I'm not here defending the police, or denigrating the project, just playing devils advocate. What happens if the police just ignore you?
We've come a long way since that post in terms of strategy and focus. Most of that time was spent with between 1 and 3 volunteers, working a couple hours a week.
Transparency is a good goal in itself, I think. People are already using this public data, we're just trying to make it more accessible.
"Policing the police" was the original phrase used on reddit, but if you look at our website (https://pdap.io), that's not a phrase we use.
I’d like to aim higher than a quotable statistic for a politician, in any case :)
This seems to indicate the data will always and only be used to tell a preferred narrative.
Despite the downvotes your example is good I think it's safe to say the 95% male to female ratio is likely to be down to males more likely to be involved in violent incidents than females. No one really has a problem with this until skin colour comes into it. As a society though tackling the cause of why males get into violent confrontations seems like a no brainer.
Why isn't it plausible that different groups are different in some ways? For instance, when it comes to testosterone, this seems to be the science.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20759/
> In fact, African American men have higher exposure to testosterone, the main biologically potent circulating androgen, than their Caucasian and Asian counterparts, beginning in the in utero period. African American women have testosterone levels that exceed those of Caucasian women by 50% or more in early pregnancy, an exposure that has been hypothesized to permanently alter the “gonadostat,” the hypothalamic-pituitary-testicular axis, in African American male offspring relative to Caucasians. African American men during young adulthood also have substantially higher circulating testosterone levels than their Caucasian counterparts (approximately 13 to 15% difference at age 20 years). Although this difference appears to dissipate with age, African American men still have slightly higher testosterone levels than Caucasians (≈3% higher) at age 40 years.
For example, here's a larger study showing NO difference in testosterone between black and white men: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17456570/
Conversely, I've never heard of a single study anywhere claiming that women have more testosterone than men. QED
I guess the question is why people don't think that correlation holds true by race (or culture) as well. The percentages match up. For instance, white males (and black males and hispanic males) are actually over-represented as demographic cohorts who are victims of police shootings, whereas asian males and women of all races are under-represented. This tracks exactly with violent crime rates.
Perhaps we should address this a gender problem more than a racial problem. At least, that's what the data tells us.
The National Crime Victimization Survey says yes. Also any article you see trying to debunk FBI crime stats but doesn't mention the NCVS (and how the NCVS largely corroborates the FBI stats) is either ignorant or willfully deceiving you.