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A comment on The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance. Parent comment

Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by GhostVII on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:06PM (#25703440)
> 1 in 1000 young black men is killed by a cop

Given that ~300 black men are killed by police each year, I don't think that math checks out.

Agree with police reform, although we probably need more funding in many places, not less.

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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by ceejayoz on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:10PM (#25703477)
300/year * an average lifespan of 78 years = 23400.

Multiply that by 1,000 and you get 23M.

There are 38M Black and African Americans in the USA, approximately half of which are male.

The math checks out fine.

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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by GhostVII on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:22PM (#25703623)
Yea that makes sense, surprising to me that it works out
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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by torstenvl on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:24PM (#25703645)
It doesn't work out. A 78 year old is not a "young black man."
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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by ceejayoz on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:27PM (#25703679)
I would suspect the ages of people shot by police are weighted fairly heavily in the younger category.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

> Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.

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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by torstenvl on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:23PM (#25703640)
300/19740000 = 0.0000152

→ 0.999984802431611 chance of not-being-killed-by-police per year.

pow(0.999984802431611, 69) = 0.998951909443727 chance of never being killed by police.

→ 0.001048090556273 chance of at some point being killed by police

→ just over 1/1000 over a lifetime.

The math checks out... if we ignore the "young" part.

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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by anchpop on Sunday January 10, 2021 @02:39AM (#25711994)
It still works out if we assume young people are just as likely as old men to be killed by police. Restricting us to young people would probably reduce the denominator of "300/19740000" enough to counteract the fact that the exponent of "69" is reduced.

In fact, if you assume that people are young for x% of their lives, and x% of black people are young, this exactly cancels out and you still get `0.001048` odds of being killed by police.

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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by GhostVII on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:48PM (#25703953)
The violent crime rate for black men is roughly equal to the portion of police shooting victims which are black. Violent crime rate (excluding murder) is roughly 2x the average, and so is the death rate to police.

That's why I think we need to be focusing on why black people have a higher crime rate, and how we can fix the societal problems that lead to that. Reducing the number of police shootings is a great goal, but so long as there is a racial (and gender) divide in the crime rate there is going to be a divide in the police shooting rate.

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Re:The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance by dragonwriter on Saturday January 09, 2021 @02:44PM (#25703888)
> Criminality among young black men is also disproportionaly higher.

Is it? Or are young black men just disproportionately more likely to be held accountable for their “Three felonies a day”?

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