What are the verifiable facts again? Do you have alternative statistics because they're actually on the FBI website and contradict everything you're saying. The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election via amplification of convenient (and unfortunate/terrible) imagery to turn out voters. I hate to be stone cold but that's my understanding of what unfolded. We witnessed something similar in 2015.
I should add a caveat around "the BLM movement is about." One of its problems (like many progressive movements) is everyone has a different idea what it is about, and the mainstream media does not help with that in the slightest.
So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true. There are no statistics to worry about for that one and there don't need to be: just look at a handful of publicized cases and be angry.
But of course, people do like statistics. You can't be angry without statistics. (Truly, you shouldn't. It's unhealthy). Also, that framework makes a terrible export. (Which is unfortunate because Canada loves importing protests from the States instead of making its own).
So, various other progressive movements globbed on to the name, as they do, but fortunately it's a more visceral thing than, say, Occupy Wall Street, so they are at least mostly on topic. I think the real problem, which is the source of most of the recent anger (see the equally badly named and easily co-opted slogan "Defund the police"), is that police are killing a lot of people for stupid reasons.
It is still important to emphasize that black lives matter, because they do, and it's infuriating that that makes people uncomfortable. But the root cause is the United States has an unreasonable approach to policing in general, which creates as many problems as it solves. And I think if you talk to most BLM supporters, they aren't going to tell you about racial sensitivity training or hiring more black cops: they're going to tell you how the police in a developed country shouldn't act as if they're expecting a war.
I'll join you on beating that drum. Statistics are the key skill for making policy decisions. One that the vast majority of the population, educated or not, fail to grasp.
>So, the original idea there is police in the United States are killing black people for stupid reasons, which is true.
Is it though? Seems to me you're advocating feelings matter more than facts. I believe it would be more accurate to say "police in the United States are killing people for stupid reasons, which is true." while keeping in mind that those incidents are the exception, not the norm. The police shot 28 unarmed people in 2019. On a population of 320 million.
>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.
>We create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during 2015 and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.
>In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
I think the issue isn’t just police killing unarmed black people but also an incredibly large disparity in use of all physical force which your stats allude to:
>This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities.
Further down in their comment they cite statistics about variant violent crime rates by race, where African Americans commit more than 50% of violent crime, which seems in line with your cited non-lethal force rates. Violent criminals receiving proportionate rates of violent force doesn't stand out as a disparity.
>African Americans commit more than 50% of violent crime,
Out of curiosity, I understand that you're simply citing statistics from a source but I'd like to know if you think this reflects reality? If so, what reason would you suggest creates this?
That’s fascinating. I personally haven’t found any statistics on how many crimes of any type are committed that didn’t include estimates, only statistics that count arrests(1) since those are discrete and easily countable.
I agree that statistics are an incredibly powerful tool to understand the world but I disagree that they’re the “only lens on reality” since in some cases, ideologues are able to summon numbers that fit a preconceived notion.
I believe it reflects reality, or is at least a strong approximation of reality.
I think the cause to first order is economics. Second and third order terms with much less but still contributing importance are political (decades of policy failures like the War on Drugs and welfare expansion, for-profit prisons, etc), and cultural (there is far too much celebration of crime culture, gang culture, and respect culture that normalizes the state of things in the black community).
> they're going to tell you how the police in a developed country shouldn't act as if they're expecting a war.
Which gives me a bit of whiplash when I see many of those people outraged that the Capitol Police didn’t just start shooting indiscriminately into the crowd on 1/6.
> Which gives me a bit of whiplash when I see many of those people outraged that the Capitol Police didn’t just start shooting indiscriminately into the crowd on 1/6.
What I've seen is mostly people pointing to that response as proving police know how to respond nonviolently to mass, even violent, protests, and therefore that the reason they choose a different stance and response when, e.g., BLM is involved is racial bias, not neutral procedure.
The Capitol Police retreated from most of the capitol building and only shot one rioter before eventually recapturing the building later that evening. Police responding to BLM protests shot virtually nobody and retreated from multiple police stations, some of which were either occupied for weeks or burned to the ground.
> The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election
I noticed that that the BLM protests happened a few months before the 2016 election and then vanished. Then the same thing happened before the 2020 election.
To be specific, the data shows Google search interest - not number of protest events.
Protests are not necessarily “newsworthy”; however, that search interest would track media stirring up news before elections seems likely.
Further, (and I say this as a Minneapolitan) the significant protests of this summer were very clearly and obviously precipitated by real world events, not astroturfed protest crowds.
One question is why and how certain specific real-world events go viral and others get memory-holed.
I would surmise that a lot of the protests this summer were, emotionally, a consequence of the stress, economic uncertainty, and way-too-online cabin fever of the early stages of the COVID epidemic.
You wouldnt believe how sophisticated the firms are that the dem party hires. They have their own versions of Cambridge Analytica which are more than capable of amplifying messages.
"You are actually on CIA website marked as terrorist. \s" what is the context of this joke Im not following. I stated a fact (FBI statistics) and then an opinion. Are we allowed to do that on the internet?
> The riots were most likely political AstroTurf before an election via amplification of convenient (and unfortunate/terrible) imagery to turn out voters.
So, Trump was behind it, so he could run on a law and order platform? Because he certainly did take advantage of it.
I'm afraid the boring truth was that ordinary people got angry during a time of high unemployment, with protests and rioting being a predictable result. It's not as though large protests over police shootings are new.
