I was describing the mental state of a segment of American society. The particular segment I'm referring to often has views that are detached from facts.

No, you were demonstrating a classic strawman argument. A bigoted strawman argument, at that.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

No, I was not advancing a straw man. A straw man is an intentional mis-statement of an opponent's argument (e.g. "We can't be descended from moneys because there are still monkeys"). That's not what I was doing. I was making a straightforward claim about what is believed by a significant portion of American society. That claim might be wrong, but it's not a straw man.

I believe there are logical holes in the article posted.

> According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or "were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force," according to Mac Donald in a speech at Hillsdale College. > > Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties.

This is saying that while cops shoot more blacks than the population would indicate, we also arrest them at a higher rate. Because they are arrested at a higher rate, we would expect the shooting rate to be high b/c they have a higher-than-population-level-would-indicate interaction with police.

So.. it's unclear as to whether there's selection bias here. Are blacks given disproportionate police contact which increases arrest rate (aka differential exposure)? This would also lead to the same circular logic.

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, there was a report tracking different ethnicities through the criminal justice system called the Relative Rate Index. Article about it: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2016/02/blacks_... and source: http://media.oregonlive.com/portland_impact/other/RRI%20Repo...

In there, it says the rate of each stage of the prison pipeline is approximately the same across race. So to explain why 4x the number of black people are in the pipeline than the population would point to the pre-sentencing side of the world.

The article you linked cherry picks statistics for metropolitan areas (it seems to lump the poor and African American parts of New York with the richer are more white sections) and the article even mentions that unarmed black men are much more likely to be shot and their argument for why that is seems largely anecdotal so the statistics seem less clear than what you linked would imply

The definition of what constitutes a crime is convenient, though. Nixon started the war on drugs to criminalize black people.

> More white men die being shot by police, per violent crime rate, than black men.

What's this statistic even supposed to mean? It looks like you're dividing an absolute number by a per-capita rate but never adjusting for a higher base population of whites in America.

Doing the math for 2017 (using population demographics from 2016 since those are the most recent) we find:

Of the total 987 deaths by police for 2017 Caucasian - 2016 percentage of pop: 76.9 * 987 would be: 759 This group total was actually: 457 or 46.3% African American - 2016 percentage of pop: 13.3 * 987 would be: 131 This group total was actually: 223 or 22.6%

That is a significant difference and nowhere near in line with population percentages. There may be some stories behind the shootings as the article you link to mentions. However, that article is relying on an article at the Marshall Project which was written by Heather Mac Donald who is the author of a book called "The War on Cops". A quick search on this shows quite a few articles claiming bias.

It took just 20 minutes of following sources and looking at available data to come to the conclusion that there are biases in your statements and sources. please do some more research and math in the future.

You are ignoring violent crime rate, as I posted below.

Also, as posted below, this information can be inferred from two popular left leaning media outlets, in addition to raw FBI statistics.

The "truth" is typically not exclusively found on clickbait blogspam. If what you say is factual then the stats should be easy to compute using primary sources; provide that or maybe rethink your views.

The article I posted synthesizes its primary conclusion from two biased sources:

1.>According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black

2.>But as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country

Because of the agenda of the media featured on google (wapo, huffpo, et all), it is left to the readers to compile these two sets of data and infer that, if we take the disproportionate confrontation rate for assaults alone, per capita it would explain why more black people appear to be dying.

I don't have time to provide you with a statistical analysis, just note that the sources for this data should be "legitimate," especially when they effextively lie through omission by selectively reporting data to further their pre-drawn conclusion.

It's pretty clear you're not arguing in good faith; but, for the sake of anyone that happens upon your post, just going to enumerate a subset of your weak assumptions.

--Restrict crime stats to 75 counties (ie major cities) without also restricting fatal shootings

--Assuming population ratios are constant among those counties as compared to the wider nation (required to generate percapita) --Not addressing the issue of scale between your two data sets. I don't know for certain, but I'd wager the number of violent crime incidents is at least an order of magnitude greater than the number of police fatal shootings.

--Related to the population point above but not accounting for potential inequalities in the who is charged in which counties.

You don't have "time" to provide a comprehensive statistical analysis because doing it right is nontrivial and very likely isn't going to conform to the views you spent so long searching the net to validate.