
Police use-of-force data is finally coming to light - ericlucb1
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/police-use-of-force-data-is-finally-coming-to-light/
======
Bartweiss
An honest question: what's up with the use of the word "murder"?

I'm not asking that to start a fight over whether these shootings were
justified. I'm asking because that word has a specific criminal definition,
and news organizations typically have very strict policies on implying
criminal guilt (witness the pre-conviction use of "alleged X" even in the most
obvious of cases).

As I understand it, most of the names described here as "murdered by police"
have not produced murder convictions or even murder charges against police
officers.

Without getting into subjective discussions of 'guilt', does TechCrunch have a
policy on language in criminal cases? What is it?

~~~
afandian
You could look on it as lexicographical civil disobedience.

If it's impossible to get justice because the killer was wearing uniform
what's the value in the judgements of justice system? If so many cases of
behaviour that would lead to a conviction, don't, that conviction loses starts
to lose some of its meaning. If an officer is so rarely convicted for murder,
at what point does it remain meaningful to use the word 'murder' to mean a
legal conviction where a police officer is concerned?

Or do we look at the stats and say that police are incapable of committing
murder. "There is no murder in paradise" as Stalin is reputed to have said.

(I'm slightly playing devil's advocate here but there is a massive problem)

~~~
microcolonel
From the wikipedia (which confirms my prior understanding):

>Murder is the unlawful killing of another human being without justification
or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human being with
malice aforethought. This state of mind may, depending upon the jurisdiction,
distinguish murder from other forms of unlawful homicide, such as
manslaughter.

Murder is both specifically unlawful (which is debatable in this case, even if
we don't want it to be), and specifically premeditated (which it almost
certainly is not). So I'd say murder is probably not accurate in common law
jurisdictions, especially U.S. jurisdictions.

~~~
afandian
To come at it from the point of view of my parent post. What conviction would
a normal citizen _normally_ receive if they shot someone with a gun? I have a
hard time prosecutors wouldn't find a way to get the perpetrator tried for
murder.

~~~
ZoF
And...?

These are obviously not _normal_ situations are they?

------
austincheney
_Until very recently, and thanks to the likes of The Guardian’s The Counted,
Fatal Encounters and Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence, the data to
prove the systemic racism that results in the police killings of unarmed black
people has not been widely available to the public._

It doesn't sound like, according to the article, the California initiative is
to prove racism but rather track, identify, and reduce police initiated
violence. Is this the writer's bias?

~~~
dalke
As you say, it isn't. But the author doesn't say that that's what it's for.

The author describes three stages in collection, from no data, to third-party
collections, and now to government collection.

The given Guardian link shows that blacks are twice as likely as whites to be
killed, on a per-capita basis. This is consistent with the hypothesis that
there is systemic racism, which previously was mostly conjectural due to lack
of data. In the Poppler viewpoint, the racism hypothesis made a testable
prediction, which was shown to be true.

Beyond that, the question is about what level of evidence is required before
you can say here is proof. Some might say this is evidence which supports
multiple hypotheses, others might say it's proof.

Still others might use the term "weak proof" when there some supporting
evidence which isn't conclusive. For examples, [http://www.ndtv.com/india-
news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-...](http://www.ndtv.com/india-
news/horoscope-is-a-weak-proof-of-birthdate-supreme-court-465185) says
"Horoscope is a weak proof of birthdate: Supreme Court" and
[https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251](https://www.aan.com/Guidelines/home/GetGuidelineContent/251)
says "When compared to injections without steroids, there is weak proof that
epidural steroid injections may result in some improvement in radicular
lumbosacral pain in the short term, when assessed between two and six weeks
after the injection."

Is "weak proof" a type of proof? (Is "dwarf planet" a type of planet?)

In any case, the author shows why data collection can be useful to test a
hypothesis, then describes how the State of California will now be collecting
the data, but doesn't make the concrete connection that CA will be collecting
that data for that specific purpose.

As to the legislative history of the bill, in the summer of 2015 senators
Booker and Boxer proposed the PRIDE bill for better nationwide reporting.
Booker writes, at [https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-
in-...](https://medium.com/@CoryBooker/the-role-of-reliable-data-in-reducing-
police-use-of-force-incidents-6adb41d72f9a) :

> Almost half a century later, tragic events across the country — in New York,
> Ferguson, North Charleston and Baltimore — have reminded us how critical
> trust is to the fabric of our democracy. These incidents have raised the
> public’s awareness and sparked a long overdue national debate about how
> police and citizens interact and how they should interact.

and how it's hard to act without good data. This shows that PRIDE is coupled
to the question of possible influence of racism in how police deal with
people.

That's a proposed bill at the federal level. It's not the state bill. The
history of CA AB-71 is at
[https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB71)
. That bill started a few months after PRIDE. The analysis for the bill
includes specific references to PRIDE. It sounds very much like the same
concerns of Booker are also behind AB-71, which includes knowing if there is a
systemic racial bias in police initiated violence.

So while the bill doesn't say it outright, the reason for the bill seems to
include gathering the information which can help prove (or disprove) systemic
racism.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Just for clarification, blacks being shot by police at a rate of 2.5 times
that of whites per capita is only evidence of racism if the shootings are
random across the entire population.

If the shootings are correlated to, say, the demographics of murderers (which
is probably more representative than the population at large), it might
actually be evidence of racism against whites -- the number of murders
committed per 10,000 people in blacks is about 8 times that of whites, which
means if they're dying at only 2.5 times the rate per 10,000 people and the
deaths are correlated to the murder rate, the police are killing white people
disproportionately often.

I think that a lot of people, such as yourself, are being very dishonest when
analyzing the police data because they're analyzing it against total
population numbers while ignoring the correlations to crime demographics. Such
as the Guardian numbers you cited.

I also think you're being racist. Against white people.

~~~
mcguire
According to the Mapping Police Violence site, fewer than 1/3 of the black
suspects shot were suspected of a violent crime or armed. Randomly shooting
people who match crime demographics seems a poor strategy.

[http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/](http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/)

~~~
tzs
It was way more than 1/3 according to the Washington Post's database [1]. They
have 258 black people shot by police in 2015 (out of 991 people total shot by
police). Of those, they categorize 183 as involving "Attack in progress"
(71%).

They have 63 categorized as "Other". I'm not sure what counts as "Attack in
progress" because looking at those under "Other", it looks like about 40% [2]
of them involve the suspect charging at officers with a knife, or threatening
officers or a third party with a knife and refusing orders to drop it, or
trying to run down officers with a car.

That fits in with what I've seen when I've picked a random sample at
killedbypolice.net and sorted them into "justified" and "unjustified" piles.
There I got something around 80-90% seemed reasonably justified, at least
based on the data initially available.

Did police _have_ to shot all these people who were threatening with knives
and such? Probably not. Better training and techniques could probably have
handled those situations without anyone dying or getting seriously injured.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-
shoo...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/)

[2] Warning: I arrived at 40% by looking at around 25 of them, but it was the
first 25, not a random sample of 25 out of the 63. Since they are ordered
chronologically, if there is some seasonal variation in the circumstances
under which people get shot by police it could affect my estimate.

~~~
dalke
(FWIW, The Guardian, at [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database) , lists 1146
people killed by police in 2015, of which 306 were black. Almost identical
percentages, and it doesn't change your point.)

The tricky part is to look at how non-black people were treated in similar
situations. If use of force would have been justified against white people,
but non-lethal means were used instead, then it wouldn't show up in the
resources you consulted.

------
jbmorgado
> _" Until very recently, and thanks to the likes of The Guardian’s The
> Counted, Fatal Encounters and Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence, the
> data to prove the systemic racism that results in the police killings of
> unarmed black people has not been widely available to the public."_

Actually there is already data, and actually that data states that in fact,
black people suffer more violence from part of the police, but __LESS
__killings, is just there is a total bias by the media outlets that basically
only show cases of police killings involving black victims and don 't report
the ones with white people.

Source: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-
evid...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-
shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?_r=2)

------
Animats
Prior to Ferguson, nobody was collecting data on police shootings across the
US. Now the press and some nonprofits collect it. The Washington Post has a
database.[1] The Guardian has another one.[2] There's a site,
"fatalencounters.org", trying to crowdsource this.[3]

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-
shoo...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-
shootings-2016/) [2] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database) [3]
[http://www.fatalencounters.org/](http://www.fatalencounters.org/)

~~~
fweespeech
> Prior to Ferguson, nobody was collecting data on police shootings across the
> US. Now the press and some nonprofits collect it.

\---

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-
coun...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-countrys-
best-data-set-on-police-misconduct/)

> When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post
> needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings,
> they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University
> criminologist Philip M. Stinson.

> Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and
> reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police
> officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in
> which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the
> few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely
> convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18
> years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new
> officers who were acting out.

> The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that
> Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of
> nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to
> collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also
> contains court records and videos.

\---

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest)

> The Ferguson unrest (also referred to just as Ferguson) involves protests
> and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by
> white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014

------
eth0up
Below is a sloppy, incomplete, and unedited archive of authoritarian madness.
While some of the websites are dubious, most events can be verified as having
occurred (regardless of the perspective or source) and many of the websites
are sufficiently credible. The much larger remainder of this list is not yet
vetted and is omitted. I expect very few will take the time to look, but for
those who do, it may thereafter become evident that something is terribly
wrong. Again, there are a few random or unrelated links included, which will
be removed when time or interest permits.

[https://justpaste.it/yzu0](https://justpaste.it/yzu0)

