I think this is probably the simplest way to point out the major flaw with claims like that the article makes. To properly assess risk in any scenario, one must account for exposure. People implicitly understand that men are more likely to be involved in a situation where police respond with violence (such as being armed).
I’m not sure if there is a surefire metric that can be used for this kind of exposure, but violent crimes are probably decent proxies. For example, according to the most recent US demographic breakdown, and FBI crime statistics [0], black Americans are about 4x more likely to commit murder than white Americans. So if that were to be used as a measure of exposure to potential police violence, they might actually be less likely to be killed by police than a white person, given the number of situations in which police violence has potential to occur.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean black Americans aren’t the victims of systemic racism. But it means that the racism is occurring not necessarily due to trigger happy cops who hate black people, but due to a society in which black people are disenfranchised in more banal, but impactful, ways (educationally, economically, socially), which results in higher crime rates, which results in more police contact/confrontation, which results in more deaths at the hands of the police.
This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.
Most murderers are not caught in a shoot out with police. And murderers account for such a small number of police interactions that it’s a little bizarre to extrapolate the murder rate would strongly correlate to victims of police violence by race.
What’s a better consideration? That more police interactions happen with black people. Some of this is due to racism. Black people are far more likely to have the police called on them for being “suspicious” and police are more likely to stop or question black people (as shown in NYC stop and frisk or traffic stops, etc.).
Statistically, white people and black people have about the same rate of drug use. There are 4x as many black people getting arrested for drug use.[1]
Now one way to interpret this is that police target black people more, and so they find more crimes, reinforcing the idea that black people are criminal, leading to even further over-policing.
This isn’t to say there isn’t a gang problem in black communities, but it’s a complicated problem and the solution isn’t improve policing OR support black communities… it’s we need to do both.
> This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.
I think this shows a misunderstanding of what defund the police was, and comes off as patronizing in that ignorance. The intent of the movement was that the difference in funding would then be invested in those communities, which is something you seem to agree would help accomplish their goal of reducing crime.
I’m not sure if there is a surefire metric that can be used for this kind of exposure, but violent crimes are probably decent proxies. For example, according to the most recent US demographic breakdown, and FBI crime statistics [0], black Americans are about 4x more likely to commit murder than white Americans. So if that were to be used as a measure of exposure to potential police violence, they might actually be less likely to be killed by police than a white person, given the number of situations in which police violence has potential to occur.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean black Americans aren’t the victims of systemic racism. But it means that the racism is occurring not necessarily due to trigger happy cops who hate black people, but due to a society in which black people are disenfranchised in more banal, but impactful, ways (educationally, economically, socially), which results in higher crime rates, which results in more police contact/confrontation, which results in more deaths at the hands of the police.
This is all to say that many of the “defund the police” efforts, while understandable as a knee jerk reaction to police violence we sometimes see, is fundamentally misguided. It’s akin to campaigning against chemotherapy, because lots of chemotherapy recipients end up dying. Defunding the police won’t change the underlying systemic racism that is the source of the problem, and if anything will exacerbate it. This is reflected in polling of black Americans who live this reality, the majority of whom want more policing in their communities.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...