Cops kill (or are supposed to kill) criminals. The statistics are far smaller for the ratio of young black male criminals to young white male criminals. You’re comparing the wrong statistics. Irrelevant statistics. If cops are just behaving as a reflection of the criminal statistics – they’re more likely to kill young black males because young black males are more likely to be criminals – than it wouldn’t be close to 21 times different.
I provided a cite in post #5. You are incorrect (again).
I think the suggestion is that whatever factor is causing black men to be the disproportionate victims of homicide is also influencing police shootings of black men.
The argument seems to be that police culture is not the problem, since that is unlikely to be affecting the overall disproportionate rate of homicide.
If that’s the argument, I don’t think it is very persuasive. One likely explanation that still implicates police culture is that black men are indeed disproportionately involved in violence, for a whole range of reasons. A combination of racism, overly-militarized and insufficiently citizen-concerned tactics, and that empirical reality of more violence (which is itself largely a consequence of white supremacy) cause the police to both have more fraught encounters with black men and to shoot them more often in those encounters.
Changing policing would not reduce the non-police violence level (except insofar as distrust of the police and mass incarceration are contributing factors to that violence), but it could indeed reduce the number of police shootings.
They are, but they’re not 21 times more likely to be involved in violence than young white men – not even close (it’s around 6 to 8 times for homicide).
Then why don’t the base homicide rates line up? Why are the base homicide rates 19 times different, if there’s such a small difference in the ratio of black to white criminals?
BTW, I was comparing non-hispanic whites to non-hispanic blacks, which matches the methodology used by ProPublica. Your cite does not.
Right. I’m not sure why you think I was suggesting otherwise.
Your cite was for the whole population, not for young men.
Accord to this article, young black men murder 14 times more than young white men. True, it’s not 21 times, but it is an amazingly high ratio, wouldn’t you say?
You’re using the homicide victim stats. How does it make sense to compare cops killing young black males to criminals killing young black males, if the argument is that cops are justified in this increased rate of killing young black males? That would only work if young black males were 21 times more likely to commit murder, and they’re not.
Like a lot of things that are passed off as common knowledge, this is a pile of crap. Lots of black kids like hip hop. So do lots of white kids. That’s been public knowledge for as long as data on CD sales has been public. Once upon a time it was quite a shock when people discovered that suburban white kids were buying more hip hop albums than black kids in the city, but I’d have thought word would have gotten around by now. What does happen is that when black kids and white kids engage in the same behavior, people are much more likely to call the black kids thugs and gangstas and other nonsense. You can see this sometimes in discussions of things like baggy pants or hooded sweatshirts, which are popular with all sorts of people but are evidence of gangsta-dom when black kids do them. And unfortunately black people are more likely to have negative interactions with the police. For example, here’s a recent study that shows that
even though white people are slightly more likely to deal drugs than black people and the two groups use drugs at the same rate, black people are far more likely to be arrested for drug dealing or possession. And if we’re talking about attitudes, it should be noted that policies like stop and frisk in NYC make it much more likely that people of color will have a negative experience with the police.
But by all means, let’s dismiss this and the shooting data as a coincidence. The real answer is probably based on what clothes they wear and what kind of music they listen to. That makes sense.
The point of it is ‘hey, look over there!’
Again, your cite of “6-8 times” is not for “young black men”. For young black men, it’s 14 times for homicide. Don’t know about violent crime in general.
The ratio I cited was 6 to 8 times. Either way, it’s very high. But it’s still not 21 times.
EDIT: your cite goes nowhere. It says “14 times”, but the associated link doesn’t work. Where does this 14 times come from?
It was not for “young black men”, was it?
This is a good supporting piece of evidence. If we believe black people are treated differently by police, it would show up differently in statistics like this one – and apparently, it does.
Considering that your non-existent cite is still not 21 times, it’s the best one offered so far.
The young black men killed by police are victims of (legal) homicide.
These young black men are, wittingly or unwittingly, in a situation where another person feels that committing homicide is the best course of action. This situation comes up about 20x as often as with young white men, whether or not the other person is a cop.
You can try to look at the cop angle in a vacuum, but you’re missing a source of violence that is 75 as large as cop violence, and is violence that the police are actively working against.
And of course black and Latino men were far, far more likely than anyone else to be stopped during the NYC stop and frisk program, which is why a court ultimately ruled that the program violated their civil rights. The name is unique to NYC, but some of the tactics involved are not. Asset forfeiture is another related problem. Again, minorities are way more likely to have these kinds of interactions with police.
You’re putting the police on par with murderers, and that’s actually the best thing I can say about this apples-to-oranges comparison. If the police are much more likely to kill a young black man than a young white man, they’re not actively working against violence.
The police are 1/75th as likely to kill a young black man as a murderer.
And of course if anyone objects to the data provided in the OP, that illustrates another problem: there’s no comprehensive database of people killed by the police. Everybody from Nate Silver to Radley Balko to The Daily Show has weighed in on this lately. It’s transparently absurd, but there you go.
You’re not contradicting anything I said. You wrote that, somehow, a black murder victim and a black man who is killed by the police are both “in a situation where another person feels that committing homicide is the best course of action.” A death by a murder and death by cop aren’t supposed to be similar at all, so why are you comparing them? Someone who is killed by another citizen is a murder victim. Someone who is killed by a police officer is dead at the hand of the government, a person who is trained and trusted with a great deal of power to uphold the law. If you’re more likely to a be murder victim, that has jack squat to do with the likelihood that the police will kill you.
Getting back to the OP, I wrote this in another thread on this subject last week:
I’ve never understood the societal contradiction:
“The reason men are more likely to be arrested, or shot and killed by police, or incarcerated than women, is because men commit more violent crimes than women.” Okay, fair enough.
But yet:
“The reason black men are more likely to be arrested, or shot and killed by police, or incarcerated than white men, is somehow NOT because black men commit more violent crimes than white men.”
This is actually very easy and has been discussed at some length in the thread already. You’re assuming the underlying premises of those statements are both true, and I am not sure that’s the case. And we’re also discussing the fact that some people suffer disproportionate rates of arrest and violence at the hands of the police. It ought to be obvious why it’s a problem if some people are far more likely to get arrested, hurt, or killed than others even if they’re committing the same crime.