That data generally agrees with victim surveys about the race of offenders of violent crimes. It stands to reason that a group with a larger share of violent criminals is also going to have more police killings. Is there any data that contradict these? Is there any plausible theory about why victims might conspire with police to make it appear as though black Americans collectively overcommit violent crimes?
At first, I typed out a more long-winded reply about why one can't conflate the self-report statistics of victims with the motivations of police in violent skirmishes, but I've been reflecting a lot lately on choosing my battles.
The "but black people are more likely to be violent criminals" rebuttal is a despicable one, and if you can't see the absence of causal links that you're deliberately hopping over in an attempt to shoehorn that in, then I doubt I'm going to make you see it in a HN comment. That said, I sure hope you don't ever correct someone on "causation vs correlation", as you'd be a tremendous hypocrite.
It’s only appears to be despicable to people who don’t understand statistics on a basic level (which, sadly, describes most Americans, even educated ones) or ardent racists who believe that “the race” supersedes “the individual”.
Notably, we can correctly observe that black people commit more violent crimes per capita than other races without implying any of the following:
1. black people are biologically disposed to crime
2. a significant percentage of black people are criminals
3. any given black person significantly more likely to be a criminal than any given non-black person
I definitely think your decision to pick your battles more carefully is the right one, and I encourage you to be even more judicious.
I firmly believe that you don't understand statistics on a basic level, and you've wholly demonstrated that in this comment by throwing around a bunch of "explanations" with no basis but your own intuition. So the irony of your opening assertion has a wonderfully humorous tinge to me, a literal statistician. Take your pseudo-intellectual trolling back to reddit.
Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I will, as much as I enjoyed most of your posturing, including your misunderstanding of what constitutes an ad hominem AND the feeble attempt to invoke the guidelines. Is my tone too harsh for you? Or was it that I assumed the bad faith that you wear on your sleeve?
Flamewar comments like you posted to this thread will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
