The hyperbole around police is getting a bit ridiculous. We need way, way more accountability for police, but being so absurdly extremist, particularly with rhetoric like that which is so easily disprovable, is not going to move us in that direction. It's just going to make proponents of police reform (like both of us and many others here) be dismissed as ridiculous crazy people.
"In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime." [1]
If police are mostly spending their time doing discretionary traffic stops, and using a criteria for those stops that ignores most white drivers, then "Pretty much all they do is harass and commit violence towards minorities" is accurate, at least in terms of time spent.
It could be simultaneously true that LA County sheriffs spend somewhere between 0.1% and 5% of their time playing a crucial role in society. It would be great to know whether this was true!
1. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/police-are-not-prim...
Black people get force used 12-15x more often. Hispanic, 2-3x.
In historical context, this isn't particularly surprising. What's different about our modern era is the extent to which we're finally talking about it.
And they're committing ~50% of homicides and shootings while being 5% of the SF population. Stats are a funny things, they say a lot of things depending on which ones you look at
https://sfgov.org/policecommission//sites/default/files/Docu...
Now the question comes: why is this the case, and how can we address it? I don’t have evidence to support this, but I would imagine that race is an unfortunate proxy for socioeconomic status, and that, rather than race, is the main driver for these homicides. The report goes on to link drugs, gang membership, and other factors which are more significant issues in more deprived communities to these homicides, which suggest at least a reasonably circumspect approach to the problem.
Yes that's my point too, saying "police bad because they arrest black people more" while ignoring the entire context is as bad as saying "black people bad because they commit more crimes" while ignoring the context. In both cases you're looking at the rusty last link of a very long chain
We absolutely cannot use stats on suspects, who are chosen by police, to demonstrate that there is no police bias in use of force.
I was instead saying the OP is likely reasonable to infer from the data that Black men are disproportionately likely to be involved in homicides.
While it is of course possible that suspects are wrongly accused, victims’ ethnicities should be fairly clear.
Probably most cities which aren't absolute shit holes like LA, yes indeed...