Hah! With friends like you . . .
“That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.”
I’m glad you brought up proportions in your asinine comparison of police vs. black people killing black people, because that’s once again where morons like you forget my admonition: IT’S THE DENOMINATOR, STUPID!
Since I could only find FBI data as recent as 2011, we will use that year.
We’ll take your estimate of 100,000 cops in the US. According to the CDC’s WISQARS (http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html), there were 133 black people killed during legal intervention in 2011. 133 out of 100,000 police officers killed a black person.
According to Wikipedia, there are 38,929,319 black people in the US. According to the FBI, there were 2,447 instances of a black person being killed by a black person in 2011. So, 2,447 out of 38,929,319 black people killed a black person.
The odds ratio of a cop killing a black person versus a black person killing a black person is 21.1590 (p < .0001). This means that it is statistically far more likely for a cop to kill a black person than for a black person to kill a black person. A cop is 21 times more likely to kill a black person than a black person is.
I didn’t say “killed”. I said “murdered”.
How many black persons were murdered by police officers in 2011?
Without the cooperation of police departments (as well as things like body cameras), we can’t know.
Just like we don’t know exactly how many slaves were murdered by their masters before 1865, or exactly how many black people were murdered in the Jim Crow South.
Do you know how many it would have to be to flip the odds in the direction of significantly more black people killing black people than cops killing black people? Less than 1; if we presume 1 cop murdered a black person, the OR is 0.16, with a p value of .07. (The odds flip, with nevertheless a non significant association, at a total of 6 (OR = 0.95, p = 0.9)).
It’s the denominator, stupid. There are 389 times more black people in the US than cops.
Beyond this, the comparison itself is fucking asinine. My point is that it’s also statistically stupid.
We can’t know how many police officers were convicted of murder in 2011, or how many of their victims were black?
Or we’re not interested in actually looking up the numbers because doing so would harm the narrative?
Smapti, I say this with all due respect: you are an unhinged loon. Again, with all due respect.
If you pretend that “the likelihood of a cop murdering a black person” means the same thing as “the likelihood of a black person being murdered by a cop”.
We can’t know how many black people were actually murdered by police. We’re not talking about murder convictions, we’re talking about murders – which can happen even if there is no conviction.
So it’s one of those unknown unknowns, then.
Rumsfeld?
It’s possible, but very rare. You basically need a believable post-trial confession or extremely strong evidence that, for whatever reason, was not presented at trial. It’s reasonable to say that OJ Simpson, or the Emmett Till killers, got away with murder. It’s not reasonable in any of the cases presented in this thread.
The number of police killings that we can reasonably say are murder, rather than manslaughter, negligence, accidents or justified self defence, may very well be zero.
Using “murder” to refer to a wide range of other deaths is false, dangerous, and disrespectful to those who were actually murdered.
This is SUCH an idiotic line of argument. Everyone, EVERYONE, is bothered by the fact that criminals commit murders. That’s why we have the entire criminal justice system. That’s why we have cops. That’s why we have courts. We hate criminals. Criminals should be caught and punished.
But it’s an accepted fact of human existence that some percentage of the population will be criminals. It was true in ancient Rome, it was true in 10th century China, it’s true today.
Cops committing crimes, however, is far more outrageous and offensive to our understanding of civil society, even if a (meaningless) comparison of absolute numbers suggests that it is less important than non-cops committing crimes. Cops committing crimes renders meaningless the very structures that we put into place to protect ourselves from lawlessness. It’s a betrayal.
That figure seems extremely low, suggesting that only one third* of black people murdered were killed by other black people. That contradicts everything I’ve ever seen on the subject. Does it refer to all murders, or only those the FBI investigated?
Very rough stats, but there’s around 15,000 murders per year in the US, and around 50% of the victims are black.
It’s not even reasonable to suppose Oscar Grant wasn’t murdered?
A person deliberately drew a gun, pointed it at Grant, and on purpose fired the weapon at Grant’s torso while Grant was lying face down, his hands cuffed behind him. Grant died, which is a reasonable thing to expect would happen when you do that. I mean, one could reasonably argue that was murder. The cop was not convicted of murder, but that’s typical.
Monk, I’m failing to see the hateful bigotry in Steophan’s statement.
If someone points a gun at a cop, he’s gonna get shot. It doesn’t matter what color his skin is. Same if they pull a knife or whatever. Skin color is meaningless in this context. If someone attacks a cop, bad shit is gonna happen and that was the point of his post. Perhaps you could point out what was hateful or bigoted about it, other than its accuracy.
Other things that can get you shot by police – reaching for ID, running away, moving in a way a cop interprets (rightly or wrongly) as threatening, having the bad luck to be arrested by a group of police that includes an old, unqualified idiot who mistakes his gun for a taser…
If anyone still doubts the racist violent nature of cops (not all of them of course), but if you actually have doubts, or just reject the very notion, the facts probably won’t make any difference to you at all.
For those who are unsure, there is no doubt after looking at reality.
In this case, the cops beat one of their own, which makes it impossible to deny it happened, or to deny that sometimes cops just start inflicting brutal violence on black men, with out warning at all.
An Undercover Cop, Brutally Beaten, Revealed Racial Divide In Boston
1995 Beating by Boston Police Highlights Dangers for Black Undercover Officers
He was brutally and illegally beaten by cops, who thought he was just a black man.
If that doesn’t mean anything to you, then nothing will ever get through…
And all of this happened twenty years ago, you say?
Well, this is no doubt VERY relevant to events happening in an era where people graduating from high school were not yet alive at the time.