http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-...:

> This in turn suggests that removing police racial bias will have little effect on the killing rate. Suppose each arrest creates an equal risk of shooting for both African-Americans and whites. In that case, with the current arrest rate, 28.9 percent of all those killed by police officers would still be African-American. This is only slightly smaller than the 31.8 percent of killings we actually see, and it is much greater than the 13.2 percent level of African-Americans in the overall population.

http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race...

Even for something like traffic stops, you need to study whether or not black people are more likely to get pulled over because they are black or because they are more likely to be young and therefore more likely to speed. It isn't enough to just say that black people are disproportionately stopped, you have to show that the rate of speeding is the same to show bias.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/nyregion/study-suggests-ra...

Because this is America and there is a continuous history of racial bias since the country was founded. Or did you think that all went away with the 13th amendment? Or the 14th? Or maybe the 15th?

The Department of Justice has reports detailing racist enforcement in Ferguson http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-find... and Newark http://time.com/3020180/newark-police/ and the New York Bar Association had a report on stop-and-frisk being a racist policy in NYC http://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072495-StopFrisk... [PDF] and a St. Louis police union is calling out racism in the department http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-black-union-st...

Marijuana possession accounts for 46% of all drug arrests. In terms of marijuana use, 14% of blacks and 12% of whites have used marijuana in the last year, yet blacks are 373% more likely to be arrested for possession. In some areas of the U.S., like Cook, IL, the bias gets as high as 720%. [1]

If police are racially biased with arrests for one set of criminal behavior, isn't it likely there is some bias towards other types of behavior too? Like in stopping cars?

[1] https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel...

Speeding or not speeding - African Americans are significantly more likely to be involved in all crimes - according to arrest and conviction data.

I think there is probably some bias, for sure, but bias can't quite explain it all away. Neither can income or education. Even normalizing for those, there is still more violence within African American communities.

It's obviously a complex problem, god forbid I don't have the answer, but the more politically fearless research we can do the better.

A study of the likelihood of being shot while interacting with police, as opposed to a study of just the likelihood of being shot given race - is really not very helpful in this situation.

And according to studies in criminal behavior, African Americans are not any more likely to be committing crimes than other races. They're just more likely to be arrested by police and convicted for behavior than other races. If you don't believe me, you can look into marijuana use and possession arrests between the different races.

Of course, since your last comment seems to hint at confirmation bias, I'm sure you'll dismiss any real statistical analysis as "scrubbing".

[1] http://qz.com/556988/here-are-four-charts-on-race-and-murder...

As a white intern, I was pulled over for a speeding ticket on the commute to work and just given a ticket. That same morning a cop pulls over a black intern for speeding on the same route, but before giving him the ticket he pulls the intern out of the car and pats him down on the side of the car.

In hindsight we should have compared the tickets to see if it was the same officer, but we were both wearing boring business casual attire.

I was riding with a black friend, and when he was pulled over in the same town, it was a drastically different experience. He was pulled over for no reason, and ultimately got a ticket for "possible possession of drugs". We were told to leave the car, separated, and spent ~1 hour being drilled with questions.

A very eye-opening experience.

I’m white, and live in CO. I was traveling the day before Thanksgiving and traveled through South Fork, CO (which is at the bottom of a mtn. pass). I was just following the car in front of me (at a 200m distance), doing ~40mph. Apparently, the speed limit drops to 35mph for a short stretch in the ‘business district.' I saw him in my rear-view, pulled over, and he pulled-up beside me. He rolled down his window and told me to follow him because he had someone else to ticket (I was clocked at 43mph he said). He gave us both tickets that were $100/ no points if paid quickly, it’s a total racket.

Also, I’ve been pulled over ~15 times in the last 20 years (mostly in Boulder), and I’ve never left my hands on the wheel. I immediately go to my glove box and get my registration/insurance, then grab my license. By the time the cop gets to my window, I just hand over all 3 documents at once.

One time, I was doing 90mph through Denver at 4am for a Crispy Creme run as the designated driver. On I-25, I think the speed limit there was 55-60mph. He gave me a warning.

Do any of these involve anyone other than just you? You know, that offer a comparison and are relevant to the discussion?

Edit: Just to be clear, I do not appreciate the antagonistic tone in your comment.

(I'm not -- at least, not exclusively, or in general perception -- white, have lived in parts of CA with lots of diversity, and have often failed to follow the "rules" without problem -- and don't think any of that is unexpected even with the "rules" being valid.)

Even then you would need to have a cop-experience involving other races, in areas of "little racial diversity" to make this conclusion -i.e. Your black friend and you (white) were treated no differently than the other times you were pulled over alone.

Your stories really only involve you, which is weird that you think they're relevant.

Blaming the victim? Really?

That's what the protest in Dallas was about. That Philando Castile, an African american, was politely complying with police and was still shot and killed in his car with his fiance and her daughter.

What is interesting is that you're choosing to deflect by accusing me of not knowing the "facts", even after you admitted to not knowing them (which qualifies as psychological projection). Perhaps you'd like to share these "facts" that justify your racially-based victim blaming instead?

You might also want to note, that I'm clearly not blaming the victim. You yourself quoted it, "nobody's there teaching these guys how to deal with cops in a civil manner that keeps you alive". I'm not saying that Castile was to blame. I'm saying society needs to teach people to not do IDIOTIC things in front of police. And since this happens to people of all races, you saying it's racially based is completely baseless.

You seem to be confused about what blaming the victim is, or you're intentionally trying to redefine it as "no, I was blaming society". It's interesting, because you're still trying to grasp the assertion that it's the behavior of the victim at fault for the the cops killing them.

I'm also the kind of person who gets into debates with cops out why I was stopped, etc. I'm by no means 'compliant' essentially refusing everything I'm not obligated to do.

It doesn't make much sense to cite the proportion of black people convicted of a crime by US law enforcement as evidence refuting the claim that the US law enforcement's interaction with people changes according to their race. The proportion of black people convicted of [category] crimes could be high for many reasons, including actually higher incidence of such crimes among blacks, racial prejudices at various points along the legal path of alleged criminals, and any combination of those or other factors.

It actually does.

The rate of violent crime among African Americans is massively disproportionate. There's no way any kind of racial bias on the part of police could account for it.

A major study done in the late 2000's actually showed that while African Americans did receive more punishment for similar crimes - once 'criminal history' was taken into consideration, the difference evaporated.

Given that there is a massive difference in 'recorded convictions' (which is arguably biased because of 'racist cops') and numerous attempts to study the prevalence of racism in the system - it's pretty safe to assume that there's no way on earth that 'racist cops' are why there is why African Americans are about 700% more likely to commit violent crimes than others.

It's a sad situation, surely, but it's important to keep the facts in check.

About 50% of violent crime in America is committed by African American men, though they are only about 7% of the population (about 13% including women). This is quite radically high and it's not even explained by poverty.

The sheer size of the discrepancy between ethnic groups is unsettling.

I wish I had answers.

On that basis, non-black bias against blacks would not account for population rates of convictions in those localities, at least insofar as post-arrest procedures are concerned.

Conceivably other factors could be implicated in conviction rates, e.g., possible higher rates of plea bargaining among black defendants. Still, if the difference in crime rates (based on convictions) is great enough, non-jury convictions wouldn't explain it.

No, pragmatically the vast majority of criminal convictions are the result of plea bargains, with no jury involved; the calculus that goes into agreeing to a plea bargain certainly includes the expectations regarding a jury verdict, but it also includes the cost of pre-trial confinement and other factors.

> In those jurisdictions with high concentration of blacks, which is where the preponderance of black crime takes place, juries would be highly likely to include black members whose assent is required for conviction of a black defendant.

It may be more likely that this is the case, but its not guaranteed. Particularly given that jury pools are not guaranteed to be representative (typically, they are determined by means like voter registration and drivers licenses, which may not be consistent in participation across races.)

> On that basis, bias against blacks would not account for population rates of convictions in those localities, at least insofar as post-arrest procedures are concerned.

You seem to be saying that jury pool considerations would prevent racial bias in post-arrest conviction rates; while that's wrong for post-charge rates for the reasons stated earlier in this comment, its even more wrong for post-arrest rates because it ignores prosecutorial bias, which introduces potential post-arrest bias in the rates of criminal charges being pursued for like conduct.

> Still, if the difference in crime rates (based on convictions) is great enough, non-jury convictions wouldn't explain it.

Upwards of 90% of US criminal cases (not just convictions, but all cases; the share of convictions -- since all plea bargains are convictions -- is even higher than the share of cases) are resolved by plea bargains [0]. There's virtually no level of disparity in total convictions that could be explained by disparity in the plea bargaining process, which is overwhelmingly how criminal convictions are arrived at.

[0] https://www.bja.gov/Publications/PleaBargainingResearchSumma...

While juries are not uniformly populated, in predominantly black communities I'd expect at least some jurors will be black. When there is a jury trial, a requirement for unanimous decision gives any juror "veto" power over a guilty verdict, which in principle mitigates racial bias against a black defendant.

Many years ago when I lived in Washington, DC, blacks were by far the majority. In that environment, racial bias against black residents should logically be minimal in all phases of the criminal justice process. It's not the sort of question I've researched, but someone experienced in that domain should tackle it if the question is still unanswered. In any case, if bias is detected in such a community seems there's a serious problem of a different kind.

the district attorneys and prosecutors have discretion on what facts [of the case] are relevant, have discretion on what crime to levy which influences the burden of proof, have discretion on what recommended sentence to pursue, and the judges have discretion on pursuing that sentence or not

Actual studies of plea bargaining have shown that there are racial biases in what prosecutors offer in deals between black and white defendants [0]. It seems unlikely that the same bias would not also be reflected in decisions to charge in the first place.

[0] https://www.bja.gov/Publications/PleaBargainingResearchSumma...: "Studies that assess the effects of race find that blacks are less likely to receive a reduced charge compared with whites (Farnworth and Teske, 1995; Johnson, 2003; Kellough and Wortley, 2002; Ulmer and Bradley, 2006). Additionally, one study found that blacks are also less likely to receive the benefits of shorter or reduced sentences as a result of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion during plea bargaining (Johnson, 2003)."

Now, if they had gone and showed that first time offenders, for example, had shown a racial bias between blacks and whites, you'd have me impressed.

In effect, you are going back to the original argument, that it's just systemic racism. Unfortunately, you have not provided any falsifiable evidence that this is true.

My statements are purposely written to be read independent of the context in this thread to avoid your exact rebuttal. Maybe you were expecting someone else to reply to you.

Continuing, there is a saying that "prosecutors can get a jury to convict a ham sandwich", although more applicable in civil asset forfeiture proceedings that happen to involve a jury. They can give incorrect instructions, they can give arbitrary instructions, they can create any number of constraints for the jury to consider, and they also screen jury members out for various reasons such as a potential juror's affinity for jury nullification.

This allows for greater success in their conviction rate, especially in the idea of the complacent juror.

The quote is that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. The meaning is entirely different from your interpretation.

Having read enough appeals cases I will maintain what I mentioned about what prosecutors have discretion over.

No. There is considerable history of victims not only misidentifying the perpetrator, but even inventing the offense to smear someone because of racial bias, personal animus, or other reasons. To the extent that there is a systematic racial bias throughout society, you'd expect it to be reflected in such reports.

> Even for something like traffic stops, you need to study whether or not black people are more likely to get pulled over because they are black or because they are more likely to be young and therefore more likely to speed. It isn't enough to just say that black people are disproportionately stopped, you have to show that the rate of speeding is the same to show bias.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/janfeb-2014/driving-wh...

> The key influence on who is stopped in traffic safety stops is how you drive; in investigatory stops it is who you are, and being black is the leading influence. In traffic safety stops, being black has no influence: African Americans are not significantly more likely than whites to be stopped for clear traffic safety law violations. But in investigatory stops, a black man age twenty-five or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped for an investigatory reason over the course of a year; a similar young white man has a 12.5 percent chance, and a similar young white woman has only a 7 percent chance. And this is after taking into account other possible influences on being stopped, like how you drive. Police focus investigatory stops on younger people, and so as people grow older they are less likely to be stopped in this way. But a black man must reach fifty—well into the graying years—before his risk of an investigatory stop drops below that of a white man under age twenty-five. Overall, black drivers are nearly three times more likely than whites to be subjected to investigatory stops.

> Being black is also the leading influence on how far police officers pursue their inquisition in investigatory stops. In these stops, full-blown vehicle searches are relatively common. After taking into account other possible influences, black drivers in our survey were five times more likely than whites to be subjected to searches in investigatory stops. Searches are remarkably rare in traffic safety stops, and the driver’s race has no influence on whether the driver is searched in these stops.

Fyi, investigatory stops means the cop pulls you over for reasons that don't involve a traffic violation.

Even if this is true (and it's probably true to some extent), by focusing on 'interactions only' we can isolate the degree to which cops may be racially biased in at least those incidents wherein there is interaction.

This would yield much more valuable results than the paper in the link.

The linked paper is almost useless because there is a very large divide in who cops interact with. So many factors there including police density, income, poverty, education etc..

One resource is: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/...

This table shows that blacks are responsible for more than 50% of all murders in 2015, and a greater absolute number than white-committed murders. Blacks make up around 10-12% of the population, so the rate at which they commit this crime is far higher than whites.

It's likely that there are also biases in how police interact with blacks and whites. However it's hard to say with certainty what magnitude of effect there is. I find it hard to believe that the entirety of the difference in these statistics is due to bias.

The police -- and I do believe that the vast majority are well intentioned -- too often think that aggressive tactics are the answer, because the way to reduce crime must be to catch more criminals, right? So, when a police officer is assigned to a rough area with lots of crime, he tends to treat the citizens like criminals instead of victims. Maybe not everyone is treated this way -- but young, poor, black men certainly are in many cases, especially when they're involved in petty criminal activity like selling bootleg CDs that leads to tense interactions with police.

It's a really tough problem, and I don't have a good idea about what could be done to solve it -- but local governments are failing these communities, and we should demand something better from our leadership.

Second to that is the leadership and elite of the country, that accepts this victimhood narrative out of misinformation, political correctness, and political expedience. There's no better way to get 90% of a population to vote for you than to convince them that the other side is the mortal enemy that hates them for the color of their skin and wants to keep them down.

Oh, that same president was strongly anti-abortion except in extreme circumstances. His example of such a case when abortion was warranted? Mixed-race babies.

He also reset the fundamental strategy one of your political parties for the last few decades to appealing to racists with "the southern strategy". Which Trump, with his flirting with white supremacist groups continues to this day.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1058326...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Why shouldn't a victim acknowledge the reality of being targeted? What other groups do you expect to follow this bizarre recommendation?

Thus is a nice historical overview that ties a lot of this stuff together:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/is-ameri...

History sucks. It landed my grandparents in America, having fled Cuba, with the clothes on their backs. They had built lives for themselves and had it all pulled from under them. Somehow, the Cuban-American community has done phenomenally well for itself. Definitely not by blaming the past for their lot and demanding nebulous reparations.

It's also not the root of the Cuban-American community's success. The earliest waves of migrants were almost all from the middle and upper class. They did correspondingly well in their new home. Wealth is not really a number in your bank account, it's the knowledge and virtues that guide of the process of producing value.

If you took everyone in America's money away and started over, the resulting classes would look a lot like today's. Culture is almost everything.

Given that the vast majority of violence is white-on-white or black-on-black, are you seriously suggesting that the police are spending _more_ of their time and resources investigating murders of blacks than of whites?

The vast majority of the unsolved murders are inner-city, where often the police don't care who kills whom. The vast majority of the murders in the suburbs, in otherwise peaceful neighborhoods, get tons of police attention.

So no, I think it is is exceedingly unlikely that the actual homicide rate skews more white than the statistics show.

What would be interesting to see is the rate at which charged persons of certain socioeconomic tiers successfully defended their case, or were able to plead down to a lesser charge if they were originally charged with homicide.

It's true that more black people live in poverty than white people per capita, but it's also true that crime is not evenly distributed across all people per capita, and has a connection with poverty level. My point is that there are more white people living in poverty, and they commit crimes at lower rates per capita and also total than black people.

I don't have data for all of these arguments handy, but here's one resource on poverty levels by race and region: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceeth...

Also note that controlling for poverty does not eliminate the effect where blacks commit more crime than whites:

http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/parker/SOCI836_S08_files/McN...

> > As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...] Although this finding appears to provide partial support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis

We could speculate that lots of things might be true, but if we're going to approach this topic scientifically, we should analyze data that we have, and not simply posit hypothetical after hypothetical. E.g. speculation like: "maybe all the unsolved murders are committed by whites"or "maybe white defendants are getting off when blacks aren't" -- a fine train of thought to explore and validate with data, but it's just speculation unless/until there are data and evidence to back it up.

To expect equal outcomes is absurd. The black and white communities in the US have very different histories and cultures. Their economic conditions are also wildly different. The different crime rates and outcomes are completely consistent with this.

And yes, for some crimes, blacks probably get caught at a higher rate. Black neighborhoods tend to be high-crime areas, so they tend to have greater police presence. This is totally rational policing. Liberty City in Miami needs a strong police presence to protect the inhabitants. The super ritzy and quiet parts of Coral Gables don't. Guess where you're more likely to get picked up for a low level stuff like speeding, smoking weed, or loitering? And who's more likely to get caught? The white guy selling drugs to his buddies at school or from home, or the black guy selling drugs on the corner? Different communities, different dynamics, different outcomes.

Or we could conduct simulations and put police officers through them, in which the only differences were race.

To support his claim, he shows both a video of police killing black people and a video of police killing white people. Each time the perp was already on the ground and immobilized. Then shot.

At this point I'm terrified of ever interacting with the US police in any way for any reason.Starting to think it's time to vote with my feet and move to a different country again.

Your fear, I think, has far more to do with an availability bias of these relatively few stories getting plastered everywhere. You're much more likely to be killed in a gang or drug related shooting than you are by a cop.

- I've been hassled and cursed at by an officer.

- I've watched a friend who was doing nothing wrong be roughed up by an officer.

- I've had police give false evidence against me on a traffic citation.

- As a child being physically bullied, a friend and I went to a cop for help. When we told the cop that these other kids were trying to beat us up, the reply was "you'd better watch out, they'll probably hit you again".

So while it's true that not all cops are bad, my personal experience shows me that the bad seeds aren't all that rare.

But I definitely don't feel safe about interacting with the police. From all the advice on how a cop is never your friend and you shouldn't talk to them, to all the deaths all over the internet ... how else am I supposed to feel?

I'm sure all of them are upstanding citizens and perfectly awesome when off duty. I'm sure most of them are amazing when on duty. But the overall climate and police procedures or whatever it is, sure make them seem thuggy. I believe a lot of it is because they have to be thuggy in order to stay safe.

But it doesn't make me feel safe.

> I believe a lot of it is because they have to be thuggy in order to stay safe.

Perhaps then we should be focusing our attention on improving the environments they work in? For example, cracking down on violent crimes, perhaps especially those that target police?

Funnily Trevor Noah is both black and recently immigrated from South Africa. Doesn't get more african-american than that.

A fair bit of his early stand up concerns the complexities of being a mixed race child in South Africa and then the extra layers of complexity that occur when transplanted into the US.

From watching that I think he'd disagree with your conclusion.

Real life firearms are NOTHING like those on TV. First, your chances of actually hitting something from any non-trivial distance isn't that great. Even 10 yards is far from a sure hit, and just hitting doesn't necessarily count for much.

Second, the fact that the bad guy took a hit doesn't mean he's going down. In fact, he almost certainly will not. Anything less than a headshot destroying the brain (sorry to be graphic) may well have them still shooting back at you, even if the wound will ultimately prove fatal. Even severing the femoral artery or aorta isn't going to have the bad guy dropping in his tracks.

And in such a situation, your goal is to stop the threat. As you can see, ensuring that the treat is stopped requires a lot more than a double-tap.

In the UK they manage to subdue dangerous suspects without unloading the entire clip.

Going by their data, of the 258 Black people shot by police in 2015, 188 were armed with a deadly weapon, 20 with a vehicle, 5 wth a toy weapon, and 45 either unarmed or unknown.

If you accept toy weapons and vehicles as being armed, that is 82%, which is what I remember hearing.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

To your point, a bias in the encounter rate (assuming it exists) is a significant problem, and one that would need to be addressed. But it's also a distinct problem, and there's no reason to believe that the violence problem and the disproportionate-encounter problem would be amenable to the same solution.

We need a culture change. We need politicians not afraid of using the truth. Instead it benefits politicians to exploit the issue for political gain. The real crime is that political manipulation leads to more minorities deaths because they will not act on the real damage and instead go for the sensationalist side.

Does the probability per-encounter increase?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but if the original bias comes from the elevated amount of interactions (rather than the percentage that ended in shootings) in the original case I would be surprised if it there was a statistically significant deviation here either.

Disclosure: I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'm not seeing why ratio is important compared to magnitude. There is certainly a relationship between number of armed suspect shootings and number of unarmed suspect shootings but it is not clear what that relationship is. It can't be a constant, that just doesn't fit human threat response. Rather, I would expect that the higher the armed suspect shootings (numerator) in an area, the smaller the ratio, meaning that nonproportionately more unarmed suspects are shot as a direct result of a large number of armed suspect shootings. But if that's the case, that will increase the likelihood of unarmed suspect shootings without there being any necessary racial bias. A smaller ratio just reflects a larger denominator increase due to numerator.

If we have equal numerators for each race, but the denominator differs, than that seems like a clear indication of racial bias. But if the numerators are different at all, that potentially reflects an entirely different police interaction dynamic. The expectation that one race is more likely to be armed than another race is, strictly speaking, a racial bias but could also be a rational bias based on encounters rather than prejudice.

What are the numerators? This whole issue may be of course be misguided but I'm simply unable to find the actual numbers from the paper.

> County-level race-specific crime rates (1. aggravated assault, and 2. weapons possession)?

So they are categorizing weapons possession into race-specific crime rates.

> There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates)

Which is to say crimes related to weapons possession does not correlate with racial bias.

And I advocate for police not carying guns. They don't need them. No one else in society needs them during normal interactions. They should be reserved for the swat team and only used for that level of situation. A regular police officer's only job should be to give tickets and directions - and those interactions don't seem very dangerous.

Why not? This works great in other countries...

I'm Norwegian and I live in the UK, and while I think the US would have been in a much better place if the US had followed a similar policy a long time ago ("US conditions" is a standing term in Norwegian politics used to scare voters - almost nobody wants "US conditions" in almost any context), I still think the US would find it extremely hard to introduce such a policy now.

It works in Norway and the UK for a number of reasons:

* Low sentences for crimes without weapons combined with huge additional sentences if using a weapon. E.g. you could easily get 4-5 years for participation in a relatively serious robbery, but risk tacking on up to 10 extra for an armed robbery.

* Criminals rarely risk meeting armed resistance. Lots of people have weapons, but the weapons law requires weapons to be stored locked down in an inoperable state (so detach a part and lock it down in a different location).

* Criminals know very well that if they are reported to be likely to be armed, they will face a large manhunt with armed police, while if they don't carry a weapon anyone coming after them will be hunting them without firarms.

The problem with introducing this elsewhere is that you have an existing situation where criminals have a strong incentive to arms themselves, which in turn maintains a strong incentive for other people and police to be armed. Changing that around without the risk of a lot of harm in the process would be incredibly challenging.

So what we'd expect to see is:

1) A bias is present: any study based on american society at large that DOESN'T find a bias in its behaviours/outcomes involving the black community, in terms of either wealth, incarceration, shootings, education, employment, etc etc etc must be so off you'd be more likely to disregard the evidence collected rather than believe the study/conclusion.

2) This is because, not surprisingly, all those things are so highly correlated and historically caused.

3) While I respect that it MIGHT be an interesting question to study whether, controlling for all confounding cultural and obviously explanatory variables, police are more likely to shoot black people in america, and you might even find a very very very weak effect there explained by the low pay, the correlation between low pay/racism/education, and the tendency of police as a career to attract authoritarian personalities, this is in many ways a politically pointless conclusion, because I'd bet good money that you both need to have quite sophisticated statistical understanding to really "get" what such a study is saying, it would be a horrendously complicated statistical study to almost swamp any practical implications and raise very valid questions about its methodological valididty, and I think any effect you may find will likely be swamped statistically by all other factors of black bias in american society.

4) It does no practical good to be able to go up to black groups and say "No no no, its not that police are particularly biased against you because you're black and police are racists, its just that because the higher-order causes of racism and racial history in american society: i.e. you're poor, uneducated, encounter the police more often, commit more crimes, american historical wealth disparities and racial wealth disparities, americans are more likely to carry and be afraid of guns, etc, means that you're just more likely to encounter them and therefore they're more likely to shoot you...so just go home and chill."

That socioeconomic/historical/political factors are the main determinant of things here strikes me as both:

a) Statistically and historically obvious

b) Totally irrelevant to the actual question of whether institutional bias is outrageous/real/needs to be fixed/the reality of black experiences on the other side of that equation.

From the last time I checked into it, blacks where on the order of 10 times more likely to resist arrest than whites, and 4 times more likely to kill a cop.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/African-Americans-cite...

"African Americans in San Francisco are cited for resisting arrest at a rate eight times greater than whites even when serious crimes are not involved, according to statistics drawn from court records."

Here is also a good overall source (but the author has a label on him).

http://www.colorofcrime.com/2016/03/the-color-of-crime-2016-...

[1] http://project.wnyc.org/resisting/

If the same cops patrol the same demographic and the same high crime areas it would reason that the same cops (and same type of specific category) will be making the majority of the arrests. Which will skew the mentioned statistic to them.