[bmcfeeley]

You've brought exactly as many sources to bear in this conversation as the parent you've replied to, which is to say, none. When admonishing others for their lack of sources and making a counterclaim, you may want to consider providing the source yourself.

As for sources of evidence suggesting disproportionate use of force against black persons, here's one to consider:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black. Additionally, black individuals were unarmed when fatally shot more frequently than white persons.

[john_moscow]

>Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black.

That depends on what you take as a baseline. I would assume that police shootings mostly happen in response to violent behavior. I couldn't find any data on the violent behavior, however there is an open FBI dataset on homicide offenders by race [0].

If you assume a correlation between the number of homicide offenders and the general probability of violent behavior, it could very much explain the disproportion you pointed out.

[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[jeffdavis]

The table you linked is a little confusing because it's focused on the murders, but the offenders are more relevant to your point. It also excludes a lot of murders where information about the offender is missing, so the overall numbers seem too low.

The following table is more relevant:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

And here's the one from 2018:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

So your point stands: when you talk about "disproportionate", you need a baseline. If you choose the proportion of the general population as a baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts blacks. But if you choose the proportion of known murderers as the baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts whites.

Note that there is a subtlety here: the baseline ratio is simply a ratio to use as a comparison point. I am in no way implying that all people killed by police are known murderers. Nor am I saying the ratio of known murderers necessarily extrapolate to the number of justifiable-use-of-force incidents.

EDIT: I am really just saying the baseline expectation matters, and that the general population is not the only meaningful baseline. I am not saying which baseline is the "right" one. That depends on which specific policy you are considering.

[rukittenme]

I think the GP would use your source to prove his point as well. An absolute disparity of 2.8x but it does not consider the level of violent crime a particular racial category commits.

Your source also suggests unarmed white people are nearly twice as likely to be shot than unarmed Hispanics. Doesn't that contradict the narrative of racist motive by white police?

I have to wonder how many people were killed by police. Was it 100 or 10,000? The difference in magnitude could see these racial biases diminish or worsen.

[jeffdavis]

If you go to the WaPo database:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

And select 2018, you'll see a total of 991 people killed by police. If you also filter by race, you'll see that 229 were black and 454 were white. I'm using 2018 because it's the most recent year with good FBI stats to compare to.

According to the FBI, were 14123 murders in 2018:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

For blacks and whites, it looks like most murder victims are killed by a member of their own race:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

That table is excluding a lot of cases where there is missing information (that's why the numbers don't add up to 14123). It shows 2600 blacks were murdered by blacks out of 6570 murders with enough information to be included in the table. If you were to extrapolate to 14123 total murders, then you would estimate 5589 blacks were murdered by blacks in 2018; and 5754 whites were murdered by other whites in 2018.

That means blacks in 2018 were over 20 times as likely to be murdered by another black as to be killed (justifiably or not) by a police officer (black or white). Whites are about 13 times as likely to be murdered by another white as killed by a police officer. Note that "white" include latino in these numbers, but it doesn't look like the number of latino murders is high enough to have a major impact on the overall analysis (though feel free to dig in to that as well).

I'm not passing any value judgement here, but the data do seem to paint a different picture than the simplistic view of a racist police system. I conjecture (and am open to evidence that supports or refutes this claim) that the vast majority of problems blacks face in the U.S. happen long before risky police encounters, so police reform is unlikely to be very impactful by itself. In fact, there is a major risk that it will be counterproductive, if reform causes police departments to be less effective at their jobs and allow criminals to do far more damage.