@LeonydusJohnson It's not hard to explain. All this reflects is higher overall crime rate for black folks, such that per capita relative to crime, the rate of being killed by cops is slightly lower than for whites. But that doesn't mean what u think it means...here's why...several points coming..
@LeonydusJohnson The question is not how many blacks/whites are killed by cops relative to commission of crime, unless you presume that raw aggregate data can justify individual cases…you are treating humans like statistics...(cont)
@LeonydusJohnson Most killings like that do NOT happen as result of a cop trying to stop one of those violent crimes. It’s like stop and frisk: yes, black folks committed dispro violent crime in NY, but only 15% of stops were for investigation of violent crime…
@LeonydusJohnson The rest were for “loitering,” furtive movement, or things like drugs (which whites do and sell equal to rates of blacks)…
@LeonydusJohnson So unless you can show cops are mostly killing people who are THEMSELVES committing those crimes, aggregate data here means nothing. Obviously in the case of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, etc there was no crime happening..
@LeonydusJohnson And what the data actually shows is that such killings are NOT correlated with crime rates at the local precicnt level, so the disaggregated data debunks your premise...
@LeonydusJohnson additional research shows that unarmed black folks are 3.5x more likely than unarmed whites to be shot by police...sort of more important than the data you think matters...journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
@LeonydusJohnson All you have done is basically suggest that so long as black folks have higher crime rates nothing cops do to a black person can be considered racist...that's the take away from your position...but the cop killings people have been protesting were NOT to stop violent criminals
@LeonydusJohnson The fact that most folks killed by police (black or white frankly) were not committing a violent crime when they were shot, suggests that this aggregate data is irrelevant to the discussion here...
@LeonydusJohnson You are seeking to rationalize police violence against unarmed people, who are not being violent, by referring to data re: violent crime. That is fundamentally dishonest
@LeonydusJohnson I go into greater detail about why conservative arguments re: bias in policing and the justice system are wrong, here:
medium.com/@timjwise/arme…
medium.com/@timjwise/arme…
@LeonydusJohnson And there's another way in which your premise is wrong. You say (later in your thread) that if there were systemic bias we'd expect it to be MOST pronounced relative to violent crime offenders. But actually that is exactly backwards...
@LeonydusJohnson for violent offenders, we should actually expect very little difference (and the difference between 3 or 4 per 10,000 is actually not statistically significant, it's functionally equal)...thats because obviously when confronted by a violent criminal cops are likely to shoot...
@LeonydusJohnson ...disparities tend to be MUCH larger for non violent offenses, throughout the justice system (i.e. for things like drugs)...because there is more discretion there...same with viewing someone as a threat when they aren't committing a violent crime...
@LeonydusJohnson so the better comparison is, how likely are cops to shoot an unarmed black person versus an unarmed white person, when there is no threat being posed by the white or black person, and THAT is what the above data I embedded in one of the tweets (the Bayesian analysis) shows...
@LeonydusJohnson in those situations the threat is worse for black folks...this is why bias is operative. In situations where a white or black person is engaged in violence of course there will be similar treatment...just like sentencing bias is less in those cases bc range of discretion is less
@LeonydusJohnson You position basically is "these black people over here commit violent crime at x % higher rate than these white people over here, and thus, the fact that other black people, not even the criminals in question, get shot by cops is no surprise and not racism.." that's absurd
