The studies are not at odds. My point is that it’s not a clear cut issue - certainly not as clear cut as the DNC/BLM would have people believe. For one thing disparity =/= racism. For another, the variations in the findings you note above are a result of different benchmarks. The census benchmark is common and that’s what people are usually talking about when discussing racial disparities.Originally Posted by pacifism
The second study I cited indicates:
Here the author used his own data collection from individual events of police shootings reported in the media and from police dept records.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 argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
The first:
An interesting bit here is the authors were able to illustrate how different benchmarks can produce wildly different impressions from the data.Is there evidence of a Black–White disparity in death by police gunfire in the United States? This is commonly answered by comparing the odds of being fatally shot for Blacks and Whites, with odds benchmarked against each group’s population proportion. However, adjusting for population values has questionable assumptions given the context of deadly force decisions. We benchmark 2 years of fatal shooting data on 16 crime rate estimates. When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. Multiverse analyses showed only one significant anti-Black disparity of 144 possible tests. Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for Blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings. For unarmed shootings or misidentification shootings, data are too uncertain to be conclusive.
The third:We first reproduce the well-known finding that Blacks are more likely to be fatally shot than Whites given population proportions. Between 2015 and 2016, 1,051 Whites and 510 Blacks were killed by police gunfire. Benchmarking these fatal police shooting data on 2015–2016 U.S. Census population values, the odds ratio for Blacks relative to Whites is 2.5, indicating that the odds were 2.5 times higher for Blacks to be killed by police compared to Whites given their population proportions.
When fatal police shootings are benchmarked against crime data rather than population proportions, a different picture emerges. Figure 1 presents the odds of being fatally shot by police given homicide (left panel), violent crime (center panel), and weapons violation (right panel) rates for Blacks and Whites. When fatal shooting data are benchmarked against the number of murder/nonnegligent manslaughter reports and arrests, the odds ratio obtained when benchmarking against population proportions flips completely. The odds were 2.7 times higher for Whites to be killed by police gunfire relative to Blacks given each group’s SRS homicide reports, 2.6 times higher for Whites given each group’s SRS homicide arrests, 2.9 times higher for Whites given each group’s NIBRS homicide reports, 3.9 times higher for Whites given each group’s NIBRS homicide arrests, and 2.5 times higher for Whites given each group’s CDC death by assault data.
The authors note the causes of the disparity they encounter are unknown. The impression of disparity comes from the population benchmark the authors use on page 6. As explained by the authors of the first study, this assumption based on a single benchmark doesn’t hold when controlling for crime rate benchmarks and more robust testing. If racism on the part of white officers isn’t the reason for the disparity even against a single benchmark, and other studies don’t find the same disparity when using other benchmarks, those claiming to be targeted by racist cops have quite alot of homework to do before calling it a question of civil rights. Journalistic and political narratives aren’t hindered by fact, any more than are Trump’s caravans of rapist immigrants.The debate over possible bias in the use of deadly force has recently been exacerbated by highly publicized killings of African American males around the country. While much research has been conducted examining police behavior, little has been done to investigate the impact of race on police behavior. This article aims to answer this question: are white police officers more likely to use lethal force on minority suspects or people of a specific race? To answer this question, the authors construct a data set of all confirmed uses of lethal force by police officers in the United States in 2014 and 2015. They find that although minority suspects are disproportionately killed by police, white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers.
The structural issues created by the false narrative vis a vis police shootings and racism have already borne fruit, even if the riots aren’t a big deal, as you seem to suggest. California’s reparations initiative is facially unconstitutional, and that’s just the start of things to come, some of which I mentioned in the last post. In any case, the onus would be on those claiming racist police are a national crisis in America to prove it, not on police or the public to prove they aren’t.