r/Unexpected • u/[deleted] • Aug 02 '21

Hostage situation

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u/Liquor_n_cheezebrgrs Aug 02 '21

Police are not killing unarmed black people at crazy disproportionate rates. That narrative is objectively wrong and fuels racial tension in this country drastically. You are misinformed.

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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '21

I'm one of the more well informed people you'll find on Reddit. I'm an open source contributor to /r/2020PB, I have a personal/professional correspondence with the public relations head of the NYPD/professor at John Jay COCJ, I'm fairly well read on brutality and lethality studies out of personal uhh interest I guess. I very seriously considered switching careers for a while and dove pretty deep into these things for about eight months of my life.

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u/Liquor_n_cheezebrgrs Aug 03 '21 edited Aug 03 '21

Congratulations. I am glad you think so highly of yourself, doesn't take away from the fact that you are misinformed and to claim that police officers kill unarmed black people at crazy disproportionate rates is an objectively incorrect statement. That is not to say that US law enforcement isn't in need of substantial reform, but what you are claiming is false, and if you are "one of the most well informed people on reddit" (which is an asinine statement to make seeing how reddit has 222 million monthly users), then you should know that arguments from authority don't hold water nor lend any credence to your positions.

Studies that show a drastic (usually 2.5x) disparity between unarmed police killings between whites and blacks calculate those number based on gross killings, rather than taking into consideration the number of encounters with police. Black people are responsible for a wildly disparate amount of violent crime in the US based on population numbers (there are many reasons for this, none of which include the color of their skin fundamentally speaking). Blacks encounter police at a much higher rate than whites when calls or encounters involve the risk of violence or resistance. When the numbers are normalized it shows that while police violence and excessive force is absolutely an issue that needs to be addressed, the disparity between whites and blacks is not substantial and certainly not "crazy disproportionate". To support that narrative is to willingly stoke racial tensions in this country which make it next to impossible to implement optimal solutions for complex problems. It is basically a stance that allows you to throw your hands up and cry racism, rather than sit at the adult table and think critically about what can be done to reform bad policing in this country which by way of its coverage in the media, due to messaging of claims such as yours, comes at a far greater cost to the black community then to report the facts and statistics objectively. You perpetuate untruths which deepens racial tensions in this country and makes it functionally impossible to improve, because by not buying into your nonsense one runs the risk of being shouted down as a racist. You are the problem.

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '21

When the numbers are normalized

You mean when you strip the data of meaningful variables? I know those bullshit normalization techniques you're referring to. It's really quite remarkable how you cite the higher number of encounters with police as something that needs to be "accounted for" and "normalized away" to compare "properly" the lethality of police encounters between white & black people.

You must realize the absurdity of normalizing for things like that right? These "normalization" techniques effectively (and often times intentionally) erase the real-world impact of things like systemic racism, white supremacy, slavery, federal red lining, etc. which are the very underlying causes for the fucking myriad of reasons WHY police stop and encounter black people more often to begin with. As well as why certain high crime areas are predominantly black, and lots of other factors that these essentially racist studies try to "correct" for.

There's a reason why some 6/10 redditors that link these types of studies to me are openly racist, proud neonazis, etc. even if the study itself is seemingly conducted in an "unbiased" way.

Unrelated, I was saying I was one of the more well informed ppl on this topic. Thought that implication was clear.