Do Police Pick on Blacks? Do they kill unarmed blacks more than unarmed whites? Another Study
I will use another blog post to share a complicated study with readers. My assumption is that most readers will scan and skip the data.
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| Son Dillon. |
A reader in Coos Bay, Sheryl Gerety, has followed the discussion on this blog and has shared and annotated a study by Cody Ross, a recent Ph.D. recipient at U. C. Davis. She helped prepare the study for publication. It is complicated and dense: Click here: It brings you to the Peer Reviewed Open Access Journal.
The data in this study show blacks in fact to be at significantly more risk of being killed by police than are whites. Sheryl Gerety forwarded this link and some commentary on the study because she felt the Harvard study getting recent publicity was wrong--or at least it was contradicted by other studies.
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| Dense reading, but not a secret. It has been viewed some 538,000 times |
Fox News and Trump do not care. Progressive Democrats do not care. Fox News and Trump are riding the wave I described yesterday. White resentment over affirmative action, voting rights laws, and targeted benefits is part of the Trump message. Trump has a villain: outsiders here and abroad who are taking more than their share. He is the strong, no-nonsense advocate against them and for "us." America First. Americans First.
Hillary's analysis is that gender and ethnic bias hold back vast numbers of Americans, and she supports those disadvantaged people, and they support her. In response to Sanders she has strengthened a secondary message, that the "middle class" is being screwed, but her message is muddled by the fact that the villain posited by Sanders (the billionaires and Wall Street) are not a group Hillary can condemn in a full throated way. In Hillary's world, there are good and bad billionaires. Hillary wants to work with the rich, not condemn them.
She hasn't yet defined what holds back the middle class while she has defined that racism and sexism within the white and racially privileged middle class holds back women, blacks, and Hispanics. So it makes sense that she is losing votes among the white middle class. After all, she implies they are the oppressors, when they feel themselves to be the oppressed.
She hasn't yet defined what holds back the middle class while she has defined that racism and sexism within the white and racially privileged middle class holds back women, blacks, and Hispanics. So it makes sense that she is losing votes among the white middle class. After all, she implies they are the oppressors, when they feel themselves to be the oppressed.
I will not hide my own guesses and conclusions regarding the likelihood of biased policing based on race. I believe that sensible, alert people have some situational awareness ("street smarts") which allow them to survive.
I assume that police make snap profile decisions constantly and that they take a read of age, gender, posture, dress, context and make educated guesses about who is "legit" and who is suspect. A 22 year old male smoking a cigarette waiting on a corner is more "suspect" than in a 22 year old woman pushing a baby stroller busy crossing the same corner, or a nine year old in a cub scout uniform, or a 50 year old man in a business suit.
I was a practitioner of profiling. I wanted it to work for me. Throughout my working career as a Financial Consultant (formerly known as stockbroker) I always wore business suits at work and usually in non-work settings where I might bump into clients, unless I was in an acknowledged and easily interpretable "farm work" setting. I wanted to be profiled as a serious businessman, whose respectability and probity and prudence could be inferred by my serious and expensive bespoke suits.
I assume that police make snap profile decisions constantly and that they take a read of age, gender, posture, dress, context and make educated guesses about who is "legit" and who is suspect. A 22 year old male smoking a cigarette waiting on a corner is more "suspect" than in a 22 year old woman pushing a baby stroller busy crossing the same corner, or a nine year old in a cub scout uniform, or a 50 year old man in a business suit.
I was a practitioner of profiling. I wanted it to work for me. Throughout my working career as a Financial Consultant (formerly known as stockbroker) I always wore business suits at work and usually in non-work settings where I might bump into clients, unless I was in an acknowledged and easily interpretable "farm work" setting. I wanted to be profiled as a serious businessman, whose respectability and probity and prudence could be inferred by my serious and expensive bespoke suits.
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| Good politics for Trump |
Everyone profiles. One can give it scientific dress and call it "risk algorithms" or call it racist stereotyping. Working and middle class white Americans do it, just like everyone else. They have a sense of a bad neighborhood and a good neighborhood. It is partially race and part everything else. They generally like the police more than they like "criminal types", and Trump knows it and profits from it.
Here is the Abstract and another link to the full study: Full Study Link
Abstract
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.
2 comments:
“Rebranding- Black Lives Matter- Also”
NPR All Things Considered yesterday aired an interview with Black Lives Matter (BLM) founders about the status of the movement. Listen, “Black Lives Matter Founders Describe 'Paradigm Shift' In The Movement” (July 13, 2016, http://n.pr/29EpdLl). What I found most politically important was one of the founders recasting the movement as “Black Lives Matter-Also”. She did this in response to criticism of BLM’s claim of primacy for black victimization, to the apparent exclusion of other oppressed groups, including poor whites. Civil rights lawyers have a rule: “never take on a burden of proof that is unnecessary to your goal- winning”. BLM will never win a debate over whether blacks are disproportionately killed by police, because credible dueling statistics preclude carrying the burden of proof on that proposition. Worse, that statistical debate, as we have seen, severely detracts from the more important goal of addressing racial injustice in the broader context of poverty.
Whether this “BLM-Also” shift will be embraced by activists and liberal media is yet to be seen, and I am doubtful that it will. I was disappointed to hear one of the BLM founders propose "defunding police departments" as a way to address police abuse in black urban areas. Urban blacks, other than criminals and gangs, have long been demanding more police in their neighborhoods, not less. See, Heather Mac Donald, “The War On Cops: How the new attack on law and order makes everyone less safe” (2016, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/waroncops). Indeed, disproportionately low funding of police for the poor blacks has been the subject of protracted civil rights litigation under the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment.
BLM-Also has a lot of work to do in finding a sustainable message. Dropping unnecessary and disputed statistical claims is a big step in the right direction.
Post Script- “Hispanic Advocates Denounce Unfair Attention to Black Police Killings”
This afternoon the New York Times published this article, “Amid Protests Over Police Shootings of Black Men, Latinos Note a Disparity” (NYTimes, http://nyti.ms/2a0ymRU, July 14, 2016). Advocates argue that Hispanics’ fatal encounters with law enforcement “do not inspire the same kind of scrutiny, outrage or discourse” from the media compared with blacks. The sooner the media refocuses this debate as a poverty issue, as an issue about how police interact with the politically powerless poor whether black, Hispanic, white or other, the better.
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