Discussion for article #228708
According to some research I’ve read about, blacks and minorities are just more associated with crime in the minds of police officers. And it doesn’t even matter the race of the police officer.
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Up next in the GOP/Teatroll response: “Stop confusing killing with culling.”
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An article of faith in the black community???
He still doesn’t get it. It’s a fact, a verifiable, testable, predictable fact. He just doesn’t want to or is unable to accept it.
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Too many people who are not Black think we were paranoid for thinking that we are targeted. That a non-Black organization says it, might lend some credibility to reality.
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Exactly, it’s a misguided assumption that simply putting more blacks and minorities on the police force can solve the problem of police discrimination—whites aren’t the only people that can be racist towards black people.
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Fair and Balanced: And white men are 21 times more likely than black men to think that’s perfectly ok.
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Exactly. More young black men are killed by cops than other young men. How many of those killings have white men who are cops as the only witness to the killing? As with the Michael Brown killing, the memory of those white men (in court testimony or as Use of Force Report) is not treated with the same level of scrutiny as a civilian eyewitness’ account. I am tired of being told the memory of an eyewitness is often unreliable. Surely the memory & testimony/Reports of the police officer involved bear close inspection.
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Just think how bad the ratio would be if we weren’t living in a post-racial country.
What worries me with these kind of stats is that they’ll start killing non blacks more to make it more equitable, instead of overhauling the system by which police violence occurs to an unacceptable level against all inmates.
To the extent that police departments receive federal funds, it is deplorable that the feds don’t make them report such statistics annually. The entire state of Florida hasn’t reported in 17 years??!!
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Yes. They know damn well what the stats would show if compiled, so they just want them buried.
People really don’t understand how to interpret statistics. I just glance at this but is ProPublica really just comparing the raw numbers and reporting a “risk” ratio of 21:1? Is TPM just mindlessly passing that along?
The interesting finding would be how much likely a young black man would be to get shot controlling for other factors such as location, demographics of the police force, etc.
Shame on you, TPM, if you’re helping contribute to innumeracy (although it would in no way surprise me if you are).
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Awesome journalism.
What? “Controlling for other factors”? Being white or black is the controlling factor!
Dumbing it down to something like a notification of “No off-duty cops posing as a carnival clown have murdered a white or black man” as some sort of unbiased analysis would be nonsense.
I can have a productive discussion on this topic with people who understand how control variables work. This is just basic stats.
“ProPublica calculated a statistical figure called a risk ratio by dividing the rate of black homicide victims by the rate of white victims. This ratio, commonly used in epidemiology, gives an estimate for how much more at risk black teenagers were to be killed by police officers.Risk ratios can have varying levels of precision, depending on a variety of mathematical factors. In this case, because such shootings are rare from a statistical perspective (emphasis added), a 95 percent confidence interval indicates that black teenagers are at between 10 and 40 times greater risk of being killed by a police officer. The calculation used 2010-2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.”
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Could one really further parse out the distinctions you desire with any confidence considering the paucity of original data?
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Perhaps you could do a greater service to the conversation without by explaining your concerns in a non-jargony way, delivered with 82.635% less condescension.
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On think I like to ask my white friends who doubt this is how often has a police officer pulled a gun at a traffic stop? I’m 40 I have had police pull guns on me 4 times. I live in a medium sized New England city as a reference point. Most of my white friends have never had a police officer pull a gun (or even put their hand on their gun) once. That is a telling stat to me.
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I think you may be overreacting to the authors’ choice of words. The general tone of the article, while not editorializing, seems pretty accepting that these ARE the facts and that they are implicitly shocking, even if they are trying to maintain an air of objectivity. Note that this is not a TPM article reporting on another article. This is an article written by the actual authors of the Pro Publica Report. Check the byline—it’s actually 1 woman and two men.
Think about this as well. Pro Publica does public-interest investigative journalism. You can bet the house that part of the reason these individuals chose to do this report was because they ALREADY accepted that there is a tragic, outrageous problem. Their investigation was simply intended to quantify the scope of the problem using cold, hard numbers which, in turn, can be used to persuade the public at large, as well as elected officials and law enforcement leaders.
“An article of faith” means “deeply held belief”. “Belief” doesn’t become “fact” until it has been verified via some sort of measurement. Part of the outrage is that this ought to be easy to measure, but that it is NOT. There is a federal law that instructs the Department of Justice to collect this sort of data. Unfortunately, the law has no teeth in that it does not REQUIRE law enforcement agencies to collect the data in their jurisdiction and report it to DOJ. (Jon Stewart actually had a piece on The Daily Show on this exact problem just last week.) These reporters have actually done the hard work of essentially acting as scientists and gathering the data from disparate sources to PROVE in an undeniable way that what many of us have always believed is now a verified fact. They ought to be looked at as heroes or at least allies, not enemies.
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Sorry, I’m apparently becoming the classic academic who sometimes forgets how to communicate to a non-academic audience. That doesn’t make me happy. The funny thing is I’m far far far from a stats wiz. I really just thought control variables were something that a typical college-educated reader (which is about what I would assume to be the audience here) would at least vaguely understand.
I can’t reiterate that enough. I’m not a stats wiz, and I just skimmed the article. If there’s something subtle that ProPublica is doing that I just don’t understand, please let me know.
That said–if the idea of a control variable isn’t clear, wouldn’t a better response be to ask me to clarify what I mean, rather than telling me that I’m all wrong?
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