• FiniteBanjo
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    9 months ago

    This is funny, and police do murder innocent dark skin ethnicities at a much higher rate, but that doesn’t just erase the other 7/10ths 5/10ths of executions which are white people.

    Edit: white to black was a 7:3 ratio but it’s more like 5/10ths when you include other demographics.

      • FiniteBanjo
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        9 months ago

        Yes I agree with you 100%, I’ve never on any occasion argued against any of that.

        Actually, the data has been largely unreliable since at least 2015, as James Comey while he was head of the FBI puts it: “I think it’s embarrassing for those of us in government who care deeply about these issues, especially the use of force by law enforcement, that we can’t have an informed discussion because we don’t have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by police in the United States last month, last year, or anything about the demographics, and that’s a very bad place to be.” All US Federal data on police use of force is self-reported since forever.

        For about 2 decades, largely one of the biggest sources for data was Philip M. Stinson, who tracked nationwide shootings with Google Alerts. There was also another great study on the matter by PNAS called “Risk of being Killed by Police in the United States by Age, Race-ethnicity, and Sex”.

    • wathek@discuss.online
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      9 months ago

      Thats some right wing talking point. It’s valid that we overfocus on the race issue. Though you also have to consider the amount of white people available for exexution vs black people. Unfortunately using bad statistics only gets those race people to focus on race more rather than the OP stats cops have in general. We about to be downvoted into oblivion though. This is Lemmy! You cant say things like that in the echo chamber :,)

      • FiniteBanjo
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        9 months ago

        Are you saying my talking point is right wing? Because I see it the opposite way. I see that sweeping victims under the rug that right wing people can associate and potentially empathize with makes it a partisan issue when instead we should all be united against police brutality and unjust murders of all our peoples. It could be any of us, at any moment, without any consequence for them.

        Making police out to be an Anti-Black figure is in itself a conservative political philosophy that too many right-wingers would support.

        • FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          That guy just wants to take turns around the little children’s table of murdered-people’s-recognition and say that one ethnicity deserves more sympathy than another. Apparently, he’s saying that one particular group deserves more time with the microphone than another.

          In reality, it’s all of us who are being murdered and race is just a distraction. The race battle is alive and well even among all of us who are on the same side, which is ridiculous.

          That’s them winning, because every ounce of effort we blow arguing who deserves more sympathy today is an ounce of effort not directed toward the police.

          Besides, it’s not even race; its economic class that matters. Who has any numbers documenting rich people who were shot with pencils in their hands because they looked like guns?

          It doesn’t exist.

        • wathek@discuss.online
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          9 months ago

          Yes, I would agree. But this is lemmy. And I hope I’m wrong about people’s reaction here. I’m speaking for people who I do not support, and who’s ideas don’t make logical sense to me, so i will shut up now and let those people make their questionable points instead.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It’s valid that we overfocus on the race issue.

        The eternal struggle in American politics is whether to persecute black people because they are largely poor, or to persecute poor people because so many of them are black.

        Unfortunately using bad statistics only gets those race people to focus on race

        The efforts by both historical and modern American leadership to impose a formal caste system on a melting pot of ethnicity and migrating communities has produced an enormous number of contradictory policies and practices.

        But one upshot is how you can focus in on a particular state or agency or subset of the criminal statistics, and get any kind of trend you want.

        You can then draw all sorts of conclusions - some of them pretty nakedly illogical and incoherent - and then build a media career around using these statistics to prove your fringe view to a gullible audience.

        I might say that the problem isn’t with “bad statistics” nearly so much as pure “bad faith”. Arguing for vicious, sadistic, and largely ineffectual policies by pointing to a singular cohort in a sliver of the overall data set and insisting we need to do full-on Gestapo-esque policing if anyone is to sleep soundly ever again.