Has the church made progress with race since the revelation on the priesthood?

[Tacenda]

28 minutes ago, smac97 said:

CFR.

Thanks,

-Smac

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276877/utah-police-shootings

"Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the available, limited FBI data."

[smac97]

2 minutes ago, bluebell said:

Your data is incorrect. 

"According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police office.

U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times as great as the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.

From yesterday's Washington Post article here .

I thought this bit from your cited article was interesting:

Quote

White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population.

So what is the explanation for blacks being disproportionately represented in police-involved fatalities?  Well, here's a possible factor (analyzing date from this Washington Post study of police shootings in 2015):

Quote

The Post found that 990 people, almost all of them men, were shot and killed by law enforcement last year. Before you start calling them victims, however, note that the Post also found that in three-quarters of these incidents, police were defending either themselves or someone else who was, at that moment, under attack.

So 75% of police-involved fatalities involve police defending themselves or the public from criminal attacks.  For me, I am grateful for law enforcement officers who put their lives at risk to protect the public.  So that would be a heroic statistic in most contexts, but in today's racialized political environment, I guess not.

Quote

That leaves around 250 cases that were not obvious self-defense or defense of a third person. That doesn’t mean, of course, that those shootings were unjustified.

I think this an important distinction.  

Quote

What was the racial breakdown of those who were shot by police in 2015? The largest number, 494, almost exactly half, were white. 258 were black, 172 were Hispanic, and the remaining 66 were either “other” or unknown. (Interestingly, Asians are rarely shot by police officers.)

The 258 blacks represent 26% of the total. That is about double the percentage of blacks in the American population.

Compare this 26% statistic with the one in your article: "24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population."

Is this a significant correlation?  Let's see:

Quote

Is that prima facie evidence of racism on the part of law enforcement? Of course not. It is common knowledge that blacks have an unusually high rate of contact with the police, both as victims and as perpetrators. In 2012-2013, the Department of Justice found that blacks were the perpetrators of 24% of all violent crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known (in 7.8% of violent crimes, it was unknown).

So the percentage of blacks fatally shot by police officers (26%) is almost exactly equal to the percentage of blacks committing violent crimes (24%) [to be clear, that is the percentage of violent crimes committed by blacks, as stated above, which is the relevant comparison]. 

Put another way, wouldn't we expect to see a racial group that is overrepresented in committing violent crimes to also be overrepresented in officer-involved shootings/fatalities?

Quote

Indeed, given that the black homicide rate is around eight times the white rate, it is surprising that the portion of blacks fatally shot by policemen is not higher.

Well, the NY Times article seems to account for at least some of that.  There is a rather clear trend of police officers in New York City using statistically higher levels of less-than-lethal force (touching with hands, pushing into wall, using handcuffs, drawing/pointing weapon, pushing to ground, and using pepper spray or baton)   against blacks as compared to whites.  But in terms of lethal force, there is a surprising difference (from the Times article) (emphases added):

Quote

{Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard} and student researchers spent about 3,000 hours assembling detailed data from police reports in Houston; Austin, Tex.; Dallas; Los Angeles; Orlando, Fla.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and four other counties in Florida.

They examined 1,332 shootings between 2000 and 2015, coding police narratives to answer questions such as: How old was the suspect? How many police officers were at the scene? Were they mostly white? Was the officer at the scene for a robbery, violent activity, a traffic stop or something else? Was it nighttime? Did the officer shoot after being attacked or before a possible attack? One goal was to determine if police officers were quicker to fire at black suspects.

In shootings in these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force.

But police shootings are only part of the picture. What about situations in which an officer might be expected to fire, but doesn’t?

To answer this, Mr. Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The Police Department there let the researchers look at reports not only for shootings but also for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. Mr. Fryer defined this group to include encounters with suspects the police subsequently charged with serious offenses like attempting to murder an officer, or evading or resisting arrest. He also considered suspects shocked with Tasers.

Mr. Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were black. This estimate was not precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But in various models controlling for different factors and using different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites.

So there seems to be a lot of data to sift through, a lot of date to still compile, and so on.  But simply dismissing data as "incorrect" because you don't like it seems problematic.

Thanks,

-Smac

[smac97]

26 minutes ago, Tacenda said:

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7276877/utah-police-shootings

"Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the available, limited FBI data."

That quote appears to pertain to nationwide data from ProPublica, not to Utah specifically.  So again, CFR regarding your Utah-specific claim regarding officer-involved shootings where the victims are blacks.  

Or did you just biff it here?  Are we just looking at another casual accusation of racism?  I continue to be appalled at this sort of thing.

The Vox article links to a Salt Lake Tribune article about how officer-involved fatalities in 2010-2014 outnumbered fatalities caused by gang members, drug dealers, or child abusers.  There is no discussion in the Trib article whatsoever of a racial dimension to officer-involved fatalities.  Yet you have publicly suggested there is data to support such a charge.

So where is it?

I should note that I find the Trib article to be pretty crappy in terms of journalistic quality.  It seems agenda-driven.  It seems calculated to foment animus against the police.  I should note here that I think police must be held accountable for use-of-force issues.  But the Trib article goes out of its way to make officer-involved shootings in Utah look epidemic, and Utah police officers to look like a bunch of trigger-happy yahoos salivating at the prospect of gunning someone down.

I have some real concerns about some aspects of law enforcement.  But the data should be treated with more care and scrutiny than you have apparently done here.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Tacenda]

3 minutes ago, smac97 said:

That quote appears to pertain to nationwide data from ProPublica, not to Utah specifically.  So again, CFR regarding your Utah-specific claim regarding officer-involved shootings where the victims are blacks.  

Or did you just biff it here?  Are we just looking at another casual accusation of racism?  I continue to be appalled at this sort of thing.

The Vox article links to a Salt Lake Tribune article about how officer-involved fatalities in 2010-2014 outnumbered fatalities caused by gang members, drug dealers, or child abusers.  There is no discussion in the Trib article whatsoever of a racial dimension to officer-involved fatalities.  Yet you have publicly suggested there is data to support such a charge.

So where is it?

I should note that I find the Trib article to be pretty crappy in terms of journalistic quality.  It seems agenda-driven.  It seems calculated to foment animus against the police.  I should note here that I think police must be held accountable for use-of-force issues.  But the Trib article goes out of its way to make officer-involved shootings in Utah look epidemic, and Utah police officers to look like a bunch of trigger-happy yahoos salivating at the prospect of gunning someone down.

I have some real concerns about some aspects of law enforcement.  But the data should be treated with more care and scrutiny than you have apparently done here.

Thanks,

-Smac

It was my perception, I will look into it further, did you not notice my IMO that you CFR'd? What about your mistaken belief that bluebell corrected. 

[smac97]

6 minutes ago, Tacenda said:

It was my perception, I will look into it further, did you not notice my IMO that you CFR'd?

I would hope that publicly-declared charges of racism by law enforcement, particularly given the recent assassination of five police officers in Dallas, would be supported by at least some data.  But if "IMO" is all you've got . . . 

I am not denying that racism does not exist in law enforcement.  I think it does.  It exists everywhere.  It will never be stamped out, not fully.  Not until "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ."

I was particularly persuaded by the NY Times article referenced earlier and its data regarding NYPD treatment of black people when using less-than-lethal force.  This is well and truly troubling.  And we as a society need to work to address it.  But such efforts need to be made with prudence, clinical analysis, fairness, and without ulterior motives.  I quoted an article earlier which made this observation: "It is important to hold police officers who abuse their authority accountable. It is also important to reject media-driven race-baiting narratives that only further inflame social tensions."

Quote

What about your mistaken belief that bluebell corrected. 

What "mistaken belief" is that?  I am open to correction.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

Given that Fryer found significant differences for nonlethal force after removing possible variisbles that might justify use of nonlethal force. I would be cautious about accepting his lethal force claims (for one thing, he uses "shooting" but in a quick skim I couldn't find if he differentiated between fatal and nonfatal shootings, if he didn't, that needs to be determined).  While it is certainly possibly that officers become more cautious when using greater force, it seems more likely to me that use of any significant force is probable to raise the likelihood of use of lethal force, so his findings need to be reviewed to ensure they are valid.

"With these caveats in mind, this paper takes first steps into the treacherous terrain of under- standing the nature and extent of racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after ac- counting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction. Interestingly, as use of force increases from putting hands on a civilian to striking them with a baton, the overall probability of such an incident occurring decreases dramatically but the racial difference remains roughly constant. Even when officers report civilians have been compliant and no arrest was made, blacks are 21.3 (0.04) percent more likely to endure some form of force. Yet, on the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls."

If his study can be replicated and it means that shooting deaths are not a greater risk for blacks contrary to much of data that has been collected in the past, this needs to be highly publicized.  Also effective controls to remove the difference in nonlethal force need to be put into place.

[Calm]

Link for above:  http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399

[Calm]

An article examining possible problems with the new study:

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12149468/racism-police-shootings-data

"

If you’ve been following the nationwide debate about police killings of black Americans, you know that we don’t have super-reliable data onhow many people (and which ones) get killed by police.

But there is some data out there: from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, media-compiled databases from the Washington Post and the Guardian, and volunteer-compiled databases like Fatal Encounters(which Vox uses for our maps of police killings)....

So when the Times article summarily dismisses existing data as “poor,” and doesn’t explain what that data actually is, that should be a red flag — a clue that the article’s author isn’t going to provide you with an explanation of why this new data is so much better than the old data, and you’re going to have to do that yourself.

When Fryer (an economist by training) tells the Times that he got interested in police shootings because of “his anger after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray,” and (in Fryer’s words) “decided I was going to collect a bunch of data and try to understand what really is going on,” that should be another humongous red flag.

It implies that Fryer assumed he was doing something pioneering, rather than asking first what work was already being done and what he could add to the existing conversation. This is something that often happens when people in “quantitative” social sciences, like economics, develop an interest in topics covered in other social sciences — in this case, criminology: They assume that no rigorous empirical work is being done."

[Calm]

"

In comparison, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database includes records from thousands of police departments around the country. The number of shootings in the Fryer data set, spanning 16 years, is about equivalent to what the Uniform Crime Report compiles in two or three.

More importantly, the UCR report includes not just major cities but small towns and rural areas; not just diverse cities but less diverse ones; not just departments that think carefully about data collection but departments for which it’s just a needed chore to qualify for government funds....

In other words, Fryer and company found that there weren’t big racial disparities in how often black and white suspects who’d already been stopped by police were killed. But they deliberately avoided the question of whether black citizens are more likely to be stopped to begin with (they are) and whether they’re more likely to be stopped without cause (yup)....

Maybe it’s possible (maybe) that those encounters would have been just as likely to escalate to the point of lethal force if each of those men had been white — but it kind of misses the point to say that, because if they’d been white, the encounters probably never would have happened.

Controlling for variables is an extremely important thing in social science. It allows you to figure out which factors actually matter and which ones don’t. In this case, Fryer and his team have given us suggestive evidence that among major-city police forces, police in tense situations are not unusually likely to shoot black suspects. They’ve made a valuable addition to the literature. But it’s just that: an addition, not a discovery, and not the last word."

[USU78]

25 minutes ago, Calm said:

whether black citizens are more likely to be stopped to begin with (they are) and whether they’re more likely to be stopped without cause (yup)...

And why would that first be the case? 

And what are the "control factors" present in establishing that last (assuming it indeed has been established)?

I can think of several.

[Calm]

http://fortune.com/2016/07/11/police-shootings-blacks-study/

"In an interview with Fortune, Fryer says these misleading reports are “unfortunate,” pointing out that many high profile fatal encounters involving blacks and police—people like Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Barbara Dawson, and Freddie Gray, for example – did not involve guns.

“One of the things I worried about was people were going to take the shooting results and pay less attention to the lower level uses of force,” Fryer tells Fortune. “These lower level uses of force happen thousands of times per day. Who would want that to happen?”

In 2015, the UK-based newspaper The Guardian started its own comprehensive study on police killings in America, simply called “The Counted,” since U.S. Crime stats failed to keep track of police involved civilian deaths.

The analysis found 1,146 people died as a result of police interaction in that year alone. It also revealed blacks were 2.48 times more likely to die in police custody than whites even though blacks are only about 12% of the U.S. population. So far this year, 571 people died or were killed in U.S. police interactions and blacks were about 2.31 times more likely to be one of them than their white counterparts, according to the Guardian, which has continued to update its numbers...."

 

[Calm]

Blacks get stopped and searched more even though whites get found with illegal materials more often per stop:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/police-are-searching-black-drivers-more-often-but-finding-more-illegal-stuff-with-white-drivers-2/

"This chart from the Times analysis shows how often black people were searched at traffic stops compared with whites. As you can see, the Connecticut State Police searched blacks 2.6 times as often as whites; the Rhode Island State Police searched blacks 2.5 times as often; the Illinois State Police searched twice as often; and the North Carolina State Police searched 1.5 times as often. In Chicago, blacks were searched more than five times as often as whites....

But all that extra scrutiny doesn't seem to be turning up any more illegal stuff. In Connecticut, Illinois and North Carolina, police found contraband less often when they searched black people than white people. In Chicago, for example, blacks were 30 percent less likely to be found with any illegal goods. State police officers from Rhode Island were the exception; they were more likely to search black drivers, but they also more likely to find contraband...

A clue lies in how infrequent these searches are — and how infrequently police officers actually find anything. The federal survey from 2013 suggests that only about 3.5 percent of traffic stops end up in a search. The Times puts that number closer to 2.5 percent. Of those stops, the police turn up contraband perhaps only a quarter of the time.

And so one possibility is that the police just struggle to see the trend through all the noise — and thus have trouble overcoming any unconscious bias...

Between 2009 and 2013, Chicago police stopped over 200,000 white drivers, but only searched 906, of which 237 had contraband. Of those searched, that’s a hit rate of 26 percent. In that same time period, they stopped over 300,000 black drivers, searched 6,593 of them, and found contraband in 1,232 cases. That’s a hit rate of 19 percent."

[cinepro]

3 hours ago, bluebell said:

Your data is incorrect. 

"According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police office.

U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times as great as the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.

From yesterday's Washington Post article here .

 

 

 

 

I've never understood the point of "data" like that.

It's presented as if the assumption were that police are tasked with killing a certain number of people each year, and in going about their charge to kill people, we are protesting that they aren't doing it fairly.  If they were to drive down the street and randomly kill people, we would expect the fatalities to be equally reflective of all ages and demographics.

 

But in looking at the data, this isn't the case.  25-year-old black men are killed at a much higher rate than 6-year-old Japanese girls.  So the police aren't properly fulfilling their charge to kill randomly across all demographics.  There is obviously some sort of selection bias at play here, and we cannot rest until each American has an equal chance to be killed by a policeman.

[bluebell]

1 minute ago, cinepro said:

I've never understood the point of "data" like that.

It's presented as if the assumption were that police are tasked with killing a certain number of people each year, and in going about their charge to kill people, we are protesting that they aren't doing it fairly.  If they were to drive down the street and randomly kill people, we would expect the fatalities to be equally reflective of all ages and demographics.

 

But in looking at the data, this isn't the case.  25-year-old black men are killed at a much higher rate than 6-year-old Japanese girls.  So the police aren't properly fulfilling their charge to kill randomly across all demographics.  There is obviously some sort of selection bias at play here, and we cannot rest until each American has an equal chance to be killed by a policeman.

I think the idea is that unarmed black people are as dangerous as unarmed white people, therefore the same percentage of them should be killed.  If unarmed black people are 5 times more likely  to be killed than unarmed white people, then that should cause people to question why.

Is that understandable?  Maybe i'm still missing your point.

[phaedrus ut]

I think the church is substantially better than they were pre 1978.  That's pretty obvious.  I think the Race and the Priesthood essays were a step in the right direction.  I believe the final step would be for the church to specifically stay which of it's past policies were not revelation and were racist policies of men.  

I think there are still some pockets of soft racism in the church.  Leadership is still very very white and from historically prominent LDS families. Another example is how BYU applies the honor code between white and non-white students.  One study by Darron Smith showed that a black athlete at BYU is 16 times more likely to be suspended, dismissed, put on probation, or forced to withdraw from the school than a white athlete.  

Phaedrus 

[USU78]

7 minutes ago, phaedrus ut said:

I think the church is substantially better than they were pre 1978.  That's pretty obvious.  I think the Race and the Priesthood essays were a step in the right direction.  I believe the final step would be for the church to specifically stay which of it's past policies were not revelation and were racist policies of men.  

I think there are still some pockets of soft racism in the church.  Leadership is still very very white and from historically prominent LDS families. Another example is how BYU applies the honor code between white and non-white students.  One study by Darron Smith showed that a black athlete at BYU is 16 times more likely to be suspended, dismissed, put on probation, or forced to withdraw from the school than a white athlete.  

Phaedrus 

yBu is a wholly owned subsidiary of but is definitely not the Church.

"Soft" "racism," I don't find particularly interesting, as the perceiver's bonafides necessarily must be examined, and people are generally too polite to do so, leaving the alleged soft "racist" without recourse to any kind of reasonable standards.

Besides that, why is this of all possible sacred cows the most sacred of all?  Folks is folks, and folks is definitely tribal.

Beams and Motes.

Edited July 12, 2016 by USU78

[cinepro]

10 minutes ago, bluebell said:

I think the idea is that unarmed black people are as dangerous as unarmed white people, therefore the same percentage of them should be killed.  If unarmed black people are 5 times more likely  to be killed than unarmed white people, then that should cause people to question why.

Is that understandable?  Maybe i'm still missing your point.

That assumes that police have a goal to kill a certain number of unarmed people, and we are protesting that it is being done inequitably.

Obviously, that is not the case.  The problem is that the police are incorrectly using lethal force against someone they perceive as a threat, and for some reason, they are incorrectly perceiving more black people as threats requiring lethal force than white people. 

Until you can answer the question as to why that is, I don't think much progress will be made.  It also helps to understand the factors involved in making the decision to use lethal force, which I'm not sure many people do.  It involves much more than just figuring out whether or not a person has a weapon.

[Calm]

18 minutes ago, bluebell said:

I think the idea is that unarmed black people are as dangerous as unarmed white people, therefore the same percentage of them should be killed.  If unarmed black people are 5 times more likely  to be killed than unarmed white people, then that should cause people to question why.

Is that understandable?  Maybe i'm still missing your point.

And why are blacks searched more at traffic stops even though percentagewise, when searched more illegal materials are found with whites?

 

[Calm]

9 minutes ago, phaedrus ut said:

  One study by Darron Smith showed that a black athlete at BYU is 16 times more likely to be suspended, dismissed, put on probation, or forced to withdraw from the school than a white athlete.  

Was this for those found in violation of the HC or all athletes?  If the latter, was it controlled for the difference between LDS and nonLDS atheletes.  I have no clue if BYU recruits more black nonlds students than white or if nonlds students violate the honour code more often (perhaps they view some things to be quite minor and unrealistic to monitor, perhaps just committing to a code puts their behaviour in line with LDS athletes).  Also possible problem with sample size, how many black athletes have been dismissed etc?  

[phaedrus ut]

3 minutes ago, USU78 said:

yBu is a wholly owned subsidiary of but is definitely not the Church.

Yes they aren't the church but what I think this illustrates is there are some still latent beliefs that exist as policies among the "unwritten order of things".  If I grew up with the beliefs that blacks were inferior because they were less valiant in the pre-existence and skin color may be a sign of sin I may retain a subconscious prejudice against certain people. These aren't uniquely BYU problems because I've seen similar reports from other colleges.  

I applaud the efforts the church makes, unfortunately they still have the millstone of historic statements around their neck and won't get rid of it until they directly admit the past errors.  

Phaedrus

[bluebell]

3 hours ago, smac97 said:

I thought this bit from your cited article was interesting:

I thought this bit from my cited article was interesting:

"U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times as great as the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer."

Quote

So what is the explanation for blacks being disproportionately represented in police-involved fatalities?  Well, here's a possible factor (analyzing date from this Washington Post study of police shootings in 2015):

Maybe i missed it.  Where in that link does it talk about unarmed people being killed?

Quote

So 75% of police-involved fatalities involve police defending themselves or the public from criminal attacks.  

100% of unarmed people killed by police were not killed because they were defending themselves or the public from the unarmed people.  

Quote

For me, I am grateful for law enforcement officers who put their lives at risk to protect the public.  So that would be a heroic statistic in most contexts, but in today's racialized political environment, I guess not.

This should go without saying but i can see that you at least are confused about it so let's clear it up. EVERYONE. HERE. IS. GRATEFUL. FOR. LAW. ENFORCEMENT.   EVERYONE HERE THINKS IT'S HEROIC WHEN POLICE DO THAT. 

There.  Now let's retire the whole 'I for one....blah blah blah... but I guess no one else...blah blah blah' spiel.  Your specific statement implies that a person can't be both pro-black lives matter AND pro-police lives matter.   And that is a stupid thing for anyone to be implying.  

And plus, it always comes off as self righteous even when it's not meant that way.

Quote

"That leaves around 250 cases that were not obvious self-defense or defense of a third person. That doesn’t mean, of course, that those shootings were unjustified."  I think this an important distinction.

I think it's an important distinction to remember that doesn't mean, of course, that those shootings weren't unjustified.  It's also important to remember that unarmed black people are killed at a rate of 5 times more often than unarmed white people.  It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person.

Quote

So there seems to be a lot of data to sift through, a lot of date to still compile, and so on.  But simply dismissing data as "incorrect" because you don't like it seems problematic.

I dismissed it as incorrect because it was incorrect.  

And equally important for you to realize (and really really absorb) is that you have no idea how i feel about it.  I did not give you enough information in my post for you to even logically think that you have any idea how i feel about it. 

Stop trying to dismiss what other people say by adding dumb stuff like (including but not limited to) 'because you don't like it' to the end of your posts when such a statement is completely unsupported by what the person has actually said.   Doing that is--how did you put it?--problematic.  

Quote

 

Thanks,

-Smac

 

You're welcome.

[bluebell]

27 minutes ago, cinepro said:

That assumes that police have a goal to kill a certain number of unarmed people, and we are protesting that it is being done inequitably.

Obviously, that is not the case.  The problem is that the police are incorrectly using lethal force against someone they perceive as a threat, and for some reason, they are incorrectly perceiving more black people as threats requiring lethal force than white people. 

Until you can answer the question as to why that is, I don't think much progress will be made.  

The point of this discussion is whether or not racism is the 'why'.  Racism definitely presents a logical 'why'.  Have any why's other than racism been offered to help explain it?  I honestly don't know.

[bluebell]

29 minutes ago, Calm said:

And why are blacks searched more at traffic stops even though percentagewise, when searched more illegal materials are found with whites?

 

Racism is a reasonable answer (doesn't mean it's the right one, but it is reasonable).

[USU78]

34 minutes ago, Calm said:

And why are blacks searched more at traffic stops even though percentagewise, when searched more illegal materials are found with whites?

 

Looking for weapons on a pretext? 

[smac97]

37 minutes ago, bluebell said:

I thought this bit from my cited article was interesting:

"U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times as great as the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer."

Yes, that is interesting.  What it means and what is causing, however, are different issues.  

Quote

 

Maybe i missed it.  Where in that link does it talk about unarmed people being killed?

100% of unarmed people killed by police were not killed because they were defending themselves or the public from the unarmed people.  

 

I do not understand your point.

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This should go without saying but i can see that you at least are confused about it so let's clear it up. EVERYONE. HERE. IS. GRATEFUL. FOR. LAW. ENFORCEMENT.   EVERYONE HERE THINKS IT'S HEROIC WHEN POLICE DO THAT. 

And yet we're seeing glib sarcasm in lieu of thoughtful and reasoned discourse (including, sadly, from me).

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There.  Now let's retire the whole 'I for one....blah blah blah... but I guess no one else...blah blah blah' spiel.  

Fair enough.

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Your specific statement implies that a person can't be both pro-black lives matter AND pro-police lives matter.  

That was not my intent.  However, in retrospect, I see that I fell prey to the glib sarcasm I denounce above.  Rather than remain a hypocrite, I will retract my characterization and apologize.

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And plus, it always comes off as self righteous even when it's not meant that way.

I will take that under advisement.

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I think it's an important distinction to remember that doesn't mean, of course, that those shootings weren't unjustified.  It's also important to remember that unarmed black people are killed at a rate of 5 times more often than unarmed white people.  It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person.

It is?  Every time?  Without exception?  How do you know that?  Have you ever served in law enforcement?  Ever been a first responder?  Ever seen death or serious injury being imminently threatened in the moment by someone who has the means and will to inflict death or serious injury?  Ever had to make a split-second life-or-death decision?

I'm not saying that all officer-involved shootings of unarmed persons are justified.  Certainly not.  Each must be taken on a case-by-case basis.  But I think your going-almost-totally-the-other-way assertion ("It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person") is, frankly, astonishing.  How did you arrive at such a conclusion?  What is the factual/legal/ethical/moral basis for such a sweeping statement?

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I dismissed it as incorrect because it was incorrect.  

It is?  How do you know that?  USU's referenced data does not seem to address the exact same concepts and data sets which you cite, so how do you know the latter debunks the former?

USU could just as easily summarily dismiss your data as "incorrect."  But that wouldn't solve the problem.  Merely asserting Data X are incorrect is not, I think, sufficient.  I'd like to see explanation and argument instead of, essentially, "Your data over there is wrong because it conflicts with my data over here."

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And equally important for you to realize (and really really absorb) is that you have no idea how i feel about it.  I did not give you enough information in my post for you to even logically think that you have any idea how i feel about it. 

I stand corrected.  Sort of.  I think you presume to much in merely asserting that Data Set X is "incorrect" by pointing to Data Set Y and declare, without analysis or reasoning, that the latter is correct and refutes the former.  

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Stop trying to dismiss what other people say by adding dumb stuff like (including but not limited to) 'because you don't like it' to the end of your posts when such a statement is completely unsupported by what the person has actually said.   Doing that is--how did you put it?--problematic.  

I will work to improve myself.  Thank you for the feedback.

Thanks,

-Smac