> the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average
What they really need to do is factor in the probability of encounters with police gI've race. That is, we want to know, out of all encounters with police, are they more likely to be fatal if the victim is black?
Without factoring in the rate of police encounters, the conclusion could just be indicating that black people are more likely to encounter the police, which is a problem in itself but is slightly different. That would point more to socioeconomic factors determining the rate of policing in neighborhoods, rather than police racism.
A study from the NYT addresses this, and finds that if arrest rates is a good proxy for police interactions (a reasonable assumption) the data supports the theory that the reason black people are more likely to be killed by police is because they are more likely to interact with police:
> This in turn suggests that removing police racial bias will have little effect on the killing rate. Suppose each arrest creates an equal risk of shooting for both African-Americans and whites. In that case, with the current arrest rate, 28.9 percent of all those killed by police officers would still be African-American. This is only slightly smaller than the 31.8 percent of killings we actually see, and it is much greater than the 13.2 percent level of African-Americans in the overall population.
I liked Trevor Noah's take on this: "This isn't a black problem, this is a US police problem. Why is the US police shooting people who are already subdued? Why are people getting shot in the back?"
To support his claim, he shows both a video of police killing black people and a video of police killing white people. Each time the perp was already on the ground and immobilized. Then shot.
At this point I'm terrified of ever interacting with the US police in any way for any reason.Starting to think it's time to vote with my feet and move to a different country again.
I'm not sure I agree with you - having a higher encounters rate need not be limited to simple neighborhood selection for policing (although there is likely bias there too) - rather simply choosing who to interact with may exhibit bias (e.g. is the police officer more likely to have an encounter with a black person even in a predominantly white neighborhood)?
What are the numbers for being a policeman being shot by a black person? The PC crowd won't like those numbers but its higher than the reverse. We have a police violence problem but it is no where on the scale of the crime rate of one community whose statistics blow everything out of proportion.
We need a culture change. We need politicians not afraid of using the truth. Instead it benefits politicians to exploit the issue for political gain. The real crime is that political manipulation leads to more minorities deaths because they will not act on the real damage and instead go for the sensationalist side.
> There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
This is one of those "awkward statistical analysis" moments where the outcome of the analysis should be...well...as an analyst, i think, ridiculously obvious before its even carried out... if you have any familiarity with the topic/history/culture. But I also can respect its a topic that needs careful interpretation and isn't likely to go down well in everyday english.
So what we'd expect to see is:
1) A bias is present: any study based on american society at large that DOESN'T find a bias in its behaviours/outcomes involving the black community, in terms of either wealth, incarceration, shootings, education, employment, etc etc etc must be so off you'd be more likely to disregard the evidence collected rather than believe the study/conclusion.
2) This is because, not surprisingly, all those things are so highly correlated and historically caused.
3) While I respect that it MIGHT be an interesting question to study whether, controlling for all confounding cultural and obviously explanatory variables, police are more likely to shoot black people in america, and you might even find a very very very weak effect there explained by the low pay, the correlation between low pay/racism/education, and the tendency of police as a career to attract authoritarian personalities, this is in many ways a politically pointless conclusion, because I'd bet good money that you both need to have quite sophisticated statistical understanding to really "get" what such a study is saying, it would be a horrendously complicated statistical study to almost swamp any practical implications and raise very valid questions about its methodological valididty, and I think any effect you may find will likely be swamped statistically by all other factors of black bias in american society.
4) It does no practical good to be able to go up to black groups and say "No no no, its not that police are particularly biased against you because you're black and police are racists, its just that because the higher-order causes of racism and racial history in american society: i.e. you're poor, uneducated, encounter the police more often, commit more crimes, american historical wealth disparities and racial wealth disparities, americans are more likely to carry and be afraid of guns, etc, means that you're just more likely to encounter them and therefore they're more likely to shoot you...so just go home and chill."
That socioeconomic/historical/political factors are the main determinant of things here strikes me as both:
a) Statistically and historically obvious
b) Totally irrelevant to the actual question of whether institutional bias is outrageous/real/needs to be fixed/the reality of black experiences on the other side of that equation.
Another point is how do you factor out the possibility that blacks are significantly more likely to resist arrest and fight with the police officer in a manner that would justify a shooting such as grabbing at the officers' weapons, beating the cop with his own equipment, etc?
From the last time I checked into it, blacks where on the order of 10 times more likely to resist arrest than whites, and 4 times more likely to kill a cop.
Some of the comments here are pointing out the questions about data quality etc. that affect a study like this. And those are real concerns, and obviously analytical studies could only be improved if they had better data to work with.
But let's not make the mistake of looking at this study only in isolation. It is a recent addition to a large collection of observations and evidence that support a theory that personal racial bias affects American policing.
The evidence includes other studies, criminal investigations, criminal cases, federal investigations and reform agreements with police departments like Cleveland and Seattle, videos and photos of violent police encounters, and of course decades of stories and statements from minority communities about how the police treats them.
The last one is important because it gets at trust, which is the heart of the issue. Minority communities, many of them, do not trust the police to protect them in the same way they protect whiter/richer communities, and they have stories that explain why not.
If you are depending solely on data-driven studies to inform your opinion on racial bias in policing, then you're implicitly saying that you distrust or reject what minority people and communities say. Why is that? It's worth thinking about IMO.
Which brings us back to the data. Why is it so lacking? You can't answer that question without coming back around to bias, because until recently, it was the police forces themselves who supplied the data, or not, or only part of the data. So discounting the bias reported in this study because of data problems is getting toward begging the question, logically speaking.
The essential question, when it comes to whether you agree that racial bias affects policing, is: what level of evidence will convince you?
This analysis is based on crowd-sourced data on shootings. I'm not saying that makes it invalid, but I'd need to know more about the dataset before trusting the results. It seems hard to have it be complete. The official FBI data has the same problem. We need to require local departments to report all shootings in a standardized way.
Edit: the author acknowledges the incompleteness of the data in the conclusions section. Oddly, he doesn't think that's likely to affect the mean "since the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". That doesn't really make sense to me. How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results?
"How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results?"
It doesn't. The author means there is some actual population of shootings, and this dataset is a random sample of them. Since there are no systematic biases in the collection of the data, ie, it's not the case that the shooting of a black is more likely to be recorded than that of a white, the random sampling of the full set is sufficient. That's an assumption, of course, but given that assumption the rest works.
It doesn't improve the results, it just doesn't harm them.
Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
With the disclaimer that the conclusion might still be correct, I think looking at the county level is completely absurd. You leave yourself open to the Simpson's Paradox at a neighborhood level.
For argument's sake, let's say that the majority of police shootings happen in poor neighborhoods. Let's also assume, sadly, that the ratio of black/white people in poor neighborhoods is high.
Their analysis would imply that their is a racial bias to the shooting, when in fact, the racial bias could be entirely explained by the demographics. Or it might not, but doing it at a county level completely washes out all useful signal.
Analyses like these are always helpful, and often raise lots of questions, maybe even more questions than they answer. As the parent of a black child, I have a personal interest in this data -- the statistic that some counties have 20x higher risks for unarmed blacks is pretty terrible.
In my mind, I tend to assume that criminals, active or former are more likely to be shot at than non-criminals, whether or not they are armed. I'd really like to see the data normalized against prior convictions or in-process-of-a-crime stats; that would help me understand:
1. Is the effect magnified or dampened by some sort of differences in black and white criminality in these areas?
2. Are these shootings happening while people mostly commission crimes, or are they, a-la Minnesota this week, something that appears to be just wholesale adrenaline-based killings by police officers?
I looked for (but did not find) the researcher's definition of "armed." E.g. is that any weapon, such as a knife, club, tire iron, etc? Or just a firearm?
One thing to understand is that police are trained to take defensive action against an aggressive individual who is within a certain distance. Within that circle, an unarmed individual can reach and overpower an officer before he can draw his weapon. So even if you are unarmed, if are acting aggressively and you approach an officer you are likely to get shot or at least tased/pepper sprayed. If you ignore an order to stop where you are and put your hands up, and you continue to approach you are likely to get shot.
Now, at least on the surface this does not appear to be exactly the situation in the recent Minnesota case. But we only know what's in the media, and the media likes to sensationalize and report half the story.
That said, if a cop has his weapon drawn on you, do not move. Do not twitch. Keep both hands in view. Do not do anything that you are not explicitly asked to do.
> There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
Factors increasing police shootings
- Large metropolitan counties
- Low median incomes
- High financial inequality
- Sizeable portion of black residents.
Factors which did not affect police shootings
- Local level crime rates
- Race specific crime rates
Crazy takeaways
- A black unarmed individual 3.49x more likely to be shot than a white unarmed individual on average across america.
- Some counties showing 20x more likely
I'm interested to see this data in relationship to gun accessibility and gun ownership stats. Would less access to firearms affect police shootings? Is there a racial connection to gun ownership and carrying?
I'm not american and the idea of civilians with guns seems just so crazy to me.
Facts that you don't much analysis to see:
(CDC) - From 1999-2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to just 1,130 blacks.
(DOJ) In 2013 black criminals carried out 38% of murders, compared to 31.1% for whites (despite blacks being only 13% of the population and black males 18-35 being 3%)
It seems the question we should be concerned with should not be 'is there racial bias in policing', to which the answer would surely always be 'yes' because there's one bias or another in everything human and police are human.
The question we should be concerned with should be: 'How is policing/governance structured in a way that enables or encourages people to act upon their biases to detrimental results?'
The distinction is important because eliminating bias/whateverism will never happen, but making it possible for the justice system to operate fairly given the biases of its constituent members should be a desired outcome.
>The question we should be concerned with should be: 'How is policing/governance structured in a way that enables or encourages people to act upon their biases to detrimental results?'
That begs the question, though, of whether the structure is actually set up in such a way. Blacks in the US commit murder at a rate eight times that of whites. Wouldn't you expect them to be shot comparatively more often by police?
I don't think it's reasonable to take a handful of incidents where police were clearly in the wrong and then try to extrapolate that based on statistics relating to incidents in which we have no reason to believe that's the case.
They talk about comparing probability of {black, unarmed, and shot by police} vs {white, unarmed, and shot by police}. Is this not meaningless without adjusting for relative frequency of black vs white in the community? Shouldn't we be comparing P(shot by police|white & unarmed) vs P(shot by police|black & unarmed)?
I didn't understand it all. For instance, they admit some results may be due to more interactions with one population or another. I would have assumed to be useful, we'd want it normalized by population or total interactions by group, right? Else this all becomes just a heatmap of population.
Across almost all counties, individuals who were armed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Likewise, across almost all counties, individuals who were unarmed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Tragically, across a large proportion of counties, individuals who were shot by police had a higher median probability of being unarmed black individuals than being armed white individuals. While this pattern could be explained by reduced levels of crime being committed by armed white individuals, it still raises a question as to why there exists such a high rate of police shooting of unarmed black individuals.
> Whether suspect is unarmed is only known for certain after the incident.
Not even then, really; this can be manipulated in either direction after the incident, and there are enough incidents where its become known that it has been that one should not assume that this is even certainly known after the fact in general.
re: 2, this is covered quite clearly in the abstract: "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates."
What I think is more horrifying, is the use of deadly force in general. For example, based on a quick Google search, 41 police were killed by shooters last year, while roughly 1,000 civilians were killed.
Police should not be using deadly force unless necessary, 41:1000 seems like some pretty bias reactions on the side of police.
The reason different races are shot at different rates can be based on anything including racism, likely hood to commit an offense, which race is more likely to have mental disease, whether or not it's more difficult to identify facial structure. Blaming race outright is kind of silly, it's trying to simplify a multi dimensional problem that needs all of it's dimensions to reach a conclusion.
Yet it should be noted of the 1000 only 102 (by one count http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/) were unarmed, and in at least some of the cases were still acting violently (aggressively trying to reach for the cop's weapon). For instance:
"Deputies say Browning, 30, fled when they were attempting to arrest him for a DUI. They claim he put deputies in a "bear hug" and reached for a firearm before being shot by deputies."
Is use of deadly force not necessary here? I am not sure, depends on the actual details of the encountered. It seems use of deadly force is inevitable, so the best we can do is try to quantify how often it gets misused and try to lower that amount.
I'm not sure what the "right" number is, but you would expect that someone trained to use a weapon would "win" in the majority, if not the vast majority of cases. The ideal ratio would be zero police deaths compared to a much smaller and truly unavoidable number of civilian deaths, but even in that ideal case, the ratio would be incredibly skewed toward civilian deaths, so perhaps this number doesn't tell us much.
I have to wonder how many of those civilian deaths prevented police deaths? Obviously we have seen plenty of news about bias and wrongful deaths of civilians, but how many of the rest were life saving defensive uses of deadly force? I don't actually know the answer, but I would think that contributes to the bias of the numbers.
Agreed. But, it could also be a training issue. From what I understand, police departments do not have enough funding to adequately train their force.
I believe around here (Northern Virginia), the police are trained to shoot if the situation seems 'threatening' (subjective). However, recently a couple of notable cases (that I know of) seem extreme.
1) police responded to a teenager who was threatening suicide. Apparently, the teen raised the knife, and the police shot and killed him.
2) police responded to a Costco employee that was acting erratic. The employee raised a knife, and the police shot and killed her.
As a tax-paying citizen, I would rather the police are trained to first try to diffuse the situation, then try to neutralize, then shoot as last resort. It seems instead that they panic and shoot immediately.
I think a great follow up to this is, what would these numbers look like if the majority of police didn't carry guns?
I'm not sure how you'd get a sense of this though. Maybe data from other countries and comparison of security guard death rates. Both of these ideas are long shots.
Unfortunately, incidents are virtually certain to recur so long as the first line of monitoring and compliance policing is performed by armed officers.
In short: we must disarm most police officers.
The Castile shooting occurred at a stop due to a broken tail light. Consider: the city of Chicago uses cameras to asynchronously ticket red light violators. Running a red light is objectively more dangerous than driving with a broken tail light, but Chicago will allow you to continue driving unimpeded after doing so.
Further, consider: any number of other violations in Chicago --- expired plates, bad stickers, poor selection of parking places, failure to pay parking fees, outstanding warrants on your car --- are performed by parking enforcement officers who are not armed. Chicago also routinely deployed traffic direction officers who are themselves not armed.
The police force we have today will not allow itself to be disarmed. The realistic medium-term answer to this problem is not to change the culture of existing police --- we should do that, but we should be pragmatic about how far that will get us. Instead, cities that want to reduce police violence should stop hiring assault officers, and begin programs to replace them with monitoring and compliance officers who will accept jobs with a description that includes doing the work unarmed. Smart cities should find ways to offload monitoring and compliance work from assault officers onto unarmed officers. Police forces can be disarmed through attrition.
Cities are incentivized to do this anyways: assault officer hires come packaged with intractable pension problems. New job descriptions don't.
Consider also: "armed" and "unarmed" isn't binary. When approaching Philando Castile's car to inquire about the broken tail light, the officer was by default no more than 20-30 seconds away from being able to fire a bullet into Castile. Smarter public policy can increase that delay from 20 seconds to something far greater. For instance: general-purpose patrolling assault officers can be (are, in fact, today) issued rifles and shotguns stored in their trunk. Those officers can remain armed; just, not with handguns, and not wielded by default.
Modern assault officers are in a double bind. They're routinely required to work in high-crime neighborhoods, often minority-dominated, and thus subjected to constant cognitive strain: they're put into contact with far more minorities at work than at home, and those minorities are sampled from a cohort anomalously likely to include criminals. Further, assault officers are acculturated and in fact trained to believe (irrationally) that routine job activities, like making traffic stops, are among the most dangerous things that can be done in America. They're stuck in a vicious circle of cortisol spikes and negative reinforcement. It is not reasonable to expect them to safely handle continuously-available firearms.
I suspect we'll discover that confrontations between unarmed officers and armed suspects are less dangerous than confrontations between armed officers and armed suspects. Most (not all) suspects who shoot at cops aren't doing it out of spite, but instead of out self-preservation. Regardless, I think we already know what would happen if we reconstituted police forces to be 20% assault and 80% compliance, down from 90% assault: far less police violence, far fewer shooting incidents, less expense, and a greater civic recognition of the real risks of policing.
> Ecological regression on county-level characteristics is plagued by difficulties theoretically [39, 51]; issues with data quality make it even harder to use county-level data. In the analysis of county-level predictors of racial bias in police shootings conducted in this paper, some of the data were low quality. Notably, the crime data may be biased by the reporting practices of the police, and Florida, Alabama, and Illinois failed to fully release data, which led to the use Bayesian imputation for counties in these states.
I'd like to see BLM take this on as their a demand during their next direct action: better data for Cody Ross @ the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
1. "In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices."
I'm very interested to see if the full article (which is timing out so I can't check) goes into detail on what the reporting practices are, how they are biased, and how this data set solves those biases.
In particular, this database shows that in 2015, while the "per million" count of blacks killed was 7.27 (and for whites was 2.93), the "in total" count was 306 for blacks and 581 for whites. The statistics in 2016 so far are not much better: 3.23/1.41 respectively per million, and 136/279 in total. Ideally this number would be 0 for all counts, but we don't live in that world.
3. This report was published at the end of 2015, and unfortunately we have seen a massive spike in killings since then. Further, their dataset (according to the title) is only from 2011 to 2014. Is anyone working on a follow-up study using more recent data?
Just read this CityJournal post by Heather MacDonald this morning on the way to work. Search the article for the word "percent" and you'll hit all sorts of provocative stats not commonly heard in the media about shootings and race and police.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-brink-14605.html
There is a lot of discussion going on below. The following research addresses it. Pretty much, looking at the rate at which blacks are shot is a naive statistical method which has generated a lot of bogus beliefs.
Exciting to see the R files used to create this are attached and usable by anyone, so this measure can be tracked across time. As much as I can appreciate the benefit of having stories of individual cases of police misuse of deadly force for galvanizing activism and attempts at reform, I am not a big fan of emotional rhetoric as the main justification for a given policy stance. Relatively objective measures of how problematic the situation truly is seem far more practical to me, along with campaigns such as http://www.joincampaignzero.org/.
I am no statistics expert, so just curious, anyone here knowledgeable enough to read into the technical details and comment on how good the study quality seems to be?
I feel like this problem gets framed as a racial one, which it might be, but never as a class one, which it also might be. Adding another factor to the data of "net worth" (a convenient proxy for class) could provide interesting analysis.
This seems like a really badly done study for multiple reasons. One, as a Hispanic, I would expect there to be a huge jump in numbers of Hispanics being killed in obvious places, Texas, California, Miami, new York. Half of the data is extremely slanted, there is no way that there are even a 10th the amount of anyone else being killed in some of those places (Miami) and yet the numbers are skewed to the point of hilarity towards the other races even in obvious places.
[+] [-] akud|9 years ago|reply
What they really need to do is factor in the probability of encounters with police gI've race. That is, we want to know, out of all encounters with police, are they more likely to be fatal if the victim is black?
Without factoring in the rate of police encounters, the conclusion could just be indicating that black people are more likely to encounter the police, which is a problem in itself but is slightly different. That would point more to socioeconomic factors determining the rate of policing in neighborhoods, rather than police racism.
[+] [-] selectron|9 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/police-killings-of-...:
> This in turn suggests that removing police racial bias will have little effect on the killing rate. Suppose each arrest creates an equal risk of shooting for both African-Americans and whites. In that case, with the current arrest rate, 28.9 percent of all those killed by police officers would still be African-American. This is only slightly smaller than the 31.8 percent of killings we actually see, and it is much greater than the 13.2 percent level of African-Americans in the overall population.
[+] [-] Swizec|9 years ago|reply
To support his claim, he shows both a video of police killing black people and a video of police killing white people. Each time the perp was already on the ground and immobilized. Then shot.
At this point I'm terrified of ever interacting with the US police in any way for any reason.Starting to think it's time to vote with my feet and move to a different country again.
[+] [-] holdenk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
We need a culture change. We need politicians not afraid of using the truth. Instead it benefits politicians to exploit the issue for political gain. The real crime is that political manipulation leads to more minorities deaths because they will not act on the real damage and instead go for the sensationalist side.
[+] [-] zbyte64|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] woodchuck64|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ACow_Adonis|9 years ago|reply
So what we'd expect to see is:
1) A bias is present: any study based on american society at large that DOESN'T find a bias in its behaviours/outcomes involving the black community, in terms of either wealth, incarceration, shootings, education, employment, etc etc etc must be so off you'd be more likely to disregard the evidence collected rather than believe the study/conclusion.
2) This is because, not surprisingly, all those things are so highly correlated and historically caused.
3) While I respect that it MIGHT be an interesting question to study whether, controlling for all confounding cultural and obviously explanatory variables, police are more likely to shoot black people in america, and you might even find a very very very weak effect there explained by the low pay, the correlation between low pay/racism/education, and the tendency of police as a career to attract authoritarian personalities, this is in many ways a politically pointless conclusion, because I'd bet good money that you both need to have quite sophisticated statistical understanding to really "get" what such a study is saying, it would be a horrendously complicated statistical study to almost swamp any practical implications and raise very valid questions about its methodological valididty, and I think any effect you may find will likely be swamped statistically by all other factors of black bias in american society.
4) It does no practical good to be able to go up to black groups and say "No no no, its not that police are particularly biased against you because you're black and police are racists, its just that because the higher-order causes of racism and racial history in american society: i.e. you're poor, uneducated, encounter the police more often, commit more crimes, american historical wealth disparities and racial wealth disparities, americans are more likely to carry and be afraid of guns, etc, means that you're just more likely to encounter them and therefore they're more likely to shoot you...so just go home and chill."
That socioeconomic/historical/political factors are the main determinant of things here strikes me as both:
a) Statistically and historically obvious
b) Totally irrelevant to the actual question of whether institutional bias is outrageous/real/needs to be fixed/the reality of black experiences on the other side of that equation.
[+] [-] powertower|9 years ago|reply
From the last time I checked into it, blacks where on the order of 10 times more likely to resist arrest than whites, and 4 times more likely to kill a cop.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|9 years ago|reply
But let's not make the mistake of looking at this study only in isolation. It is a recent addition to a large collection of observations and evidence that support a theory that personal racial bias affects American policing.
The evidence includes other studies, criminal investigations, criminal cases, federal investigations and reform agreements with police departments like Cleveland and Seattle, videos and photos of violent police encounters, and of course decades of stories and statements from minority communities about how the police treats them.
The last one is important because it gets at trust, which is the heart of the issue. Minority communities, many of them, do not trust the police to protect them in the same way they protect whiter/richer communities, and they have stories that explain why not.
If you are depending solely on data-driven studies to inform your opinion on racial bias in policing, then you're implicitly saying that you distrust or reject what minority people and communities say. Why is that? It's worth thinking about IMO.
Which brings us back to the data. Why is it so lacking? You can't answer that question without coming back around to bias, because until recently, it was the police forces themselves who supplied the data, or not, or only part of the data. So discounting the bias reported in this study because of data problems is getting toward begging the question, logically speaking.
The essential question, when it comes to whether you agree that racial bias affects policing, is: what level of evidence will convince you?
[+] [-] specialist|9 years ago|reply
"what level of evidence will convince you?"
We need to learn to ask this more frequently, upfront. Persuasion doesn't work. Finding your tribe and organizing does.
[+] [-] jim-greer|9 years ago|reply
Edit: the author acknowledges the incompleteness of the data in the conclusions section. Oddly, he doesn't think that's likely to affect the mean "since the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". That doesn't really make sense to me. How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results?
http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-data...
[+] [-] twinkletwinkle|9 years ago|reply
It doesn't. The author means there is some actual population of shootings, and this dataset is a random sample of them. Since there are no systematic biases in the collection of the data, ie, it's not the case that the shooting of a black is more likely to be recorded than that of a white, the random sampling of the full set is sufficient. That's an assumption, of course, but given that assumption the rest works.
It doesn't improve the results, it just doesn't harm them.
[+] [-] chris_va|9 years ago|reply
With the disclaimer that the conclusion might still be correct, I think looking at the county level is completely absurd. You leave yourself open to the Simpson's Paradox at a neighborhood level.
For argument's sake, let's say that the majority of police shootings happen in poor neighborhoods. Let's also assume, sadly, that the ratio of black/white people in poor neighborhoods is high.
Their analysis would imply that their is a racial bias to the shooting, when in fact, the racial bias could be entirely explained by the demographics. Or it might not, but doing it at a county level completely washes out all useful signal.
[+] [-] apathy|9 years ago|reply
Simpson's paradox can be straightforwardly addressed if the stratifying or confounding factor can be identified, and here that is clearly the cases.
It appears that the authors did in fact address this.
[+] [-] vessenes|9 years ago|reply
In my mind, I tend to assume that criminals, active or former are more likely to be shot at than non-criminals, whether or not they are armed. I'd really like to see the data normalized against prior convictions or in-process-of-a-crime stats; that would help me understand:
1. Is the effect magnified or dampened by some sort of differences in black and white criminality in these areas?
2. Are these shootings happening while people mostly commission crimes, or are they, a-la Minnesota this week, something that appears to be just wholesale adrenaline-based killings by police officers?
[+] [-] ams6110|9 years ago|reply
One thing to understand is that police are trained to take defensive action against an aggressive individual who is within a certain distance. Within that circle, an unarmed individual can reach and overpower an officer before he can draw his weapon. So even if you are unarmed, if are acting aggressively and you approach an officer you are likely to get shot or at least tased/pepper sprayed. If you ignore an order to stop where you are and put your hands up, and you continue to approach you are likely to get shot.
Now, at least on the surface this does not appear to be exactly the situation in the recent Minnesota case. But we only know what's in the media, and the media likes to sensationalize and report half the story.
That said, if a cop has his weapon drawn on you, do not move. Do not twitch. Keep both hands in view. Do not do anything that you are not explicitly asked to do.
[+] [-] eslaught|9 years ago|reply
> There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
[+] [-] mangeletti|9 years ago|reply
As a human, I have a personal interest in this data.
[+] [-] JusticeJuice|9 years ago|reply
Factors which did not affect police shootings - Local level crime rates - Race specific crime rates
Crazy takeaways - A black unarmed individual 3.49x more likely to be shot than a white unarmed individual on average across america. - Some counties showing 20x more likely
I'm interested to see this data in relationship to gun accessibility and gun ownership stats. Would less access to firearms affect police shootings? Is there a racial connection to gun ownership and carrying?
I'm not american and the idea of civilians with guns seems just so crazy to me.
[+] [-] bluedino|9 years ago|reply
(DOJ) In 2013 black criminals carried out 38% of murders, compared to 31.1% for whites (despite blacks being only 13% of the population and black males 18-35 being 3%)
[+] [-] bmmayer1|9 years ago|reply
The question we should be concerned with should be: 'How is policing/governance structured in a way that enables or encourages people to act upon their biases to detrimental results?'
The distinction is important because eliminating bias/whateverism will never happen, but making it possible for the justice system to operate fairly given the biases of its constituent members should be a desired outcome.
[+] [-] gozur88|9 years ago|reply
That begs the question, though, of whether the structure is actually set up in such a way. Blacks in the US commit murder at a rate eight times that of whites. Wouldn't you expect them to be shot comparatively more often by police?
I don't think it's reasonable to take a handful of incidents where police were clearly in the wrong and then try to extrapolate that based on statistics relating to incidents in which we have no reason to believe that's the case.
[+] [-] mindslight|9 years ago|reply
Furthermore, is the goal to make sure that all races will be shot equally or is it to achieve justice for all victims of overaggressive police?
[+] [-] advisedwang|9 years ago|reply
Am I missing something from their methodology?
[+] [-] DiabloD3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArkyBeagle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|9 years ago|reply
Across almost all counties, individuals who were armed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Likewise, across almost all counties, individuals who were unarmed and shot by police had a much higher probability of being black or hispanic than being white. Tragically, across a large proportion of counties, individuals who were shot by police had a higher median probability of being unarmed black individuals than being armed white individuals. While this pattern could be explained by reduced levels of crime being committed by armed white individuals, it still raises a question as to why there exists such a high rate of police shooting of unarmed black individuals.
[+] [-] chvid|9 years ago|reply
1. Whether suspect is unarmed is only known for certain after the incident.
2. Differences in levels of crimes by race.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
Not even then, really; this can be manipulated in either direction after the incident, and there are enough incidents where its become known that it has been that one should not assume that this is even certainly known after the fact in general.
[+] [-] 21echoes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|9 years ago|reply
Police should not be using deadly force unless necessary, 41:1000 seems like some pretty bias reactions on the side of police.
The reason different races are shot at different rates can be based on anything including racism, likely hood to commit an offense, which race is more likely to have mental disease, whether or not it's more difficult to identify facial structure. Blaming race outright is kind of silly, it's trying to simplify a multi dimensional problem that needs all of it's dimensions to reach a conclusion.
[+] [-] andreyk|9 years ago|reply
"Deputies say Browning, 30, fled when they were attempting to arrest him for a DUI. They claim he put deputies in a "bear hug" and reached for a firearm before being shot by deputies."
Is use of deadly force not necessary here? I am not sure, depends on the actual details of the encountered. It seems use of deadly force is inevitable, so the best we can do is try to quantify how often it gets misused and try to lower that amount.
[+] [-] ksdale|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bedon292|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ap22213|9 years ago|reply
I believe around here (Northern Virginia), the police are trained to shoot if the situation seems 'threatening' (subjective). However, recently a couple of notable cases (that I know of) seem extreme.
1) police responded to a teenager who was threatening suicide. Apparently, the teen raised the knife, and the police shot and killed him.
2) police responded to a Costco employee that was acting erratic. The employee raised a knife, and the police shot and killed her.
As a tax-paying citizen, I would rather the police are trained to first try to diffuse the situation, then try to neutralize, then shoot as last resort. It seems instead that they panic and shoot immediately.
[+] [-] thenobsta|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how you'd get a sense of this though. Maybe data from other countries and comparison of security guard death rates. Both of these ideas are long shots.
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
In short: we must disarm most police officers.
The Castile shooting occurred at a stop due to a broken tail light. Consider: the city of Chicago uses cameras to asynchronously ticket red light violators. Running a red light is objectively more dangerous than driving with a broken tail light, but Chicago will allow you to continue driving unimpeded after doing so.
Further, consider: any number of other violations in Chicago --- expired plates, bad stickers, poor selection of parking places, failure to pay parking fees, outstanding warrants on your car --- are performed by parking enforcement officers who are not armed. Chicago also routinely deployed traffic direction officers who are themselves not armed.
The police force we have today will not allow itself to be disarmed. The realistic medium-term answer to this problem is not to change the culture of existing police --- we should do that, but we should be pragmatic about how far that will get us. Instead, cities that want to reduce police violence should stop hiring assault officers, and begin programs to replace them with monitoring and compliance officers who will accept jobs with a description that includes doing the work unarmed. Smart cities should find ways to offload monitoring and compliance work from assault officers onto unarmed officers. Police forces can be disarmed through attrition.
Cities are incentivized to do this anyways: assault officer hires come packaged with intractable pension problems. New job descriptions don't.
Consider also: "armed" and "unarmed" isn't binary. When approaching Philando Castile's car to inquire about the broken tail light, the officer was by default no more than 20-30 seconds away from being able to fire a bullet into Castile. Smarter public policy can increase that delay from 20 seconds to something far greater. For instance: general-purpose patrolling assault officers can be (are, in fact, today) issued rifles and shotguns stored in their trunk. Those officers can remain armed; just, not with handguns, and not wielded by default.
Modern assault officers are in a double bind. They're routinely required to work in high-crime neighborhoods, often minority-dominated, and thus subjected to constant cognitive strain: they're put into contact with far more minorities at work than at home, and those minorities are sampled from a cohort anomalously likely to include criminals. Further, assault officers are acculturated and in fact trained to believe (irrationally) that routine job activities, like making traffic stops, are among the most dangerous things that can be done in America. They're stuck in a vicious circle of cortisol spikes and negative reinforcement. It is not reasonable to expect them to safely handle continuously-available firearms.
I suspect we'll discover that confrontations between unarmed officers and armed suspects are less dangerous than confrontations between armed officers and armed suspects. Most (not all) suspects who shoot at cops aren't doing it out of spite, but instead of out self-preservation. Regardless, I think we already know what would happen if we reconstituted police forces to be 20% assault and 80% compliance, down from 90% assault: far less police violence, far fewer shooting incidents, less expense, and a greater civic recognition of the real risks of policing.
Disarm most police.
[+] [-] crusso|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SEJeff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rexpop|9 years ago|reply
> Ecological regression on county-level characteristics is plagued by difficulties theoretically [39, 51]; issues with data quality make it even harder to use county-level data. In the analysis of county-level predictors of racial bias in police shootings conducted in this paper, some of the data were low quality. Notably, the crime data may be biased by the reporting practices of the police, and Florida, Alabama, and Illinois failed to fully release data, which led to the use Bayesian imputation for counties in these states.
I'd like to see BLM take this on as their a demand during their next direct action: better data for Cody Ross @ the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
[+] [-] aestetix|9 years ago|reply
1. "In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices."
I'm very interested to see if the full article (which is timing out so I can't check) goes into detail on what the reporting practices are, how they are biased, and how this data set solves those biases.
2. I'm curious how this data compares to the Guardian's study: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...
In particular, this database shows that in 2015, while the "per million" count of blacks killed was 7.27 (and for whites was 2.93), the "in total" count was 306 for blacks and 581 for whites. The statistics in 2016 so far are not much better: 3.23/1.41 respectively per million, and 136/279 in total. Ideally this number would be 0 for all counts, but we don't live in that world.
3. This report was published at the end of 2015, and unfortunately we have seen a massive spike in killings since then. Further, their dataset (according to the title) is only from 2011 to 2014. Is anyone working on a follow-up study using more recent data?
[+] [-] jxramos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidsky1|9 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid...
Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings
No bias found during shooting simulations http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02police.html
counter-bias found during police shootings. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27...
Enjoy.
[+] [-] etendue|9 years ago|reply
This article is attracting some distasteful comments, generally seems to be headed in a bad direction, and I want no association with it.
[+] [-] andreyk|9 years ago|reply
I am no statistics expert, so just curious, anyone here knowledgeable enough to read into the technical details and comment on how good the study quality seems to be?
[+] [-] siegecraft|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NetTechM|9 years ago|reply