Please don't be offended by this, but perhaps your communication skills are at fault. While it may be tiring for you, people who are dealing with a lot of really difficult problems often need to vent some frustration and anger, both as stress relief and to qualify you (or not) as a sincere ally who won't fade when progress is difficult.
If you're in too much of a hurry to sell your solution, notwithstanding your good intentions, your interlocutors are likely to be a bit skeptical because they've heard many such presentations before only to be disappointed by the lack of follow-through.
Being right is not always as important as being receptive when you're trying to establish new structural relationships under difficult conditions, whatever those happen to be. I hope this can make your future communications more rewarding, even though it may require a greater initial investment of time and patience.
Whose responsibility is it? If someone is debating an issue I would hope they are familiar with and understand the underlying statistics relevant to their claims. If they claim conclusion X based on statistics Y but omit (intentionally or out of ignorance) that conclusion P is also plausible based on statistics Q, it is the responsibility of anyone aware of statistics Q to inform those claiming conclusion X that X isn't the only plausible conclusion one can arrive at because statistics Q exists that suggests conclusion P.
Are you seriously suggesting that someone aware of a different dataset that supports a different conclusion only bring attention to that dataset if those claiming the original conclusion are interested? That's preposterous.
https://byrslf.co/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-and-wants-yo...
A movement genuinely pushing for reasonable police reform and replacing lead pipes (for all people of all colors) would be much better received. But the problem is the movement is self-evidently not about actually solving problems. It's about pushing racial narratives. I suspect responses to your comment will further affirm this.
The movement has always, from day one, been about social issues (with equal accountability foremost among those issues.)
Assuring that killers of blacks, law enforcement or otherwise, are held to account until and unless there is clear evidence of justification is central, however, to that.
> A movement genuinely pushing for reasonable police reform and replacing lead pipes (for all people of all colors) would be much better received.
Movements along both those lines exist and have for longer than BLM, and have beeb generally ignored (conversely, attention driven by BLM has been successful at driving general police reforms.) Those others are not much better received, no matter how many times concern trolls trot out the line that if only BLM wasn't about Black Lives it would somehow magically be better at advancing it's interests and incidentally better at other things, to.
Typically in these cases the victim wasn't threatening the police officer's life in any way. Walter Scott was shot while running away. Freddie Gray was already safely in police custody. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes, not attacking anyone. Tamir Rice was a 12 year old playing with a toy gun.
https://www.eastbayexpress.com/SevenDays/archives/2017/02/18...
The guy in Portland who murdered two people and injured a third a week or two back was taken into custody peacefully despite being armed with a large knife or a machete, I forget which right now. Dylann Roof murdered 8 or 9 people in a church last year but he was apprehended without incident when the police showed up. Conversely, some months ago in Florida a black caregiver who was trying to get an autistic mental patient out of a busy street and back to the assisted living facility lay down on the ground with his hands in the air when he saw a police car appear, preparing to explain the situation to the officer. The cop got out of his car shot him in the leg anyway. When he asked the officer why he had shot him, the officer replied 'I don't know.'
These are anecdotal examples rather than statistical proof, but you're divorced from reality if you don't think police treat suspects very very differently based on skin color. I'm afraid that I think it is you who are delusional.
Hanlon's razor states that you shouldn't ascribed to malice what can better be explained by ignorance/incompetence/etc.
When even those officers belonging to the demographic experiencing the bias are guilty of being biased that suggests that Hanlon's razor is applicable and that the root cause of the police bias might be something else. Looking at the statistics for violent crime by race, shows why this bias and predisposition to being more aggressive with a certain might be explainable psychologically. It's human nature to form preconceptions based on experience.
Now that said, Hanlon's razor should also be applied in favor of the demographic responsible for violent crimes at rates several times higher than they exist in society. I have no reason to believe that anything about being black leads black men to be responsible for more crime then men of a different race, yet the statistics show this is the case. With this in mind, can we find some potential causes that might result in this. The two hypotheses that I think are reasonable to explore are lead poisoning and the lack of male role models due to incarceration. These are two causes that can impact one another. Higher lead levels could lead to greater violence that leads to greater arrests of black males which reduces male role models, and so forth.
When there is such a stark effect of lead poisoning on violence committed later in life, it's important that we give this serious consideration as one of the factors that might be really hurting the black community and its reasonable to infer the potential for causality of lead poisoning leading to violence that leads to bias against the lead poisoned group as being more violent.
It's fucking ridiculous that we can't have a reasonable academic discussion of this hypothesis without it and those considering it being branded as racist. It is anything but. No one here has suggested that a persons race is the cause of being more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. The hypothesis being proposed is that their race merely correlates and that lead poisoning may be a significant cause and that lead poisoning could have impacted anyone from any race, but it impacts black people more for unfortunate historical reasons. No one is trying to blame black people or men. We're merely trying to have an honest discussion of unfortunate environmental factor (lead poisoning) that maybe should be getting a lot more attention than it does in the discussion of why the racial bias against black people, especially black men exist. I wish that the problem of racial bias be solved as much as anyone else. The difference is that I'm not going to shut out any possible explanation just because its inconvenient to the politicized narrative being furthered by a group that violates Hanlon's Razor.
Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, voicing skepticism of the strength of Fryer's conclusion:
http://rajivsethi.blogspot.com/2016/07/police-use-of-force-n...
Dan Hirschman, Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University, strongly criticizing the methodology and data set Fryer used:
https://scatter.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/yes-there-is-racial...
A peer-reviewed article in a reputable journal using a different methodology whose results contradict Fryer's:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227943/
Abstract:
Objectives. To update previous examinations of racial/ethnic disparities in the use of lethal force by US police.
Methods. I examined online national vital statistics data for deaths assigned an underlying cause of “legal intervention” (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, external-cause-of-injury codes Y35.0–Y35.7, excluding Y35.5 [legal execution]) for the 5-year period 2010 to 2014.
Results. Death certificates identified 2285 legal intervention deaths (1.5 per million population per year) from 2010 to 2014. Among males aged 10 years or older, who represented 96% of these deaths, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among White individuals.
Conclusions. Substantial racial/ethnic disparities in legal intervention deaths remain an ongoing problem in the United States.
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It's not hard to find more of the literature that is more credible and contradicts this paper.
To be honest, I don't think you're carrying this discussion in good faith. Who knows? Maybe you've even duped yourself. Maybe don't take the word of an economist doing sketchy and loose research outside of his field of expertise. Being able to wield statistics isn't a scientific superpower. Sociological research isn't a bayesian cookbook recipe.
> Among males aged 10 years or older, who represented 96% of these deaths, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among White individuals.
If this is the argument you're making, than I'm not disputing this fact at all. I'm not arguing that the mortality rate for black individuals is equal to white individuals. It's not.
I'm arguing that the mortality rate relative to the frequency of violent crime is more proportional. Look at these statistics for violent crimes:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
In these debates, I usually point to this table of FBI statistics, which shows a significantly higher level of crime committed by both men (all races) and black men in particular on a per capita basis as an explanation for the disproportionate number of men and in particular black men shot by cops.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Cops are more aggressive with black people but don't actually kill them at a greater rate relative to the number of violent crimes committed. Here is Roland G. Fryer's research showing this: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
I'm not discounting that black lives matter. I'm supportive of it. My point is that if we really care about fixing the problems that result in increased mortality in that demographic, we should instead be focusing on likely root causes such as lead poisoning. Lead should be getting so much more attention in the BLM debate, but it does not. Why?