Ah… just from quickly glancing at this, there are issues with your statement here.
123 are confirmed black… 79 are hispanic, another group who is also dealt with harshly by police, and 46 are unknown.
Based on those numbers whites made up only 46% of the people shot by police, while making up 63% of the population. Also note that this only includes people who are actually shot by police and killed. This doesn’t include people like Garner, or Gray, who high profile cases who don’t show up in that database because they were killed by other means.
But more importantly, the issue is that we’re getting cases like those seen recently, where the people who are killed by police are often doing nothing wrong. And this is the issue which has black folks terrified. Can you imagine a situation where you have to be afraid that your kid will get shot by police for no reason at all? The most recent case which was live-streamed, if found to be true, will be a situation where the guy who got shot did literally everything correctly. He legally had a gun, and informed the officer of it. The cop shot him, and was clearly freaking out in the video. The guy seemingly died for having a busted tail light.
Can you honestly say that such a thing happens to white folks? Because I’m sorry, but it does not.
Folks here know, I totally support cops, and I won’t judge them without giving them their day in court. But I see things like the guy who shot that dude in the back in NC, and then planted his taser on him to try and claim that he grabbed it? And that makes me unable to just handwave away the notion of police brutality against black folks.
[quote=“Soapyfrog, post:39, topic:120215”]
It’s true my only evidence is news reporting; incidents where law-abiding white people are shot or murdered by the police do not seem to make the news. Or maybe it really happens a lot more rarely to white people.[/quote]
Anecdotes are not data, and yes, I think the media is far more likely to latch on to police killings that fit the BLM narrative than ones that don’t. Not that I don’t think police brutality/militarization is a serious problem, it is just that I don’t believe the racial characterization of the problem is supported by the evidence.
Of course I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that the serious broader issue has been turned into a divisive racial issue that is not supported by evidence.
A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices. County-specific relative risk outcomes of being shot by police are estimated as a function of the interaction of: 1) whether suspects/civilians were armed or unarmed, and 2) the race/ethnicity of the suspects/civilians. The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more. Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
But I would say most people only have the evidence that they can receive through, hopefully even handed, media. Why would the police killing of law-abiding and/or compliant white people go unreported? Statistically even weighting for higher rates of black criminality (which again should not matter when dealing with people who are law-abiding or following police instructions) there should be a bunch of those happening, and yet it is very hard to find reports.
Part of the problem may be that the police themselves won’t report these things unless forced to by filming bystanders, so we only get to see the most egregious and sensational of these events:
Distracting the conversation by putting out bullshit claims about “black on black crime” is quite literally one of the most dehumanizing and racist arguments that one can make.
Even if it were true that blacks kill other blacks at a higher proportion than whites kill other whites (which it isn’t, to any significant degree), the argument itself inherently says “No one should give a shit about black lives until black people do” and “Police officers are entitled to kill black people because other black people kill black people”
Good link, and interesting results, but why did the researcher use a crowd-sourced police shooting database, and assault and weapons related arrest rates as a proxy for race-specific violent crime rates instead of the actual violent crime rates? Nevertheless, I’m perfectly willing to admit there is evidence on the other side.
But, in this age of polarized politics, whether it be of the electoral or racial variety, Gingrich’s comments were also remarkable. Here is the key quote:
“It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this. If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.
White parents, Gingrich continued, don’t have to teach their teenage boys to be extra careful when dealing with police “because it’s not part of your normal experience.
I dislike Newt quite a bit, but he clearly meant average when he was saying normal. The dude was speaking - not writing - so beating on semantics is silly.
Sure, it’s not like I’d hold him to that gaffe or whatever, but it’s still a pretty common unconscious bias. Whether in politics, entertainment, life, or otherwise, “white” or “white male” is often considered to be “normal” that’s just expected to exist. Anything which strays from that “normal” goes through extra scrutiny.
I think I’m willing to give credit to Newt Gingrich when he says white America doesn’t understand what being black in America is really like without beating him over the head for his choice of adjectives. This isn’t a pass on institutional bigotry in language. It’s just me celebrating that Newt fucking Gingrich was able to take in what others have been telling him for decades and finally really listening.
If only every person whose first response was “What did he do to deserve it?” after hearing that cop shot and killed a minority could do the same.
I mean it’s a gaffe of a sort, but the fact that Newt Fucking Gingrich is saying what he was saying is a far bigger positive than anything else. People on social media are giving him shit for saying “normal” and I’m over here going “It’s Newt Gingrich saying white privilege is real and you’re bitching about one poorly chosen word?!?”
I mean, there are PLENTY of reasons to hate Newt. Like a spreadsheet full of them. This isn’t one of those things. If you want to change things you have to not nitpick. That he’s saying “you’re right” is massive, you don’t bitch about how he didn’t say it quite the way you wanted. That’s extremely counter productive and just going to force people of his ilk into the other corner and not help anything.
There was a really good video making fun of it out there, but fuck if I can find it. Basically a redneck saying all sorts of horrible words, but basically fighting for the rights of everyone he’s talking about. Think it was a comedy thing, but fuck if I can find it.
