Is it though? Seems to me you're advocating feelings matter more than facts. I believe it would be more accurate to say "police in the United States are killing people for stupid reasons, which is true." while keeping in mind that those incidents are the exception, not the norm. The police shot 28 unarmed people in 2019. On a population of 320 million.
>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...
>We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015 and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.
>In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population. The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities.
Out of curiosity, I understand that you're simply citing statistics from a source but I'd like to know if you think this reflects reality? If so, what reason would you suggest creates this?
Be very wary of someone who thinks their intuition is stronger than our best pursuits of data. And, based on what, Reddit r/videos and Twitter?
I agree that statistics are an incredibly powerful tool to understand the world but I disagree that they’re the “only lens on reality” since in some cases, ideologues are able to summon numbers that fit a preconceived notion.
Edit: oops, forgot the link (1) https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
I think the cause to first order is economics. Second and third order terms with much less but still contributing importance are political (decades of policy failures like the War on Drugs and welfare expansion, for-profit prisons, etc), and cultural (there is far too much celebration of crime culture, gang culture, and respect culture that normalizes the state of things in the black community).
Which gives me a bit of whiplash when I see many of those people outraged that the Capitol Police didn’t just start shooting indiscriminately into the crowd on 1/6.
What I've seen is mostly people pointing to that response as proving police know how to respond nonviolently to mass, even violent, protests, and therefore that the reason they choose a different stance and response when, e.g., BLM is involved is racial bias, not neutral procedure.
So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true. There are no statistics to worry about for that one and there don't need to be: just look at a handful of publicized cases and be angry.
But of course, people do like statistics. You can't be angry without statistics. (Truly, you shouldn't. It's unhealthy). Also, that framework makes a terrible export. (Which is unfortunate because Canada loves importing protests from the States instead of making its own).
So, various other progressive movements globbed on to the name, as they do, but fortunately it's a more visceral thing than, say, Occupy Wall Street, so they are at least mostly on topic. I think the real problem, which is the source of most of the recent anger (see the equally badly named and easily co-opted slogan "Defund the police"), is that police are killing a lot of people for stupid reasons.
It is still important to emphasize that black lives matter, because they do, and it's infuriating that that makes people uncomfortable. But the root cause is the United States has an unreasonable approach to policing in general, which creates as many problems as it solves. And I think if you talk to most BLM supporters, they aren't going to tell you about racial sensitivity training or hiring more black cops: they're going to tell you how the police in a developed country shouldn't act as if they're expecting a war.