Of course the OP wouldn’t be the ones producing these statistics. The police would. So the police would also have to collect reliable data on how they confront people, where those people are, and how the police themselves respond to those situations. We already know the police don’t compile data on who they are shooting. Does anyone see a potential problem with this system?
No. I strongly disagree. As I said, just because we lack a formal metric for wariness doesn’t mean that we can’t dial it up or down.
Better?
You’re still not responding to the actual question. Steophan said cops approaching black men should be 6 to 14 times more wary (nevermind that that number might be made up). If we can’t dial wariness up precisely, how does that even mean anything?
OK the OP should present and not produce…….your snark is why I love and hate this site.
Anyway that’s kind of my point. How could the police possibly provide statistics in these very real factors on the outcome of any given stop or arrest?
There are too many factors in why someone might get shot by a police officer to know if the 21x statistic is alarming or not.
This makes it awfully (and conveniently) easy to dismiss any concerns. The fact that most police forces don’t record (or promulgate) any such data at all, alone, should be extremely concerning.
Maybe we could start by asking them to produce statistics they could actually be expected to produce, like how many people they kill every year, and go from there.
I don’t agree. A statistic like this needs to be justified because it suggests there could be a very serious problem, and a shrug is not a sufficient response to that.
I’m still wondering about this. Can anyone else explain the 12-28 figure?
Terr said on the first page that young black men were 14 times more likely to commit murder. If that was borne out, then Steophan is just conflating murder with violence.
This also makes it awfully (and conveniently) easy to have recreational outrage over this statistic. The fact that most police forces don’t record (or promulgate) any such data would be extremely concerning if police shootings were not so rare.
We don’t know how rare they are. We only know of the ~1200 deadly police shootings captured by federal stats between 2010 and 2012.
I think it’s extremely concerning if the police are far more likely to kill a black person than a young one and that disparity is out of all proportion with crime stats. You can believe both that this data is not reliable and that there should be reliable data, but weirdly nobody in this thread has taken that position. And yes, it’s absurd to insist that these killings are rare when the people who do the killing won’t keep track of how often it happens.
Of course this was supposed to say “young black person than a young white one.”
If you have evidence that the police are secretly going around and shooting people please present it. Your statistic is what police departments report to the FBI each year.
I debated calling you on it.
Request for clarification: upon reading this, am I supposed to laugh or cry?
I am calling you on this though…I say there is too little information to be extremely concerned at this point. However, that is a matter of perspective which doesn’t exist in most debates on this or any other topic at SDMB.
Then we need to gather more information, and you’ve already said that’s unfeasible or impossible. So where does that leave us exactly? ‘Don’t worry about who the police are shooting because they say they’re not shooting a lot of people?’
Originally Posted by iiandyiiii
We don’t know how rare they are. We only know of the ~1200 deadly police shootings captured by federal stats between 2010 and 2012.
It is right there in his post, the implication that the police do not accurately report officer involved shootings to the FBI.
So laugh or cry if you like, I am curious why anyone would question the FBI data.
Yes, more information needed. AND yes that should have been the debate, how do we gather data that will tell us if the 21x data is reasonable, extreme or even possibly shows great restraint by our law enforcement.
The data I think we would need to make these determinations is very subjective which would make it invalid in the skeptical eye.