I say this as an Asian person: surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism, no?
The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ.... This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total police encounters. While it's tragic that the count is nonzero, any rational person should be amazed that the incidence is so vanishingly low, given the uncertainty inherent to policing. It's truly remarkable that it isn't much much higher. I couldn't find statistics about police killings of unarmed White people, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is higher than 31 since 2014.
The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people is because the media has worked very hard to maximally exploit cherrypicked cases to get you to believe that.
Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence:
> A Gallup poll conducted from June 23 to July 6 [2020] surveying more than 36,000 U.S. adults found that 61 percent of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they'd like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area.
The reason for this is obvious. Persistent socioeconomic inequality has had the same devastating impact within Black communities as it has had everywhere else in the world: increased criminality.
The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people [...]
This is unfair - note that the comment you are referring to didn't specially mention police unarmed shootings of blacks, the comment was about disportionate policing and killings (which presumably includes, but is not exclusive to shootings of unarmed citizens). I mention this because police shootings are not the only manifestation of institutional racism. There are also unjust arrests, accusations, beatings (remember, Rodney King wasn't shot), convictions, and general mistreatment. You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.
As a relatively well-off, straight-laced black man, I'm not overly afraid of getting shot by police (although I think I got close to catching a bullet once), but I am terrified of a stop going bad in some way, not because of what I observed in the media, but because of my own personal experiences.
I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.
Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence
Absolutely true, and that reflects my feelings as well. But that is not the same as saying black communities trust police.
> I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.
I understand there's a meme that exists about Black people needing to fear being murdered by the police. The entire point of my post is that, from a statistical point of view, this is almost as irrational as being afraid of terrorism, a plane crash, a shark attack, or being struck by lightning.
I was also focusing very narrowly on the topic of police killings of Black people, as you noted. I want to be very clear that I understand that Black people are victims of racism and socioeconomic inequality in other ways.
That said, I’m black btw, the problems in the black community are not down to any one thing, but certainly the lack of two parent households is a biggie.
I was fortunate to grow up in California with two parents who could afford to send me to a private school.
Even absent more government intervention, just having more stable households will do a lot to fix the inequalities.
I'm Asian and I grew up with parents who hewed rather closely to Asian culture. There are two values they championed essentially above all others, well known to most: devotion to family and the intense pursuit of academic achievement. I do feel like I've been a direct beneficiary of that cultural impulse. Much like yourself, I did my best to leverage educational opportunities and had the stability of a supportive family.
When we talk about culture and the Black community, many people become understandably wary. It's a fine line between invoking culture and being seen to blame Black people for their own problems. Not to mention that, in doing so, it can be easy to lose sight of the richness of Black culture and its extensive contributions to so many aspects of the American experience e.g. in music, sports, entertainment, art, literature, and cuisine.
Perhaps a better way to frame it is that when a particular community has suffered so much injustice and attendant compounded stagnation, it's very hard to find an expedient solution to bring that community to parity that doesn't involve constructing fresh and even revolutionary internal narratives around achievement (and not just academic). Without that sort of effort, it might take many more generations for a combination of government intervention and the natural course of progress to fully remedy the imbalance.
And there's also the problem of exacerbating racial animus in the course of addressing that imbalance.
While I understand the need for it intellectually, I have substantial misgivings about preferential treatment being extended specifically to Black (or Hispanic or Native American) people along racial lines. There is something that feels deeply wrong about attempting to cure racial injustice by inflicting new racial injustices on people whose only fault was being born a particular race at the wrong moment in history, especially when we are purporting to be an enlightened society that has learned its lesson in this regard.
The position is unpopular with many here, but it is my opinion that we should not be devising a society that argues that a boy from an underprivileged neighborhood in Philadelphia is more deserving of opportunity than a girl from a disenfranchised part of the Rust Belt because he's Black and she's White. Rather, we should be saying that they are nearly equally in need of help from society because they are both disadvantaged. While this is not perfectly fair insofar as it does not factor in race, I believe it is a policy position that on balance would help the Black people who are most in need of it without leaving anyone of another race feeling as if (s)he's experiencing undue discrimination.
Unfortunately I believe that quandary is even more fraught than the issue of police killings and therefore at present resistant to the possibility of honest discourse.
I mean, I literally have no answer. Except, possibly, "yes" and "yes", and "the former is on the whole a lesser evil than the latter"?
This makes two assumptions that I would challenge: that affirmative action as it exists at present is benefitting the most socioeconomically vulnerable underrepresented minorities and that the problem you're describing cannot be tackled with race neutral wealth redistribution and other need-aware policymaking.
Also, if you want to go down the racial grievance accounting rabbithole, then the Irish, Japanese, Jews, etc would like a word as well. You're be hard-pressed to find a race that doesn't have some such claim.
There's probably also something to be said for having policies trying to get some geographic rebalancing in place as well. But, what I am trying to say is that redressing recent-past wrongs MAY require slight over-compensation.
To make anything other than sweeping generalisations, I would need numbers. Oh so many numbers.
https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Rep...
This is an affliction that beleaguers both sides of the aisle.
https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f...
Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.
EDIT: Poster changed the link and added a comment. The below is a response to the modified comment.
> There is no nationwide effort to classify killings based on whether an individual was armed at the time. It's better to just look at killings because those are significant enough to record.
Sure. You can look at the total number of police killings and not only are the numbers still shockingly low as a percentage of arrests and encounters, but there is also no overt sign of an extraordinary racial bias: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de....
> Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.
Axios is one of the most credible outlets to both the GOP and the Democrats. Then-WH spokesperson Sarah Sanders has praised Axios as a worthy outlet.
The Raza database just looks at newspaper reports for deaths by police. There is no nationwide standard for how police deaths should be recorded.
You are the one suggesting bizarre conspiracy. A nationwide conspiracy of local newspaper outlets reporting deaths.
> A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,104 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata
And I will once again reiterate that the suggestion that there are some great number of police killings going undetected in the present highly charged environment is itself a crime against reason.
Asians are remarkably vulnerable to dying by police. They are also extremely under-represented in the police force, unlike black Americans. In the Bay Area, police officers are paid very well. These are stepping stones to middle class membership.
Also, discussions of racism in education may just completely exclude Asians, as if they aren't even worth mentioning even once.
https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
Are they disproportionately killed & policed? It depends on how you cut the statistics for your narrative. As a % of population vs % of Violent Crime vs % of Homicides etc etc. This is not to say there are no benefits about going into an encounter White.
I'm most concerned about anti-Asian racism because the problem is serious and unacknowledged. Anti-black racism is, at the very least, now acknowledged as a problem. I tend to focus my efforts where others don't.