Tulsa cop: research says police shoot black people 'less than we probably ought to'

[Demovictory9]

https://www.tmz.com/2020/06/10/oklahoma-cop-tulsa-police-shooting-black-african-american-less-than-we-ought-to/

A top cop in the Tulsa Police Department brazenly says his boys in blue aren't firing on African-Americans as much as they should ... something he says he's basing on crime data.

Major Travis Yates made the shocking statement during a podcast he was on, discussing George Floyd police brutality protests. Leading up to his controversial statement, he was talking about how black people -- at least in his jurisdiction -- appear to commit more crimes, so their run-ins with law enforcement increase.

Yates' interpretation of those numbers is, "All of the research says we’re shooting African-Americans about 24 percent less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed."

Yes, he knew this was being recorded and aired.

During the Monday podcast, Yates also claimed studies from Harvard economist Roland Fryer and research from the National Academy of Sciences will back him up.

He went on to say that the protests and riots that have followed the death of George Floyd were not achieving the justice they claim to be after, saying ... "Justice at this point has been done. Well, then it turned into systematic racism, systematic police brutality."

Now, obviously the guy is getting tons of criticism for the remarks -- but he defended himself by saying the notion cops should be shooting black people more than they're already doing is outrageous and not at all what he meant. He claims his words are being taken out of context.

In any case, his words aren't sitting well with some people ... including Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, who blasted the guy -- "He does not speak for my administration, for the Tulsa Police Department, or the City of Tulsa. His comments are under review by the Chief’s Office. And if he didn’t mean to make the statement in the way it has been received, he owes Tulsans a clarification and an apology."

[soothsayer]

1. He'll headline at the big drumpf rally

[OAITW r.2.0]

2. Hope Trump has the Major on stage with him!

He is woke to the Trump/Cult's need for unsubstantiated openly racial statements that support a growth in killing black citizens. Embrace it Donald...because Putin expects you to.

If I were a Trump supporter, I'd be very pissed at the Deep State if the major is muzzled and Trump can't associate with a true American patriot.

[sop]

5. You know he will. Trump will turn his Tulsa shitshow into a klan rally.

He'll probably wear a hood and robe: Exalted Cyclops Trump.

[OAITW r.2.0]

7. This is going tobe a must watch event.

I suspect the crowd will be filled with enough of his cult to pass as a Trump rally, but I truly wonder how Trump will perform. Given his performance over the past 4 months, I wonder how he'll perform, kowing everyone will be watching.

There is no needle to thread here....he either tacks to support social reality - pissing off his base or he doubles down with losers that seals his loss in November. You can bet every Republican up for re-election will be watching and reading the reviews.

[SunSeeker]

3. K & R for exposure of racist dumbfuck.

[herding cats]

4. This explains why Trump is heading there rather than a battleground state in 2 weeks.

He wants his likewise thinkers surrounding him. He's such an insecure man. Sad.

[RANDYWILDMAN]

6. F-ing Tulsa

They should know better, that town still thinks it's 1955 not 2020

[TDale313]

8. If you are in any way surprised

Google the Tulsa Race Massacre.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. Wow. Aside from the totally racist aspect,

the underlying assumption that it's perfectly okay for cops to shoot and kill people is mind-boggling. I bet if pushed, he'd say they don't shoot enough suspects overall.

[Coventina]

10. FTP & ACAB

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. I looked up the study from Roland Fyer, that Yates said backed him up. It doesn't.

An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force

Abstract

This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force,
blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force
in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian
behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force –
officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual
factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a
model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for
discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_figures.pdf

So there is bias against black people when there's a low likelihood of an investigation or sanction, but since there's more chance of getting caught and punished when they shoot them, they manage to be equal. He appears to have cherry-picked one section:

Using data from Houston, Texas – where we have both officer-involved shootings and a
randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified –
we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, officer demographics, encounter characteristics,
suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police
relative to non-black, non-Hispanics.

But:

This coefficient is measured with considerable error and not
statistically significant.
...
Our results have several important caveats. First, all but one dataset was provided by a select
group of police departments. It is possible that these departments only supplied the data because
they are either enlightened or were not concerned about what the analysis would reveal. In essence,
this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a
researcher with their Human Resources data! There may be important selection in who was willing
to share their data. The Police-Public contact survey partially sidesteps this issue by including
a nationally representative sample of civilians, but it does not contain data on officer-involved
shootings.

Relatedly, even police departments willing to supply data may contain police officers who present
contextual factors at that time of an incident in a biased manner – making it difficult to interpret
regression coefficients in the standard way.5 It is exceedingly difficult to know how prevalent this
type of misreporting bias is (Schneider 1977). Accounting for contextual variables recorded by
police officers who may have an incentive to distort the truth is problematic.