The predominant factor in black deaths by police is more crimes commited - not racism

[ksen]

Racism is a pretty serious charge in today's society, and folks like Davka here like to throw it around instead of actually challenging anything the OP said or any of the data it pointed to.

Well, when Axulus throws around gems like this:

Axulus, other data has shown that crime increases with poverty, and that poor white neighbourhoods are as crime ridden as balck ones. Have you come across any data that controls for wealth, and compares whites and blacks?

Yep, take a look at my first link. It discusses that and provides links to studies. The data is inconclusive on whether SES fully explains the difference in crime rates. It is certainly a significant factor. Another hypothesis is that black communities have a more violent subculture compared to whites, and that this is also a contributing factor, but it is a difficult hypothesis to test. A final, very controversial, hypothesis is that blacks have a greater genetic predisposition to commit violent crimes, but this hypothesis isn't very well supported by the data, and even entertaining the idea intellectually will immediately get one branded a racist, although max on this board does subscribe to this theory. I don't completely dismiss this idea (I'm driven by data and logic, regardless of the political correctness of it), as there are some possible mechanisms (black men have higher testosterone levels, for example, but such is a weak causal factor in violent crimes).

You are correct that racism is almost certainly a factor in contributing to the poverty rate of that group. However, it still doesn't support the idea of prevalent or significant racism in the police force, the political topic of late in the US, driven almost exclusively by anecdotes and misleading statistics that don't properly control for other variables.

then it's pretty apparent Davka hit the nail on the head.

 

[Davka]

Sure, I could have patiently refuted Axelus' classic racist-apologist thread with facts and reason, but quite frankly i was pretty tired of reading all the other racism-apologetics going on at the time. It's not as if any of the bigots here are going to read my carefully-constructed rebuttals and say "why, he's right! I should revisit my opinions on the subject and stop being such a bigoted fuck!"

Pointing and laughing was, I submit, the better part of valour.

 

[ksen]

Thank you for the explanation. I see it ignores the race of the police in the arrests and shootings, and I believe that the statistics on killings by police are not complete.

Do you have a cite for the incompleteness of the data used from the source in the OP?

I do!!!!

See a couple of posts up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Learn a little something about statistics!

These days with the computer you run *ALL* combinations of the variables you have to see what inputs matter. An input matters if you get a better prediction using it than not using it. An input is a proxy if it's correlated with the results but does nothing to improve the accuracy of your prediction when you consider other variables. There's nothing biased about this.

It is clear you do not know what  Bias_of_an_estimator means. Nor its implications in modelling (see http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13643/bias-an-intuitive-definition for an explanation you may be able to comprehend).

Throwing out terms doesn't rebut what I'm saying.

And there's no bias involved in testing *ALL* options and seeing which ones end up mattering.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Why would anyone ever assume White people got their place at university through affirmative action? White people are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action; they are the victims.

Since affirmative action openly and specifically works by a selection bias against higher-achieving groups (typically, Asians and Whites) and in favour of lower-achieving groups (that is, Blacks and Hispanics), why wouldn't someone wonder if a Black or Hispanic graduate student got their place partly due to their group membership?

This is a poison of your own making, since you support and defend affirmative action. If there were no affirmative action, no one could dismiss an accomplishment by a person as merely the result of affirmative action, could they?

Yeah, you still don't understand how affirmative action works.

We understand fine. It's legalized discrimination against whites and Asians and it hurts everyone, even the people it's supposed to benefit. (Not only due to questioning their credentials but by putting people in things above their level so they fail. When California banned AA the number of blacks getting degrees went *UP*.)

 

[ronburgundy]

He presented his argument, with data that can be examined and challenged, and instead of making some sort of counter argument (which I presume wouldn't be hard to do), you just call him a racist. I'm afraid he is the one who looks more reasonable here.

For example, one could point out that here

Now, how many more blacks die at the hands of police? About 3 per million individuals per year for blacks and 1 per million per year for whites, a 3 to 1 rate compared to whites. Now remember that violence crime arrest ratio? Matches almost exactly.

Data for deaths at hands of police by race here:

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-killed-police/19423

the data being relied upon is nowhere near complete and relies on non-required self-reporting from law enforcement agencies.

BJS: Arrest Related Deaths

Participation in the Arrest-Related Deaths program is voluntary, meaning neither law enforcement agencies nor states are required to submit ARD data to BJS.

So while what is being reported may be correct (and I'm not saying it is correct) based on the facts at hand but the facts on hand are hardly anywhere near complete.

Also, on page 15 of the ARD report there's Appendix Table 2 which identifies 15 states that did not report anything for a number of years during the reporting period.

If the ARD is comparable to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports program, which it seems to be since the number of annual deaths reported by the ARD and the UCR are almost identical:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...78ee00-2a26-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html

In November 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics published figures on “arrest-related deaths” from 2003 through 2009, which did include information on the races and ethnicities of the deceased, as well as broad categorization of circumstances surrounding each case. The annual average of homicides attributable to police, 422, is consistent with the FBI reports.

Then we have a case of only 4.4% (750 out of 17,000) of law enforcement agencies even bothering to report.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/

About 750 agencies contribute to the database, a fraction of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States.

So how any meaningful conclusions can be drawn from this pittance of data is beyond me.

I bolded the key distinct points that each independently support the key claim of the OP that violent crime rate difference more than account for (and are even larger) than difference in the rates of being shot by the cops.

The vast majority of those 17,000 agencies have zero deaths and are not the type of agencies even relevant to the issue of cop shootings. Agencies comprised of cops investigating reported crimes or patrolling for suspected crimes on the streets account for about 5%-10% of all "law-enforcement agencies". The rest are things like the FDA, Office of the Inspector General in the Dept of Education, Treasury Inspector for Tax Administration, and then "police" agencies that have nothing to do with street crime - shootings of suspects by cops relationships in question and rarely make any arrests at all, such as the "Library of Congress Police", the "USPS police", etc.. Then there are military police which are also a whole different ball of wax within a completely different context. Even among State agencies, "law enforcement agencies include things like the Department of Transportation, Commercial Vehicle Enforcement, or "agencies" comprised entirely of a single pencil pusher and maybe their secretary like "County Constable", etc..

Every shooting making headlines and being reacted to are by the small % of law enforcement agencies that directly deal with local communities, meaning the local and state police, and on rarer occasion the FBI or ATF. They only make up about 5%-10% of those 17,000 agencies, but are doing nearly all the shooting of civilians, and data from only them is really what is needed for the most valid data relevant to the issue at hand. The BJS report includes those type of relevant agencies.

The fact that difference agencies, from bjs, to FBI, to the CDC, employ varied data collection methods and reach highly similar estimates supports the validity of these numbers and that while not exact, are rather close approximations. This is a basic principle of showing measurement validity.

Larger samples are likely to produce smaller rather than larger differences in rate of deaths. As a matter of basic sampling probability, smaller samples usually inflate the difference in any aggregate stat between two groups. For example, in a room of 100 people, if you want to know the difference in height between males and females, if you only use one randomly picked person of each gender, they are likely to differ in height by more than the true avg difference of all the people.

3:1 is actually much smaller than the ratio predicted if cops were reacting to legit deadly threats. The OP referred to a 3:1 ratio in overall violent crime,.but includes things like "simple assault" which can be just threat of violence or two guys in a bar fight. Since deadly threat is what cops should be reacting to, it makes more sense to look at rates of committed deadly crime, namely homicides where the ratio is 8:1 in the rates among blacks compared to whites.
IOW, even if the shootings by cops data was extremely biased in underestimating the size of the black:white ratio, and the true ratio was almost 3 times as large as the current data shows, it would still be highly coherent with what is expected by cops reacting non-racistly to deadly threats they encounter.
In addition, there is the data I posted in another thread showing that blacks are many many times more likely to shoot at cops, and in fact, the ration of how often blacks are shot relative to how often they shoot at cops is lower than that same ratio for whites. IOW, if you shoot at the cops, you are much more likely to be shot and killed by the cops if you are white than if you are black.

 

[laughing dog]

It is clear you do not know what  Bias_of_an_estimator means. Nor its implications in modelling (see http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/13643/bias-an-intuitive-definition for an explanation you may be able to comprehend).

Throwing out terms doesn't rebut what I'm saying.

In this case it does.

And there's no bias involved in testing *ALL* options and seeing which ones end up mattering.

Correct, but that is not what you described.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I understand exactly how it works, which is why I oppose it. It's very easy for you to claim I don't understand it, but you've not pointed out what I've written that demonstrates I don't understand it.

But you don't understand it: you believe that it takes unqualified candidates from under represented minorities and gives them admissions over highly qualified candidates who do not belong to under represented minorities. You insist that the only qualifications that should be considered are MCAT scores and GPA without acknowledging that medical schools in fact do an excellent job of selecting candidates, as demonstrated by the very low failure rate of candidates. Because medical schools take qualified candidates, not unqualified candidates.

You have not considered nor demonstrated that significant numbers of high scoring Asian and white candidates are denied admission to medical school. I don't believe that you've considered that such highly scoring candidates likely apply to multiple top rated medical schools, regardless of whether their actual interests are a good match for that particular medical school. Certain students apply to certain schools as a way to boost their status. I am certain that not all students with very high GPAs and very high MCAT scores are admitted to medical schools because frankly, some of them have no business becoming doctors. I've known such candidates who are frankly very happy with their Ph.D's in mathematics and physics which is where they belong and where their talents (which do not include a high level of interpersonal skills in the cases I am thinking of) and abilities are much better utilized.

You're simply assuming there are other factors that explain the difference in the stats--yet your side gets vicious with us if we show (rather than just hypothesize) other causes.

You're also constructing a strawman here. It's not the very high scoring people that are discriminated against. They get in where they want. It's the midrange people where you see the problem--a midrange score for a black to be admitted is basically a do-not-admit for a white.

 

[laughing dog]

Larger samples are likely to produce smaller rather than larger differences in rate of deaths. As a matter of basic sampling probability, smaller samples usually inflate the difference in any aggregate stat between two groups. For example, in a room of 100 people, if you want to know the difference in height between males and females, if you only use one randomly picked person of each gender, they are likely to differ in height by more than the true avg difference of all the people.

That is true for truly randomly selected samples from the same population. Unfortunately for your argument that is not true here. These police are not homogenous throughout the USA so these samples do not come from the same population nor are they necessarily random.

In addition, there is the data I posted in another thread showing that blacks are many many times more likely to shoot at cops, and in fact, the ration of how often blacks are shot relative to how often they shoot at cops is lower than that same ratio for whites. IOW, if you shoot at the cops, you are much more likely to be shot and killed by the cops if you are white than if you are black.

That must explain the recent shootings of unarmed black men as well.

 

[Trausti]

"Every 28 hours a black man is killed by a police officer" gets four Pinocchios.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/12/24/the-viral-claim-that-a-black-person-is-killed-by-police-every-28-hours/

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Sure, I could have patiently refuted Axelus' classic racist-apologist thread with facts and reason, but quite frankly i was pretty tired of reading all the other racism-apologetics going on at the time. It's not as if any of the bigots here are going to read my carefully-constructed rebuttals and say "why, he's right! I should revisit my opinions on the subject and stop being such a bigoted fuck!"

Pointing and laughing was, I submit, the better part of valour.

Nobody forced you to post in the thread. You could have rolled your eyes and moved on. But you deliberately choose to slander the OP without providing any basis for doing so. That makes you, not him, look unreasonable. That you didn't point out any flaws in the data or reasoning he presented actually made him and his post look more credible, not less.

 

[Davka]

Sure, I could have patiently refuted Axelus' classic racist-apologist thread with facts and reason, but quite frankly i was pretty tired of reading all the other racism-apologetics going on at the time. It's not as if any of the bigots here are going to read my carefully-constructed rebuttals and say "why, he's right! I should revisit my opinions on the subject and stop being such a bigoted fuck!"

Pointing and laughing was, I submit, the better part of valour.

Nobody forced you to post in the thread. You could have rolled your eyes and moved on. But you deliberately choose to slander the OP without providing any basis for doing so. That makes you, not him, look unreasonable. That you didn't point out any flaws in the data or reasoning he presented actually made him and his post look more credible, not less.

Only for those who don't see why blaming the victim is a classic racist tactic. And those people would not have their tiny minds changed no matter what i wrote.

Again, point-and-laugh. It's the least i can do for this thread.

 

[ksen]

I bolded the key distinct points that each independently support the key claim of the OP that violent crime rate difference more than account for (and are even larger) than difference in the rates of being shot by the cops.

The vast majority of those 17,000 agencies have zero deaths and are not the type of agencies even relevant to the issue of cop shootings. Agencies comprised of cops investigating reported crimes or patrolling for suspected crimes on the streets account for about 5%-10% of all "law-enforcement agencies".

The BJS says there are 12,501 local police departments. Just eyeballing the numbers but that looks like more than 5%-10% of the 17,000 agencies. So we're getting reporting from about 6% of local police departments if we assume all 750 reportees were local police departments.

The fact that difference agencies, from bjs, to FBI, to the CDC, employ varied data collection methods and reach highly similar estimates supports the validity of these numbers and that while not exact, are rather close approximations. This is a basic principle of showing measurement validity.

Unless of course they are all getting their data from the same self-reporting information depositories.

Larger samples are likely to produce smaller rather than larger differences in rate of deaths. As a matter of basic sampling probability, smaller samples usually inflate the difference in any aggregate stat between two groups. For example, in a room of 100 people, if you want to know the difference in height between males and females, if you only use one randomly picked person of each gender, they are likely to differ in height by more than the true avg difference of all the people.

Cite?

In your male/female height ratio example I'd think there'd be a 50/50 chance for the random people to differ by more or less than the avg because isn't that kind of the definition of "avg?"

3:1 is actually much smaller than the ratio predicted if cops were reacting to legit deadly threats. The OP referred to a 3:1 ratio in overall violent crime,.but includes things like "simple assault" which can be just threat of violence or two guys in a bar fight. Since deadly threat is what cops should be reacting to, it makes more sense to look at rates of committed deadly crime, namely homicides where the ratio is 8:1 in the rates among blacks compared to whites.
IOW, even if the shootings by cops data was extremely biased in underestimating the size of the black:white ratio, and the true ratio was almost 3 times as large as the current data shows, it would still be highly coherent with what is expected by cops reacting non-racistly to deadly threats they encounter.

wat

In addition, there is the data I posted in another thread showing that blacks are many many times more likely to shoot at cops, and in fact, the ration of how often blacks are shot relative to how often they shoot at cops is lower than that same ratio for whites. IOW, if you shoot at the cops, you are much more likely to be shot and killed by the cops if you are white than if you are black.

We're talking about Axulus' data in his op not about something you may have posted somewhere else at some other time.

 

[pegasus8]

Wow! I mean of course it is not about racism and cops. It is all about "Whitey being protected from those Darkies.

Good thing that we have people who can see the light and point out how those "darkies" get killed by the man as being their own fault.

It never ceases to amaze me that under most, not all, of these criteria of datum, it is usually the people getting killed and arrested being the fault of their own. Nothing like convenient data I always like to say.

What is even more revealing in a Freudian kind of way is this constant drum beat since the days of our nation's infancy that us, Whitey, has to be superior to Darkie. And Darkie can be... just fill in the blanks. Darkie in this so called Ch.4 study is blacks get arrested and kill more people, because wait for it, because they are black!!!! SURPRISE!!!!

Maybe Freud was right, I hate saying this, but some of us "less endowed" seem to have that age old fear of black men.Is not this the way that how we were told growing up; white people are good and dark people are bad. All we have to do is read the data. Yet this conflation of Freudian interpretations as in you better watch out for blackey because he is going to get all the white women seems to surface like a cold sore sometimes.

Yet I must say to Axulus have no fear because just like climate deniers you can always dig up some good data to support your narrative. Never mind that the most violent and horrific killers, murders and torturers have been and will always be white! You know just take you average serial killer. Oops. They we go again with stupid facts.

I will have to tell all of my vato loco's friends that the brothers are being jacked more from the Man because they commit more crimes. Gee and stupid us thought that the gang bangers committed the most 187's and jack fool acts on people. Silly me. You know they be slinging a whole lot more than the brothers because of their numbers and street creds.

Peace and thanks for the laugh.

Has anyone been to the ghetto or Barrio lately to experience the Real World and not some statistical chart? Some people are just dying to meet, er I mean rob you.

Pegasus.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Only for those who don't see why blaming the victim is a classic racist tactic.

"Blaming the victim" presupposes victimization. His argument and data appears to be claiming there isn't as much victimization as we presuppose. If his argument and data is flawed, that would be relevant, and you could show him to be wrong. If you can show that he actually knows his argument and data is flawed, then you could rightly say he is racist (and not just wrong). Until that is done, you are just engaging in slander.

 

[ksen]

"Every 28 hours a black man is killed by a police officer" gets four Pinocchios.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/12/24/the-viral-claim-that-a-black-person-is-killed-by-police-every-28-hours/

That fact-checker got pretty torn apart in the comments section.

 

[arkirk]

Reported crime statistics are like the statistics the military uses to justify its funding....completely bogus....a kind of stew of biased reporting. The charts with the circles and arrows etc. are neat and clean and seem to spell out a clear justification for continued police violence against minorities. The chart makers pat the offenders on the back and say..."good work. Mr. Wilson" We have experienced so much demonizing of the black and brown communities in this country with very little consideration of the causative factors of what is called crime. You can define anybody and any type of person as a criminal by defining actions that truly are not criminal violations or at least acts with criminal intent as crimes. It is precisely this type of bias that comes home to us in the statistics Axulus presents in his racist OP. What's worse, I think he knows what he is doing...putting it simply, he supports a status quo position he feels comfortable with...continually thinning out the black and brown "criminal element" with continued killings by cops. Why else would he present such skewed data?

He and Loren both act as if their attitude is thus: "This kind of policing doesn't kill people of my kind, so let it be."

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Darkie in this so called Ch.4 study is blacks get arrested and kill more people, because wait for it, because they are black!!!! SURPRISE!!!!

Wait. What? Did you read the article you are referring to? Where does it say that blacks get arrested and kill more people because they are black? It doesn't say that at all. Nowhere does it or anybody in this thread suggest a genetic basis.

Here is what it actually says

So why are black offenders – and young black men in particular – over-represented in America’s crime statistics?

Judging from online comments, there is a wide spectrum of views on this, from unapologetic racism to militant refusal to blame the problem on anything but historic white racism.

Some criminologists think we could be simply confusing race for poverty or inequality: black people tend to offend more because they tend to be more disadvantaged, living in poorer urban areas with less access to public services, and so on.

If you control for deprivation, people of different races ought to be similarly predisposed to commit crime. Or that’s the theory, at least.

There is a lot of research in this area, but a lot of it is contradictory.

This study of violent crime in deprived neighbourhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, found that reductions in poverty led to reductions in the crime rate in exactly the same way in predominantly black and white areas, suggesting poverty, not race, is the biggest factor.

Other studies get different results.

All sociologists have suffered from the same basic problem: finding urban white communities that are as disadvantaged as the poorest black neighbourhoods, so that you can get a fair comparison.

Some thinkers play down the importance of poverty in favour of the “violent subculture theory”.

This is the idea that some black communities, for some reason, have developed cultural values that are more tolerant of crime and violence.

Some commentators on the unrest in Ferguson – mostly right-wing, though not all white – seem to favour this idea, but naturally it remains highly controversial.

Seems pretty evenhanded to me. It could be entirely a poverty correlate. It could be a "violent subculture", as you see in counter culture gangsta rap lyrics etc. It could be entirely due to historical white racism towards blacks. It could be due to present day racism against blacks, and lashing out in response in violent ways (but then you would expect more black on white violence). Or it could simply be flawed data. Neither the Ch 4 article, nor anybody in this thread has suggested that it is genetic.

 

[ksen]

Neither the Ch 4 article, nor anybody in this thread has suggested that it is genetic.

A final, very controversial, hypothesis is that blacks have a greater genetic predisposition to commit violent crimes, but this hypothesis isn't very well supported by the data, and even entertaining the idea intellectually will immediately get one branded a racist, although max on this board does subscribe to this theory. I don't completely dismiss this idea (I'm driven by data and logic, regardless of the political correctness of it), as there are some possible mechanisms (black men have higher testosterone levels, for example, but such is a weak causal factor in violent crimes).

 

[Axulus]

Your last link shows the exact opposite is true of what you believe
\


No: every time you eliminate someone from a competition merely because of skin colour, and that person would have been the best candidate, you have made the world poorer. This cannot seriously be denied.

You have also made the majority group wealthier, at the expense of those shut out. Basic math tells us that if there are 100 people competing for a share of a pie, and you exclude 18 of them from the competition, those remaining have a better shot at a larger slice.

You are totally ignoring the contribution to the pie of those other 18 if they are selected. If those 18 have the most merit, they'll make the size of the pie larger than the less qualified individuals. Basic math and all that.