
Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings in the United States - hunglee2
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0141854
======
akud
> 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.

~~~
Swizec
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.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I don't know why you seem to be getting downvoted - this seems to me to be the
most important question. Perhaps one of the downvoters can provide some
explanation. In particular, why is it wrong (and, I assume, perceived as
racist) to ask whether the problem can be described as "those in power are
abusing that power"?

~~~
drumdance
I don't understand why, when they do shoot, it's often five or more times. Why
not just once or twice, then get out of the way?

~~~
CWuestefeld
Actually, if we assume that force really was appropriate, then what they're
doing is correct.

Real life firearms are NOTHING like those on TV. First, your chances of
actually hitting something from any non-trivial distance isn't that great.
Even 10 yards is far from a sure hit, and just hitting doesn't necessarily
count for much.

Second, the fact that the bad guy took a hit doesn't mean he's going down. In
fact, he almost certainly will not. Anything less than a headshot destroying
the brain (sorry to be graphic) may well have them still shooting back at you,
even if the wound will ultimately prove fatal. Even severing the femoral
artery or aorta isn't going to have the bad guy dropping in his tracks.

And in such a situation, your goal is to stop the threat. As you can see,
ensuring that the treat is stopped requires a lot more than a double-tap.

~~~
drumdance
In the St. Paul case he fired 5 rounds from just outside the window of the
car. Literally just a couple feet away from the guy, not 10 yards. In the
Baton Rouge case the guy was on the ground with the cops on top of him.

In the UK they manage to subdue dangerous suspects without unloading the
entire clip.

------
snowwrestler
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?

~~~
specialist
The value of studies like this, for future, is the ability to determine if
mitigation, correctional measures are working.

 _" 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
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?

[http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-
data...](http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-database-
update-were-still-go-1627414202)

~~~
twinkletwinkle
"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.

~~~
Bartweiss
What seems to be missing to me is any support for the "random sampling" claim.
My starting assumption is that reports on police shootings would be _full_ of
systematic biases running in all sorts of directions.

Without some actual argument that this data isn't horribly biased by exactly
the issues it's trying to investigate, I'm not sure what worth to give it.

~~~
minimaxir
Specifically, random sampling assumes that data points are independent and
identically distributed:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_distributed_random_variables)

As others have pointed out, that is not a great assumption in this case.

~~~
apathy
It isnt, and indeed it is rarely satisfied. The real question is how sensitive
the resulting model may be to violations of this assumption.

Greg Ridgway looked at a natural experiment (proportion of drivers pulled over
1 hour before dawn, when the color of the driver is very hard to determine _a
priori_ , vs that proportion 1 hour after dawn, where it is easy) back when he
was at RAND, and came to a similar conclusion. Ymmv.

Obviously, "pulled over" is not the same as "shot" but the objective data is
easier to come by. Especially if you don't tell the LAPD what specifically
you're studying beforehand.

------
chris_va
_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.

~~~
apathy
So add a per-county term to both fixed and random effects and see if that fits
substantially better. This isn't rocket surgery.

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.

~~~
chris_va
If I understand what you saying (apologies if not, it has been a while since I
did modelling), that would only give a better fit if the level of
segregation/crime was consistent between counties and not already taken into
account by their other variables (like inequality). Or the paradox segments
were at a county level instead of locally.

If be happier if they just got the police records for all 721 cases, and did a
more local analysis.

Let me know if I'm missing something (I probably am).

~~~
apathy
If you fit a multilevel mixed model, either the intercept or the slopes can
vary, but the model fit at each level (and accuracy of predictions on held-out
data) will improve substantially if the terms matter and you include them.

In this case I would only believe the result if it led to across the board
improvement. Contrarily, if a stratified fit's cross-county predictions were
dramatically shittier than within county, I might believe it, but by pooling
information in a Bayesian framework these authors appear to have aimed at a
happy medium.

The multilevel aspect is important (country -> county -> locale) because of
the shrinkage you get as a side effect of propagating each estimate. If time
permits I will look at their code and data (available in the supplement, the
author appears to have used Rstan for the fit, although a Python person could
probably get a similar result with PyMC or PyStan) and try fiddling some of
the dials.

The write up is a little wordy, but the model and data is all there for anyone
genuinely interested in sensitivity analysis or alterntive fits. They're not
hiding anything that I can see.

------
vessenes
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?

~~~
ams6110
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.

~~~
empath75
This might be good advice, but it's terrible that we live in a country where
this is good advice.

~~~
falsestprophet
In what country would it be good advice to move aggressively towards a police
officer with his weapon drawn?

~~~
Swizec
In many European countries officers don't draw guns in the first place.
They're trained to de-escalate situations, not make them more dangerous.

~~~
jcoffland
I've seen this in action in Amsterdam and was amazed. Rather than charging
into the situation guns drawn and yelling police in Amsterdam, seeing that the
situation was not dire, first simply made their presence known. They slowly
and calmly moved in talking to the perps the whole time. In the end, the
situation was peaceably defused.

In America, we are so used to violent interaction with authority that most
cannot imagine it working any other way.

One of the first steps we should adopt in the US is the mandatory changing of
police uniform color. Green or light blue uniforms are less menacing than the
typical US all black uniform. I believe this simple change would reduce police
violence.

~~~
Swizec
I was once stopped by a cop in San Francisco for accidentally running a red
light on my bicycle. I don't know if he was intentionally intimidating, but I
nearly shat my pants.

------
JusticeJuice
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.

~~~
bluedino
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%)

~~~
specialist
Your point?

IIRC, blacks are 13% of the population yet 30% of the police killings.

Lies, damned lies, statistics.

~~~
wtbob
> IIRC, blacks are 13% of the population yet 30% of the police killings.

Yes, and blacks are 13% of the population but 38% of the murderers (to use
your & the OP's numbers). The point is that in two random encounters with two
random people (one black, one white), the black person is more likely to be a
murderer than the white person. That's not racist: it's just a fact.

As an example, I'll use the 2013 FBI crime statistics
([https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-
the-u.s/2013/...](https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-
the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43)) and 2015 U.S. Census
data
([https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/)) —
yes, there will be some inaccuracy due to using different years' data, but the
2015 crime data isn't yet available by race that I could find. In 2015, 77.1%
of the U.S. population — 247,813,910 people — were white; 3,799 whites were
arrested for murder in 2013, for an arrested-murderer rate of 1:65,200. In
2015, 13.3% of the U.S. population — 42,748,703 people — were black; 4,379
blacks were arrested for murder in 2013, for an arrested-murderer rate of
1:9,760.

Assuming the correctness of those numbers, and assuming that black and whites
are fairly arrested for murder, any random black person one encounters is 6.68
times as likely to be a murderer as a white person.

Now, there are no doubt some very powerful arguments that blacks and whites
are _not_ equally treated when it comes to murder arrests, but even if only
half of all blacks arrested for murder are guilty and as many white murderers
are never arrested for murder as are, the multiplier would still be 1.67, and
honestly those assumptions are a stretch.

Given the previous assumption of fairness, police killing blacks 3.49 times as
often as whites would indicate that they are actually almost twice as cautious
of killing blacks (or twice as quick to kill whites) as the actual random-
encounter risk would predict: 6.68/3.49 = 1.91.

~~~
specialist
So police killing a higher proportion of unarmed blacks vs unarmed whites is
okay because, um, reasons.

~~~
wtbob
> So police killing a higher proportion of unarmed blacks vs unarmed whites is
> okay because, um, reasons.

The evidence which appears to indicate that blacks are more likely to be
dangerous is a pretty reasonable reason for law enforcement to be more alert
when dealing with blacks.

The fact that the proportion of blacks killed is _less_ than the proportion of
dangerous blacks seems to indicate that law enforcement is actually showing
restraint.

------
bmmayer1
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.

~~~
gozur88
>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.

~~~
thenewwazoo
> 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.

~~~
gozur88
I'm not sure that addresses the point.

------
advisedwang
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)?

Am I missing something from their methodology?

~~~
DiabloD3
Unarmed doesn't even really help here. Cops in certain areas have serious
problems with ham sandwiching suspects.

~~~
iamdave
_ham sandwiching_

This idiom is new to me, care to elaborate?

I've definitely had my fair share of "why was I even approached in the first
place" with police officers, in Austin Texas-the part of Texas everyone and
their mother _swears_ is liberal, progressive and not at all like the rest of
Texas.

If that's what you mean.

It probably didn't help that I was walking down the street from the gas
station at 1 in the morning in an area that was established as "Exclusively
for white people" ([http://kxan.com/2015/08/20/exclusively-for-white-people-a-
hi...](http://kxan.com/2015/08/20/exclusively-for-white-people-a-history-of-
segregation-in-austin-neighborhoods/)) as a black man-a neighborhood that
still to this day is almost entirely white....still watching a cop pass me
going down the road, whip a u-turn, come back and stop me just to ask "Where
are you going?"

Or the time an officer stopped me on my way to a UT football game and before
even asking to see my license or registration asked who I stole my Honda Civic
from.

Armed only with tickets and a case of beer for tailgating.

~~~
codemogul
A "ham sandwich" is evidence, often a handgun, placed at a crime scene by law
enforcement.

See: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-
disorder/blog/20...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/law-
disorder/blog/2011/07/former-detective-describes-cover-up-ham-sandwich.html)

~~~
iamdave
Ahhh so a plant. Got it. Thanks for that!

------
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
It's particularly a heatmap of ... certain demograhics as outlined in the
article.

------
enraged_camel
Relevant part:

 _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
Two concerns I don't see addressed in the study:

1\. Whether suspect is unarmed is only known for certain after the incident.

2\. Differences in levels of crimes by race.

~~~
21echoes
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."

~~~
chvid
Why does it have to be explained at "county-level"?

~~~
21echoes
If it's true at the county-level, it's true at the national level (which is
also stated in the abstract). By specifying it's additionally true at the
county level, it makes a much stronger claim -- that high racial bias does not
exist only in high-crime areas, and as such, racial bias is not explainable by
crime rates.

------
lettergram
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

Disarm most police.

~~~
knz
> 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.

The problem with this is that in some occasions the police are required to
respond much more quickly. There are numerous videos on
youtube/reddit/liveleak of routine traffic stops that go from normal to the
driver shooting in seconds. I have no issue with the police being armed, that
is just the world "we" live in. I do however have an issue with why a routine
traffic stop involved even having a firearm unholstered.

~~~
modoc
If I'm not mistaken "routine" traffic stops are the single most (maybe fell to
#2 this year?) dangerous thing for a LEO to do (i.e. the highest number of
officer fatalities occur during a traffic stop). So asking officers to go do
the most dangerous part of their job without a weapon is unreasonable (IMHO).

~~~
learc83
I don't know how disarming traffic cops would alter this statistic, but there
were 42 officers shot and killed in the line of duty in 2015 and over 13
million traffic stops.

That puts the risk of death in a traffic stop at 0.0003%.

~~~
FireBeyond
_At the most_. How many of those 42 officer deaths occurred _during_ traffic
stops?

~~~
dragonwriter
7

------
rexpop
> Higher Quality Covariate Data is Needed.

> 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

~~~
jessedhillon
I'm skeptical of any socio-political movement demanding more science -- not
because more science isn't needed, but that I doubt the movement would avow
and abide by results which are contradictory to their vision. This isn't a
criticism, per se -- just recognizing that BLM and other movements are driven
by experience, and one of the key claims of the victims of those experiences
is that their suffering is invisible. Therefore, any study which invalidates
that experience would serve as further proof of the invisibility of their
suffering.

Again, this isn't meant to single out or criticize BLM.

~~~
sevenless
That's a good point, and I like how it goes against the typical HN
'solutionism' mindset. You cannot science your way out of every problem, and
sometimes you're simply trying to answer an inappropriate question. Really,
conventional politics has failed, and all one can say is the country is deeply
divided, and millions of people hate each other. At every mass shooting and
police-relations crisis, the same people trot out the same things to say.
There is a real lack of innovative thinking around politics, the state, and
restructuring society in fairer and less harmful ways.

------
aestetix
A few points:

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...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/01/about-the-counted)

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
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](http://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-brink-14605.html)

------
davidsky1
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.

[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)

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](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...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-
crime/wp/2016/04/27/this-study-found-race-matters-in-police-shootings-but-the-
results-may-surprise-you/)

Enjoy.

------
etendue
[deleted]

This article is attracting some distasteful comments, generally seems to be
headed in a bad direction, and I want no association with it.

~~~
kmkemp
I took at as them normalizing for a known risk factor. In other words, if
white people are armed at a higher percentage than blacks, they wouldn't want
that to skew the statistics.

------
andreyk
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/](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?

~~~
louden
The methodology they used seems very good and the fact that they share the
code is excellent.

However, in a study like this, data quality is likely going to be a problem.
Collecting good data about the shootings themselves is incredibly difficult
considering we have 18,000+ police jurisdictions in the United States and even
mundane things like reporting can very between them. Furthermore, the chaos of
the situation may make data quality suffer.

Unfortunately, the best we can do is announce the limitations of the studies,
as the authors did.

------
siegecraft
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.

------
NetTechM
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.

------
JumpCrisscross
Their abstract claim is pretty strong but doesn't seem backed up by their
data. Looking at Table 2, when they throw in additional controls, it wipes out
their claimed racial effect.

------
nomat
Would love to see socioeconomic status included in the analysis as well.

------
nickbauman
US 2015 Fundamentals:

Number of gun deaths: ~13,000

Number of police officers killed: ~50

Number of civilians killed by police: ~1200

Number of white civilians killed: ~500

Number of black civilians killed: ~330

Percentage of blacks in the population: ~13

We have a large death-by-gun problem in the US as compared to the rest of the
OECD.

~~~
knz
Absolute numbers are useless. The US population is significantly larger than
many OECD countries. Assuming a large number of those deaths are suicides -
the suicide rate per capita should be factored in as well.

~~~
nickbauman
"Useless"? I think that's hyperbole.

~~~
knz
Per capita is a far more useful measure. I'm tired of seeing the media pushing
the total number for various issues and ignoring the fact that the US has 320
million residents.

~~~
stvswn
right, and lets stop saying "gun deaths" and trick people into thinking we
mean "murders." There are twice as many suicides as homicides in this country,
but we're only about average in per-capita suicide compared to the world.

We do have more murders than other rich countries, including more murders with
guns. But we also have more per capita murders with just about any weapon, as
well as more per capita violence of all kinds.

We have a violence problem, sure. We kind of always have had a violence
problem, we've always been a violent people. I'm not shrugging it off, it's
just a fact.

It's worth remembering, though, that the murder rate is at a historic low. A
40 year low.

~~~
nickbauman
> There are twice as many suicides as homicides in this country

I think it's a mistake to consider suicide as outside the gun-death problem. I
think they _should_ be considered within the continuum of a single problem.
Furthermore, the percentage of shots fired causing death in a suicide
situation is far higher than a homicide situation. So you can argue that more
violence (and injury) occurs when people square off against _each other_ with
guns.

And I also don't think it's reasonable to compare our gun-death problem with
non-OECD nations.

------
bdcravens
I'm sure you didn't mean it as such, but this comes off with the same air as
the "all lives matter" claimants.

~~~
DiabloD3
I'm not sure you didn't mean it as such, but don't all lives actually matter?

~~~
jamesroseman
Of course all lives matter. But if racial identities were homes, there are a
few on fire in the United States and it doesn't make much sense to call the
fire department for every house when a few urgently need the attention more.
Is that fair?

~~~
pixl97
Let's word this a different way.

If 6 black people's homes were on fire, and 4 white people's homes were on
fire, wouldn't it make more sense to send firefighters to all the houses?

It should be recognised that having a violent interaction with police in
America occurs more often than every other first world country regardless if
your black or white.

------
omonra
I actually did a similar kind of back of the napkin + Google exercise the
other night, here is what I wrote down:

\---

Recent MN incident is definitely horrible and seems unequivocally wrong, no
questions about it. It's very sad. It's worse than Garner and totally
different scale than other high-profile cases of late. It's the sort of
incident that definitely supports claims made by BLM (as previous ones have
not, at least to me).

The clear racial implications prompted me to look at the overall country-wide
figures to see if the actual stats for last few years reflect the narrative
promulgated in the news (black people are disproportionately killed by the
police).

1\. "... roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April
2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent
were Hispanic." ([http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-
whites-t…/](http://www.washingtontimes.com/…/police-kill-more-whites-t…/))

2\. "There were 511 officers killed in felonious incidents and 540 offenders
from 2004 to 2013, according to FBI reports. Among the total offenders, 52
percent were white, and 43 percent were black."

The ratio of african-americans among cop killers (43% of all incidents) to
those who are killed by cops (30% of all incidents) is 1.43 - which does not
bear out the claim that they are unfairly targeted as a _group_ (of course
this doesn't absolve the individual cops who wrongfully kill innocent people).

The one obvious problem with this analysis is that the set of people who kill
cops vs are killed by them are non-overlapping - but when country-wide stats
over a few years are considered the numbers would sort themselves out (ie
random white guy killed by mistake simply doesn't make the national news).

I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it could
be wrong.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I'm sorry if this analysis is unpleasant and welcome criticism of why it
> could be wrong.

Not so much wrong as irrelevant to the main issue of concern. The issue isn't
so much whether black people are more likely to be killed by cops, but whether
they are more likely to be _wrongfully_ killed by cops (and secondarily,
whether absent activism by BLM, etc., there is less _accountability_ for such
wrongful killings. [0])

Unfortunately, actually analyzing this question is messy, because you can't
grab quick-and-easy figures for it, and the fundamental base facts -- whether
individual shootings are wrongful -- are often contested.

The easy to analyze questions are poor proxies for the question of interest.

[0] Actually, accountability is the _primary_ reason for BLM existing, and its
not limited to police-involved killings (in fact, the triggering incident was
the Trayvon Martin killing, which was not a police-involved killings, its just
that the first incidents BLM was noted for responding to _after_ it got going
were police-involved, which set the perception that BLM was primarily about
police shootings.)

~~~
omonra
Who decides who was 'wrongfully' killed? For example to me (as well as grand
jury) MBrown was rightfully killed. To the BLM he was not - so we're stuck.

Even if that can somehow be quantified, do we have statistics for the number
of white people who are _wrongfully_ killed by the police? One metric I saw
(unfortunately don't have a source) is that this year 3% of whites AND 3% of
blacks were killed while unarmed.

------
jomamaxx
The research is almost useless.

Different ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates - even if their is
bias in apprehension/monitoring.

The question they should try to answer is:

'Among interactions with police, how much more or less likely are people to be
shot'.

This way, we can ignore the possibility that cops are unfairly focusing more
on blacks, and isolate and at least assess how much more likely someone is to
die.

It seems that academia even has a problem with trying to get at the truth and
heart of the matter.

------
RodericDay
> 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.

~~~
GuiA
Edit: misunderstood what was posted, please disregard below comment. Not
removing body for reference. See mrow84's comment if like me you are still
waking up.

\---

Downvoted you for picking one sentence in the abstract that misrepresents the
whole set of conclusions when taken in isolation.

HNers who are going to the comments first, please read at least the abstract
to get a sense for the nuanced results. Example:

 _The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed
black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that 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._

~~~
SCAQTony
The observed distribution was just two races. The study never included
hispanics, asians, pacific islanders, etc. etc. I suspect the contrast between
african descent and hispanic descent would be surprising.

~~~
louden
Hispanics were in the study (see the Research Objectives) and have similar
results to blacks. They just were not called out in the abstract.

------
grb423
I wish left, right and center could come together just this once to urge young
black men to not fight with police. If you feel their authority is unjustified
or they are punks then you really need to handle that politically. The police
are duly authorized by the state however flawed and racist that state may be,
to use deadly force. The are armed with government-issued, free firearms.
Fighting with them leads to your death. If that isn't your goal, i.e.,
martyrdom for political gain then it's a bad idea. Lets urge the young black
men to submit to lawful orders and take issue later in a court of law.

~~~
sevenless
It's become politically unacceptable for _any_ African-American men to be
killed by police. Given that the US is a violent country with a lot of guns
and aggressive police, and African-Americans are a marginalized, systemically
disadvantaged underclass, this is a recipe to bring a racially divided nation
to the brink of civil conflict.

The Dallas attack on police, carried out by a trained soldier, looks right out
of a textbook on guerilla war. I think it would be quite easy for organized
paramilitary groups to make many US cities ungovernable, particularly with so
many veterans around.

The Black Lives Matter movement makes more sense through the lens of other
ethnic separatist movements, such as Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. It might
sound shocking, but if they regard _any_ white law enforcement or government
as illegitimate, their demands seem to imply separatism and African-American
nationalism, in the vein of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.

~~~
lintiness
there's a country founded on black separatism: liberia. how's that going for
them?

~~~
sevenless
Liberia was founded by a coalition of white abolitionists and slave owners as
a racist mechanism to deport freed slaves. There's no question of that
happening again; African-Americans have as much of a claim to American soil as
anyone else, more so if anything.

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

