Consider a hypothetical: two separate scenarios of kids shoplifting, one white the other black: the white kid gets called out by an officer, is pursued and apprehended without arms drawn, the police officer writes-up a citation and the kid spends the night in jail as a warning before being released. A black kid does the same thing, but the officer decides to draw their sidearm and orders them to freeze - the kid turns around to look and is immediately shot by the officer (search online for "shot for turning around police"). The officer can (at present, justifiably) say they feared for their life because they thought they were about to be charged or expected their target to draw their own firearm. Or take the same scenario but both kids do actually fight back somehow - I believe the average white police officer would still be more hesitant to use lethal force against a white assailant than a black one.
I won't deny the usual statistics ("blacks commit more crimes per-capita", etc) but don't think that's where I believe the problem is. I'm not content with the sentiment that "black lives matter" - I'd much rather it be "criminals' lives matter" (I'm aware of the straightforward racist implication - that's why I dare not say it too loudly).
> I believe the average white police officer would still be more hesitant to use lethal force against a white assailant than a black one.
I thought I heard about studies into this, but I can't seem to dig them up. I'll edit or reply again if/when I find them.
> I won't deny the usual statistics ("blacks commit more crimes per-capita", etc) but don't think that's where I believe the problem is. I'm not content with the sentiment that "black lives matter" - I'd much rather it be "criminals' lives matter"
If the discriminant is criminal behavior and not race, then (by definition), the issue isn't one of race (at least not in any meaningful way). It would be good to identify if this is the case or not, so we can focus our national debate on how to appropriately deal with crime and not on racism.
The study is clear in its conclusions: in the hypothetical situation you just presented it is the white kid that has the higher probability of getting shot/killed by the police.
In a nutshell what the study based on the data says is: After you get stop by the police, you are more likely to get shot/killed if you are white than if you are black.
From the Washington Post[0]:
> White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.
If you look at fatal police shootings so far this year[1], the numbers are the same.
You should provide a link to the Harvard study you mentioned.
Here[2] is one from Yale which someone once touted to me, which supports your claims. But they only used data from a limited number of police departments in Houston, TX. I'm not sure why anyone would look at that and not the national numbers. In the paper, of their own methods they say, "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 are many places to find this information online. It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
[2] https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/workshop/leo/leo16_fr...
Actually, that very quote was what inspired my research. I wanted to know if the quote was misleading in favor of one narrative, so I filtered out cases where the suspect was armed and otherwise viably threatening.
Here's the link to the harvard study: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
> It is a fact: black people are shot and killed more often by police than white people.
I don't dispute that. I'm skeptical that black people are unjustifiably shot more frequently than white people, or at least with the frequency the media would have me believe.
Is that a general statement? Because the 20th century would like a word.
If we really managed to eliminate institutional racism in the justice system, we should probably try and work out the date that occurred, and make it a national holiday.
Which is meaningless, since black people commit more serious crimes than white people.
If you break it down by people suspected of having committed a felony, you're actually more likely to be shot as a white guy.
Convicted? Yes. Arrested? Sure. Commit? I don't know, maybe, but I bet if you factored in economic status there'd be a lot of evening out; i.e. poor people commit more serious crimes, black people are disproportionately poor, therefore more black people commit more serious crimes.
The causes are irrelevant from the standpoint of police officers. Cops have to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.
Does it? Not that I can see, particularly in response to the assertion black people are shot disproportionately by police.
Not that this changes the rough idea here which is that someone changing a license plate on a car shouldn't have a gun pointed at her and have to depend more on her de-escalation skills than the officer's.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...
> My behavior is how everyone should act in those situations: comply, survive and complain later.
> I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one who must remain calm. The legal system is asking untrained civilians to de-escalate panicky cops.
> The story and its interest doesn't hinge on this (in)accuracy ...
All of that said, there is a core of truth here that I believe should not be overlooked, and that's that dark-skinned people are treated differently than light-skinned people. There is a great deal of scientific literature that supports this belief - generally speaking, people of all races view others with darker skin to be stronger, more aggressive, less innocent, and often older than they really are.
It doesn't matter if the victim's narrative was that she was likely to get shot because she is black, but yet the reality is that cops are equal opportunity murderers. Either way, the victim is ultimately panicked because they're being assaulted with a deadly weapon.
If OP has fallen into the narrative that she is especially at risk being black [0], then there is a fine line between trying to extract her from that possibly nonconstructive narrative and shouting down her entire story. This is the general problem with the identity politics tarpit - if one objects too hard at a certain collectivist narrative (in this case, racism), then they are easily pigeonholed into being the "other" in that narrative, fueling the unproductive fire.
[0] Which given the location, is likely true regardless of the overriding distribution.
In case this wasn't a simple typo, just FYI: It's "trawled".
In particular, I was expecting a lot more drama from a story of a black woman "surviving" an encounter with police. Here's a similar story about a white man in San Fran: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9.... This sort of stuff makes me think that race is perhaps a red herring, and that the quality of police (or police training) simply vary a lot in our country.