Blacks are killed by police disproportionately by a factor of around 2-3x
The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers.
It's not just about getting killed - it's about getting unfairly fined, arrested, beaten, jailed, and so on. From my own life experience, the fear is warranted.
Of course not, because the police generally do not self-report when they victimize someone. Certainly the plethora of videos that have come out over the past few weeks, and the associated sales police reports describing those situations, indicate that the number is >0.
But as Erem points out, the situations are fundamentally different in that when one is victimized by a criminal, one has a number of options. When one is victimized by law enforcement, those options are severely limited, especially if you don't have money or influence.
But you do have to do a sanity check with the numbers at some point, and reconcile them with the feelings/beliefs/narratives you get from the media and pop culture
I am a black man, that lives in a poor city with high-crime rates. I've spent significant time in "dangerous" neighborhoods, as a resident and visitor. The number of times I've gotten the treatment I've described from criminals is 0. The number of times I've gotten the treatment from the police is >0. The same can be said for pretty much all of my minority acquaintances here. I, for one, am not getting this narrative from the media and pop culture, I'm getting it from life experience. Yes, that's not the same as carefully collected statistics, but it's not based on nothing.
Let's not compare fear of cops to fear of criminals just based on stats -- there are qualitative differences that matter too. For example, when criminals target you, you have recourse: calling the cops. Having that option can assuage fear.
However, when you learn through experience that cops themselves seek to harm you, then what? There is no recourse! Who will try the cops? If you do fight back publicly, who will stop them from endlessly patrolling outside your house seeking some minor infraction? Who will stop them from burying you in fines? Your elected representatives are your only option and good luck with that. I'll assert that in human psychology this helplessness reasonably magnifies fear beyond the statistics.
In fact, when you come through experience to fear the cops it also makes the _criminals_ more terrifying -- calling the cops becomes like running to the lions because you are being chased by wolves. So you just give up and let the wolves consume you.
And pure conjecture here maybe criminals know that, which emboldens them to preferentially predate upon black people thereby producing your original murder statistic.
Maybe you are right, but there is just not any evidence presented for any of that.
You are right that aggregated data is not the only thing that matters. It tends to represent only easily-quantifiable concepts.
But you do have to do a sanity check with the numbers at some point, and reconcile them with the feelings/beliefs/narratives you get from the media and pop culture.
On the other hand, statistics can be arranged and presented in ways that can be misleading. At some point, if enough people are saying something, you may need to take a step back and say “what am I missing here that isn’t represented in the data?”
White blindness to what is not only self-evident but completely proven out by arrest and incarceration numbers to at minimum 70% of black people if you look at polls is what BLM is fighting against.
The next step is that white people just say its all about economics. Its because they're poor. While being poor in america absolutely correlates to both committing and being a victim of crime, even when you take race out of it, there are countless instances of middle and upper class black people being treated like criminals in a way that absolutely NEVER happens to whites. A white person in an oxford shirt and khakis doesn't get arrested outside of their own home in Cambridge - it happened to a black professor.
FWIW I did not downvote anyone in this thread. I feel like the worst motivations are being assigned to me throughout this thread. If anyone cares, no, I do not have bad intentions. I saw some claims that were hard to reconcile with the data I had. That's really all. I don't want anyone to suffer, and I know blacks disproportionately suffer police violence and ordinary violence.
My takeaway here is that people simply care A LOT more about police violence than ordinary violence, something like 20X.
Black Americans care about police violence because we need to have a good relationship with authorities to help with the other problems (including, yes, black-on-black crime). That's why you see support in the black community both for "defunding" police and more police presence in high-crime neighborhoods.
The fear may be there, but I don't see it justified in the numbers.
It's not just about getting killed - it's about getting unfairly fined, arrested, beaten, jailed, and so on. From my own life experience, the fear is warranted.