Why Are So Many Black Americans Killed By Police?

[ericson00]

From Nate Silver's 538 site, a pretty interesting take:

Black Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to be killed by police officers.1 Researchers agree that racism almost certainly plays a role in that disparity. But “racism” is too broad an explanation to reveal much about the more immediate causes or to point to a way to reduce police killings of black people like the recent ones in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Researchers who have studied the issue say that racism manifests itself in different ways, requiring a range of solutions. If the disparity arises because bias among police officers makes them more likely to fire guns at black people than at white people who pose equal threats, for example, then the answer could lie in hiring, training and firing: test recruits for bias, train officers to not exercise bias and fire officers who demonstrate bias.

But if the disparity is due more to systemic police practices than the prejudices of individual officers, then the answer could be to change those practices — for instance, ensure that departments don’t concentrate car checks that are unlikely to turn up anything illegal and could turn violent in predominantly black neighborhoods.

And if the disparity is because there are relatively more police interactions with black people, because black people commit a disproportionately large share of reported crimes, then the answer could be to address the systemic causes of the crime disparity, including urban poverty. (No one said the solutions would be easy.)

[Igel]

1. Humans find patterns.

So this might be spurious.

A lot of stats and facts pattern about the same. Reported crimes, convictions, demographics where police are concentrated. This makes causal sense, you put police where there are crime reports. Just look at arrests and police presence and it's a correlation that some like to flip--more are arrested because there are more police to do the arresting. Doesn't explain the crime reports, though, so causality can be established.

Shootings track about the same. And while I haven't seen any data (perhaps it doesn't exist) I suspect that if you look at a map of where police shootings occur they pattern fairly nicely with SES.

But it appears minorities get more violence from the police than whites do. Force applied by race as reported by police shows this. But it appears whites minimize their accounts of violence while minorities either remember well or elaborate--whites report virtually no force, whereas police report a reasonable among applied to whites; blacks and Latinos report more force than police report. (So ask youself--if police are lying about the force used on minorities, why are they lying about the force applied to whites? I have no answer. But if there are perceptual differences in how whites and minorities view police, could this influence later reporting in public surveys? Yes. Are there such perceptual differences? Yes.)


As for urban poverty, or rural poverty (notice we care about one, not so much the other) ... When we say "systemic causes" we always have to be careful not to blame the victim. In some cases, though, parents victimize their children and children victimize themselves. We have to explore systemic causes wherever that leads us. It can lead to looking at failing schools. It can lead noticing to failing parents. Or all kinds of other things. I have no problem when people blame "redneck culture" for why a group of whites I get in my classes every year struggle. They don't like school, don't see a reason for it; complying is seen as humiliating, when they've got their dignity and nobody's going to tell them what to do and control them. So they make sucky, dignity-based choices, and when they get to my classroom have gaps in what they should know that make my class tough. "Why should I go to college? My father worked at _________, my grandfather did, too. What's good enough for them is good enough for me." Or they were taught to work hard, manual labor, to do stuff--not sit and read and think.

[kimbutgar]

2. A young black man who I've known all his life

Raised in a solidly educated middle class family wrote on Facebook that he is becoming scared to leave his house because he's tired of being hassled by police. He graduated college, works and is trying to find his way in life and he is disgusted by the killing of innocent black men. He said to me in a private message the shooting of the special needs aide was the last straw.

He wrote this on his facebook:

When will you people wake up and see that they want us dead. The Man, The Government, The Police Force want us black men DEAD...Six feet under....So how do you live in a society like this? Live everyday like it's your last.

P.S. I still love every gender, race & ethnicity on this planet. God Bless America

[Aristus]

3. Because when the rest of the country woke up in the '60's to how awful lynching was,

and started prosecuting it, the klukkers changed out of their bedsheets and put on blue uniforms, instead. The lynchings haven't stopped; they've just moved from the rubric of 'terrorism' to 'law enforcement'.

[brush]

4. There's a recent report out of a New York police commander grilling a Latino officer . . .

who patrolled the subway about why he didn't have more black men collars.

The commander even calls black men "bad guys".

That's what's drilled into cops heads, and I'm sure it's not just in New York.

This kind of training in nothing but racism. A wholesale new paradigm of training thought is needed, one that stresses deescalation of situations with gun play being the absolutely last resort.