These Are The Black People Police Have Shot And Killed This Year

[Igel]

72. No, most people don't see why it's so incredibly difficult to get any traction.

Bare numbers mean nothing.

My high school is perhaps 20% black, 25% Latino. But perhaps 40% of the kids who are suspended are black, and perhaps 40% are Latino. They're almost all male. Girls who land in suspension usually just rack up tardy points. Same for whites. Enough tardies and you're out for a day. But the reasons for suspension are illicit substances and fights, and when you're busted for those the only questions are, "Is that you on the video?" It's zero tolerance. If there's a report of a fight, of drugs, it's investigated. Often by the time the principals come for a person the paperwork for the punishment's already completed. The numbers look racist; but the process isn't racist, unless we look at "structural racism" and ignore the causes for the discrepancy. (Even then, does that mean half the black guys in fights get a pass to avoid disproportionality?) No, the expectations of behavior are clear; subcohort standards for behavior are at odds with those expectations. For some, landing in suspension is a badge of honor. Standing up to authority and making punishments sometimes worse is a badge of honor.

Don't get me wrong, numbers are a good start. It gets rid of the media bias we see. 570 deaths, we see 8 of them, all blue killing black, mostly unarmaed black. Hmmm ... the Guardian lists 24 unarmed black deaths-by-police, and that's 5% of the total death toll. But it's nearly 100% of the video we see. There's a stong bias there, one that can warp perceptions just like having the mainstream media just show blacks as criminals warps perceptions. But the numbers are just numbers and aren't understanding.

What we have is "the only reason for disproportionality is racism; the numbers are disproportionate, proving the presence of racism." That's assuming the premise.

After disposing of the bias, to get traction you have to show that there's actual racism. Again, disparate impact doesn't cut it because there's a mess of data showing disproportionate rates of involvement in crime by geography, by race and ethnicity, by age, by income. Scoring a possible point for the racism argument is that Latinos show no or trivial disproportionality for either overall deaths by cop or unarmed deaths by cop. On the other hand, they're reflected in crime stats, both convictions, arrests, and reported crimes, in a far less disproportionate way.


The point is that facile statistical claims look bad when you lift the corner of the carpet. Suddenly the disproportionality that's important isn't in the stats. The number of armed blacks killed is disproportionately higher than whites with respect to the entire population. Is that due to racism? Or due to # of interactions with police? Or due to higher criminality among the 15-29 year old black male population? Is there something about the interaction that could be helped? We simply don't know. There have been at most 70 or so excess black deaths, armed and unarmed, using the numbers the Guardian has (and ignoring the "unknowns&quot . But that's an upper bound to excess black deaths due to police bigotry. (And I'm leaving out how the number may change slightly from week to week.)

But presenting deaths-by-cop where the guy killed is clearly in the wrong is emphatically not a good way to start. "J was killed because he was pointed a gun and shooting at cops while black." Uh ... True, those numbers are disproportionate, but more importantly we don't have a good idea about *how* they come to be disproportionate, or even, at times, how disproportionate they really are. Take, for example, the Guardians numbers as of a few days ago: they listed 42 unarmed white deaths/212 armed deaths, for a ratio of about 1:5 (19.8%). It listed 24 unarmed black deaths/102 armed black deaths, for a radio of about 1:5 (23.5%). The obvious "racism" in those numbers boils down to 6.5 black (mostly) men so far this year. (Castile's death was labeled "disputed" as to whether he was armed or not at the time.) One problem with those numbers is that there might have been a small statistical bump in the week before that either reduced or increased one of those percentages.

Now, 6-7 excess unarmed black deaths is a lot, but not a truly humongous number. But that's not what perceptions are. And nobody, but nobody, likes that number. It should be zero, in a color-blind society. If justice is supposed to be blind, it's certainly supposed to be color blind. It's not in the hundreds, however, nor is it as one DUer said, the leading cause of death for blacks in America, in the thousands.

The male/female skew is one that we're used to. It exists, to be clear. There's no question. We assume that this obviously sexist bias. (I mean, the numbers say that, right--most of those killed by cops are men, but society is about 50-50? Oh. We assume a difference in behavior that accounts for this. But keep in mind, that difference in behavior also means cops are more likely to be distrustful when dealing with a man than with a woman, so given exactly the same actions and behaviors by an individual man or woman the man is at higher risk. That's sexism. But it's accepted sexism, and rational sexism. Men overall are more aggressive, so we assume that each man individually is average.) It might be interesting to disaggregate the Guardian's numbers not just by ethnicity and armed/unarmed but to include sex. Moving on ...

What's left to look at is the number of deaths overall, which is where we started. But again, those numbers assume that there's no difference in behavior, culture, poverty, geographical dispersal, education, attitude, age distrbution, gun ownership, etc., etc., between whites and blacks. But we still have to assume there's racism, just not blue-on-brown (i.e., Latino) racism. And we ignore the even more obvious "sexism," because we're assuming there's no difference in behavior. Yeah, that's whack.

I, for one, am not comfortable with those assumptions, which assumes there is no racism at any point in the entire society until the blue person approaches a black person. Nor am I comfortable with the assumption that it's all racism, and any differences in behavior have to just be accommodated in a just society (the alternative is separatism, and I've seen that advocated). I'm also not comfortable with the idea of writing off behavior widely deemed anti-social because of a disparate impact result.

So the number of excess black deaths may be as high as 70 so far this year, the difference you get just looking at population demographics. Or it might be below 7 (keeping in mind that when you get to numbers that small, you're going to see that the error margin might eat up most of the signal). Of course, that assumes "excess" is what's important, and that whites are the baseline for what we expect. Meh.

But a national movement over perhaps 16 excess deaths for the *year* isn't something that pushes my buttons, not when that can be the disproportionate death toll over a 3-day weekend from just 3-4 major cities; the assumed annual rate of around 140 excess black deaths seems way too high given the general stats I know about American society and subgroup behavior. Esp. when the actual "excess black death toll" is far higher than just those killed by police--and, in fact, the disproportionality of black deaths to total population at the hands of police is very close to the disproportionality of black deaths at the hands of other civilians. There's a problem, and we're hopping mad over only the small portion of it that feeds the correct narrative.