[beaner]

Oh, I see. You're arguing in bad faith.

I don't even know how to account for that, really. Is it your honest interpretation of what I'm saying that black pignment is the literal cause of violent responses? Geez...

I mean, I don't think this discussion will be fruitful now, but just in case:

This is like logic 101. We're not debating that race causes behavior - it does not. But that doesn't mean there isn't an overlap between demographic and behavior. For example, there is an overlap between being black and being lower-income in this country. There is a relationship between low-income/poverty and violence. Do you understand that?

Skin color is not the cause. I'm completely happy to ignore it. You could equally say "people who respond aggressively are 3x likely to be shot." It is you making the racial connection, not me.

[dang]

Flamewar comments like this will get you banned on HN. Please review the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and please don't post like this in the future. This is obviously particularly important on provocative and divisive topics, where allowing your comments to degenerate in this way amounts to vandalism if not arson. That's seriously not cool.

Edit: there are two other problems:

(1) It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed, regardless of which ideology the account is battling for or against. Why? Because HN is supposed to be for curious conversation, and ideological battle is the antithesis of that. We ban accounts that are using HN primarily for this, so if you'd please stop doing that, we'd appreciate it.

(2) Given your arguments in this thread and your commenting history, I'm remembering that someone complained to us about your username being an ethnic slur (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22beaner). I emailed you about this on June 24 and you never replied. At a minimum, the username is trollish given these associations, and trollish usernames are not allowed on HN. I'm not going to ban your account for this right now because I think it's fair to give you a chance to course-correct your account to conform to the site guidelines. At the same time, I think you should be using a different username. If you want to pick a different username, we can rename it for you.

[symlinkk]

How is this a flamewar comment?

[burkaman]

I'm following you, I agree with all this. I'd say the study I posted does somewhat account for this because it looked at many different geographic areas and therefore income levels, and found a higher proportion of Black deaths in all of them. But I agree it doesn't directly consider what you're asking.

I'm not sure if the data exists for this. You'd need to record a huge sampling of police interactions and somehow classify the behavior of the civilian independent of the police to see if they were "aggressive" or "escalated", which is quite difficult. And part of the issue is that many behaviors that police often claim are aggressive are obviously not, so who gets to define these words? Very tough.

Overall, I think I agree that given the data we've discussed in this thread, there's no way to prove whether or not disproportionate deaths are caused by police bias. I started this conversation to respond to a question in the Twitter thread you linked: "I'm going to keep tweeting this until someone can explain to me how this is possible if there is truly pervasive racial bias in policing". I maintain that it is absolutely possible, and seems likely given the data we have here, but definitely not proven.