psychology is enough to recognize how experts deal with large number factors in social models. You don’t just pick and choose (in fact that is what I’m accusing racists of doing). There is a large body of literature that experts consults. In an average social psychology study you find something like citations to 30-60 different works to back up something as trivial as a study on the stress relation effects of living in proximity to high noise pollution. It is anything but convenient. To the contrary, it is a ton of work. I’m sure expert criminologists have spent years doing nothing but familiarizing them self with the literature so they can best judge how do deal with different factors in their models. And if they do mess up (which I’m sure they do) the self correcting nature of the scientific method will make sure that the worlds knows how their models were erroneous, and subsequent models will take this extra knowledge into effect.

So morpheos137 asks for statistics, you provide none, but accuse him/her of racist skewing of statistics. Um... pretty sure you're the one with the agenda here.

I am not a criminologists, whichever statistics I provide will be of as poor quality as theirs.

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