> For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed
This is a weird way to frame the issue. Are black people arrested for violent crime more often? I don't know, but if they are, that changes the conclusion. This seems like an obvious thing I'd want to find out if I were posting that Twitter thread.
> I am showing that when you control for violent crime rate, the disparity vanishes.
No, arrest rate and crime rate are not the same. That's the whole point of the discussion about bias in policing.
If you ask a more straightforward question, like "how often are people killed when they interact with police?", the statistics look different. Here's a study that says:
> On average, there were large racial/ethnic inequities in the rates at which White and Black people were killed during police contact. Across all MSAs, Black people were 3.23 times more likely to be killed compared to White people (95% CI: 2.95, 3.54, p<0.001).
Ok sure, but in turn your comment ignores/doesn't contain any data on the statistics of crimes committed by race or what behaviors that lead to escalation appear more among different races.
I'll post the full quote for anyone that doesn't have NYT access:
> The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin. And police bias may be responsible. But this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter.
Absolutely agreed: using the FBI data in that NYT article, there's no way to tell why Black people are killed more frequently. All it tells you is that deaths are disproportionate. Using other studies with further data, like the one I posted, gives us a clearer picture.
> Ok sure, but in turn your comment ignores/doesn't contain any data on the statistics of crimes committed by race or what behaviors that lead to escalation appear more among different races.
Correct, I am taking it as a given that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit crime or somehow provoke an officer to murder them during an arrest.
TBH I don't understand what you're saying. I'm having the same debate on 2 threads now so here's my quote to the other person who posted the same link:
"I looked at it and the study doesn't account for anything. For example, if a certain demographic were 2x more likely to die in an encounter, but 4x more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence, then they're actually 2x more likely to be treated with less force than their actions require.
This is basic, the study (at least on my glance) appears to not account for anything like this at all."
I agree with that. The study doesn't account for that because it doesn't make any sense, how could skin color make a person more likely to respond with violence? Can you explain the mechanism for how a racial demographic could be "more likely to respond to a benign pullover with violence"?
The issue isn't skin color causing certain behavior, but whether skin color is correlated with certain behaviors. For example, it might be the case that black people are more likely to be poor, and poor people are more likely to respond aggressively to police authority.
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.
Can you replicate or scale yourself and moderate reddit too? Also, twitter. If possible, youtube. And if you're up for it, then instagram. It wouldn't also hurt to police (no pun) tiktok (: There's got be a way?
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.
Please don't assume my reaction, I'm not outraged by anyone posting an internet comment.
I would be interested to see how the statistics look if you control for income or zip code. My assumption would be that in a given "bad neighborhood", there is no racial discrepancy in murderers, even if there is overall for the country. So I would not expect an officer walking a beat to be able to use race for any proactive purpose.
Obviously this is a big assumption that would take substantial work and data to prove, but that is what I meant by my "given". It's the same as saying that skin color has no effect on a person's likelihood to commit white collar crime - statistics show White people do it more often just because they have more opportunity.
I apologize, I pasted something I'd written before and didn't edit enough. There was no reason to assume you were outraged and it was clearly my mistake.
I agree that the data you outline would be useful to look at. I'm sure someone has done some analysis to arrive at an approximation. My guess is that it doesn't change much, though there will be neighborhoods where basically everyone you encounter is of the same race so race isn't informative (if the "cop walking the beat" example is the animating one).
If I'm understanding you correctly, the basic thought is that economic circumstances might explain the difference in murder rates. They do not (i.e., there is a lot of evidence to suggest it is not causal), though obviously there is correlation. There are many chronically poor (or poorer-than-average, since no one in the U.S. is actually poor) populations that do not show significantly elevated rates of violent crimes.
Please don't post like this to HN, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. You break several of the site guidelines when you do so:
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
No I think you misunderstand. There's a data-generating process: people commit crimes. For a given set of people, the mix of crimes they commit will drive both convictions and killings. For instance, if the mix of crimes a particular group commits has more murder in it than for other groups, we would expect both more police-shootings of those people (because police can intervene with deadly force when lives are at stake) and more convictions for murder.
You're right that people who are shot by police don't get convicted of anything, of course.
This is a weird way to frame the issue. Are black people arrested for violent crime more often? I don't know, but if they are, that changes the conclusion. This seems like an obvious thing I'd want to find out if I were posting that Twitter thread.
> I am showing that when you control for violent crime rate, the disparity vanishes.
No, arrest rate and crime rate are not the same. That's the whole point of the discussion about bias in policing.
If you ask a more straightforward question, like "how often are people killed when they interact with police?", the statistics look different. Here's a study that says:
> On average, there were large racial/ethnic inequities in the rates at which White and Black people were killed during police contact. Across all MSAs, Black people were 3.23 times more likely to be killed compared to White people (95% CI: 2.95, 3.54, p<0.001).
- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...