Can you please support this rather than repeating it?
There was a whole thread on it.
Just offer a single sentence, then. 21 times more young black men than young white men are killed by police, but the crime disparity for young black men is only 6 to 9 times. How is the larger disparity in shootings justified?
What are the statistics for black people resisting arrest vs. white people?
If you have these numbers, please cite.
While I realize data isn’t the plural of anecdote, I am struck by the number of people in these discussions who’ve quite obviously never conversed with an actual black person.
I literally have *never in my life *met a black person who has not been, on multiple occasions, harassed by the police and treated in a manner that I would raise an absolute shitstorm over. And hell, this is Canada, but the Americans I know will tell you the same thing. I know black people who’ve never in their lives committed a significant crime who have been pulled over on “routine stops” or “met a description” a dozen or two dozen times, or even more - something that has never happened to me, a white man, a single time. Yes, anecdotal, but incredibly universal, the kind of thing I simply cannot ignore.
Now, I’m not saying the OP’s crack cocaine conspiracy idea is true. It’s silly, actually. Nor would I deny, a la Der Trihs, that there are many good cops out there. But if you think black people aren’t routinely discriminated against you’ve got your head so far up your ass you should be able to see out your navel.
There was also a cite of 14 times, so it’s 6-14 times, and it specifically referred to violent crime… And you’re ignoring the statistics on how young black men are several times more likely to come into contact with the police than other groups - at least twice as many. So, you can get between 2x6=12 and 2x14=28, which 21 is bang in the middle of. If, as some statistics show, young black men are more than twice as likely come into contact with the police, then if anything the ratio becomes less than you’d expect.
I’ll try to give an example. Assume a population of 1000 people, half young black men and half young white men. 10% of them come into contact with the police in a given time period - so 100 people. We would expect roughly 66 black men to 33 white men.
We also expect between 6 and 14 more of the young black men to be violent - which nicely averages at 10. Let’s assume that the chance of a young white man being violent is 1/33, for the sake of neatness. In which case 10/33 young black men will be violent.
Meaning that the police will encounter ((10/33)x66)=20 violent young black men for every ((1/33)x33)=1 violent young white man. Which is pretty damn close to your figure of 21 times as many killings. It’s entirely consistent with the statistics presented in the thread, and rational action by the police.
And here is exactly why I say you don’t understand statistics - you don’t get that a number of small changes can multiply into one large outcome.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
I literally have *never in my life *met a black person who has not been, on multiple occasions, harassed by the police and treated in a manner that I would raise an absolute shitstorm over.
[/QUOTE]
I have, but they were all female. I have literally never met a black man, no matter how law abiding, who hasn’t been harassed by cops. One of my black male friends is not only law abiding and solid middle class but a major cosplay enthusiast who travels to national level RPG tournaments and is called ‘Urkel’ by his own family because he’s such an uber-nerd, and even he has been harassed, in several cities. I live in a city with a majority black population.
Most of the black men I’ve talked to about it also say that not all of the cops who harassed them were white.
OK, you got me there. Black females aren’t harassed the way black males are.
I don’t think a lot of people get this. If you’re a black man, the police will treat you as an enemy. You’ll face it your whole life. Doesn’t matter if you have never committed a crime. It just not the same as being white.
I have, and the guy in question, a coworker of mine, is, by his own admission, a former drug dealer and banger who’ll tell you that every time he ever got hassled by the cops was because he did something stupid. He definitely looks the part of “scary black man” - tall, scruffy beard, kinky hair when he’s not wearing a do-rag, he dresses the part, etc., but he’s not involved in the kind of stuff that got him in trouble anymore.
He recently shared an experience with me where he got pulled over for speeding on his way to work. It could have been bad for him, because he also had a suspended license (unpaid tickets) and his registration was out of date. He explained to the (white) cop that he was on his way to work and he was trying to earn money honestly so he could pay off his tickets and get everything straight. Not only did the cop not ticket him, the cop let him park his car somewhere it wouldn’t be towed and then gave him a ride to work in his squad car after frisking him. And this wasn’t in some white-bread neighborhood where nothing bad ever happens - this was in a not-so-savory part of south Tacoma.
My anecdote is no more proof of anything than yours is, but I daresay that it shows that how you behave while interacting with the police matters a lot more than your skin color.
The 14 times was just a “some guy says” – the 6 to 9 times had supporting data. The 14 times was unsupported.
For one thing, this is made up – no stats were presented on how young black men are “several times more likely” to be in contact with police. For another thing, even if it wasn’t a made up number, the greater contact (if it exists) is already taken into account by the 6-9 times for crime stats. There’s no reason why this greater contact would apply twice for shootings, but only once for crime stats.
You’re the one who is inventing numbers and applying multiples for no reason. This “contact” number is made up, and even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t apply for shootings but not for violent crime. If cops are more likely to encounter young black men, that partially explains why they are more likely to arrest young black men – so that number would already be factored in.
You’ve just shown once again that you don’t even understand what I’ve written. Come back when you do, and then we can debate it.
You offered no cite for your “black people are in contact with police more often than white people” number. That was made up, as far as I can tell. And then you applied it to one statistic but not the other.
I’m not sure if anyone can understand what you wrote. If they do, maybe they can explain it to me. You’ve barely tried.
I can believe that. If black people get hassled by police more, there will be more contact with police. Says nothing about if the contact is warranted.
I’ve never been black, but when I was in college with long hair and driving a big car I got stopped all the time in Boston. Never got a ticket, never a reason, never an apology. I just got used to it. I had more contact with police then than I did when I had short hair and a smaller car and was older.
But I guess it was all my fault.
No it doesn’t.
I mean, I know white guys who are always in trouble with the cops, too. They’re the ones who deserve to be. There’s always an individual who has a bad experience or a good experience here and there, it takes all kinds.
The difference is that white guys who keep their noses clean simply do not get regularly harassed by the police. It’s a remarkably rare event. It’s not part of a white man’s life experience to be unnecessary harassed by the police; it absolutely IS a part of a black man’s experience. You can have a perfectly clean record but if you’re black, you’re going to get treated dramatically differently by cops.
The intransigence people (white people, mostly) have in refusing to accept this rather astoundingly obvious thing is really no different from men refusing to believe how much women are sexually harassed, which is, by the way, a shocking amount. It’s a bizarre, willful blindness that is motivated, I’d assume, by a desire to pretend the world is different from how it actually is.
It’s been one of your main points in all of these threads that black people are disproportionately stopped by the police, you can’t now turn round and say you don’t believe it happens. I fully accept that the factor of two is a pure guess, anecdotally it seems to be much larger than that.
If you really can’t understand my example using simple numbers, that’s really not my problem. Everything relevant was cited in the previous thread, except the factor of two for police contact that I freely admit I guessed.
Do you think it’s implausible that young black men are twice as likely to come into contact with the police than the population as a whole?
There are many, many more white people in the US than black people – about 5 or 6 to 1. So even if black people are disproportionately stopped by the police, that doesn’t mean that police are in contact with black people more than white people. If you believe they are, that means that the disproportionate stopping isn’t just 2 to 1 – it’s like 10 to 1 or more. If you believe that, you’ll have to provide a cite.
That’s a different question. You said police are twice as likely to be in contact with young black men, not that young black men are twice as likely to contact with police. The two numbers can’t be the same, because black people are only about 12% of the population.
On second read, this is getting way farther into the weeds than necessary. Whatever factors influence how often police interact with white people and black people are necessarily already included in the statistics for crime – young black men, statistically, are 6 to 9 times as likely to be involved in violent crime as young white men. This correlation statistic requires any possible difference in police contact to be included, since they must be arrested (or killed, I suppose) for the statistic to be recorded! So we can’t use this factor, whatever it is, again – if the factor is 2, this 2 is already included in the 6 to 9. We don’t get to apply it again just to make it nearly equal to the 21 times for shootings.
So no, Stephan, you don’t understand statistics if you’re utilizing this number to multiply the disparities in crime statistics, since that number would necessarily be already factored into those crime statistics.
Sigh. I’ll try once more. Any given young black man is, statistically, at least twice as likely to come into contact with the police, and between 6 and 14 times more likely to be violent. So, at minimum, a young black man is between 12 and 28 times more likely to have a violent encounter with the police than a random member of the population.
You can dispute the figures if you like, but the methodology is sound. So, even without assuming that either cops are more likely to attack young black men than they would other people, or vice versa, 21 times as many shootings would be exactly in the expected range.
A very important note - this doesn’t apply to black people as a whole, or to any other group. Not to black women of any age, or black children, or older black men. For whatever reason, the specific subgroup of young black men is disproportionately violent compared to any other group classed by race, age, gender, or a combination of the above.
I’m using the rate of violent crime among young black men as a proxy for the likelihood that any given young black man will be violent in any given encounter.
Unless your claim is that the only people come into contact with the police is when they are involved in a violent crime, your complaint is completely wrong.
Please, for your sake and everyone else’s, do some basic research into how statistics work.