Far more lives are threatened by coronavirus today than will be threatened by police brutality over the next several decades [1]. You're basically saying that immunocompromised and elderly persons are acceptable collateral damage.
One thing that's been lost in the noise is that death by police brutality is a vanishingly small problem: less than 0.0003% of the population per year (and most of those are White people).
And the ultimate irony is far more Black people are going to die as a result of these protests (since Black communities are disproportionately affected by the virus) than will be saved by whatever temporary curtailment of police brutality this yields.
Those are the real facts. Not the alternative ones you and people like you would like us to focus on. It's like it suddenly became acceptable to wantonly suspend rationality because it suits certain interests.
It is important to not the latter did not mitigating police brutality as a public health interest, but racism in general.
From the letter:
> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.
The remainder of the letter goes into strategies for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 during protests.
I think it's incorrect to only count deaths as the fallout from police attitude towards minorities. An entire group of people is effectively controlled and held back my the police. As we have already seen, the impacts are generational and have gotten us to where we are today. COVID-19 is the thing will most likely be forgotten next year with some sort of vaccine or herd immunity arising. Even if the protests are successful, it will still be only another step on a long road of equality.
> In my mind, there is almost no cause that warrants the avoidable death of even a single person, let alone tens of thousands
I agree with you! I don't think I was clear in my original post. The human toll of systemic racism and police brutality is much greater than the 'deaths by cops' number. Look at how COVID-19 is much more dangerous to the Black communities. Why is that? Lack of adequate healthcare, opportunity, and lagging economic outlook linked to systemic racism.
You see the deaths from COVID-19, and they are horrible. I'm thinking about COVID-19, and the next 10 pandemics that will disproportionally impact Black and minority communities. In aggregate the death toll could dwarf COVID-19. How do we avoid those deaths?
> From the perspective of the protesters, taking this opportunity to protest and possibly achieve change means hopefully lowering the general mortality risk for generations to come, not just in the immediate COVID future.
I didn't mention police because this was never just about the police.
It's not clear to me how this protest attempts to solve racism, even if that is a goal of participants. Demands I've seen have exclusively been for changes to policing. The words Black Lives Matter refer to police violence.
I definitely agree that it would be morally acceptable to suffer even a hundred thousand deaths in exchange for a permanent end to racism. And I could even be persuaded to believe that such actions should be taken now, as opposed to say a year from now. But that is not an outcome I expect, as I haven't even heard proposals for how that might be done.
I'm all for the reform people are asking for. But it is not my belief that the net effect of this right now will be positive.
Race war ideology flamewar is not allowed here. Yes, related topics are of the moment, but you crossed the line, and the resulting subthread was particularly wretched. No more of this please.
My opinion is policing of minority communities is generally ineffective and counter productive. Which leaves members of those communities at the mercy of both the police and criminals. At it's worst you have collusion between the police and criminals operating in minority communities.
The "general narrative" is about rampant police brutality that first and foremost disproportionately affects people of color. It's a problem that's existed since the inception of a police force in the US and that's what this movement is about. No one is trying to play a silly number game of which race kills more of what other race.
You're stopping short of spelling out your conclusion.
The aims of the protests are to shine a spotlight on police brutality and qualified immunity / defund the police / ensure that killer cops are prosecuted / damage property in pursuit of anarchy / score a new TV / whatever. It's all fairly clear and makes enough sense.
Your idea, however, leaves us with nothing but a knowing look and an appeal to not trust the narrative. If you can read any broader frustration here, it's because all the "but what about white folks?" people in my social circle have been following the same playbook.
So where does it go? Does your argument conclude that the police should be harsher still towards black people? Does it suggest that police who kill should suffer less scrutiny than they presently do? Is the status quo fine, and the resolution should be that everyone just shut up and go home?
What's your call to action here, and what would be the immediate real-world consequences of your worldview?
The playbook is the knowing look and the consistently not reaching conclusions, or perhaps not amongst polite company. They're quite free to think differently to me.
If they had said that the protests were fine but next time we expect a shout-out, then the discussion could move on. Much like in this example.
Thank you for this thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion. I would also like to add a global take into the discussion. Who stands to benefit from the American people being both divided among white / black, male / female, old / young, and distrusting of the media? Certainly not anyone in America.
Not OP. When considering this line of thought, I think of meme's in the original sense of the word. So one could take a mildly-conspiratorial take on it and say that the "meme" itself stands to benefit from this sort of division rather than a nefarious agent or group. It's a self-feeding cycle because I would argue that this cause done in a bad/unfair way sows more racial/gender/etc division and as such creates more reason for itself to exist.
> Police brutality is wrong and there is reason to think that it is a worse problem for black people than for white people. At the same time, we recognize the disproportionate extent to which white people suffer from black violence. We may perhaps disagree about the extent to which the discrepancy is due to systematic racism or socioeconomic issues, but we recognize your concerns. We want to reach across the division and work together to fix all these issues
So you want to dilute the protest which is specifically about police violence against black people into something entirely different? You're essentially arguing to destroy the entire protest for something it's not at all about.
Protesting police brutality against black people is protesting police brutality in general.
I think anecdote, personal experience, and most importantly, history, are valuable when the groups in question (law enforcement) are collecting the data in question. Would you believe a survey taken by Coca-cola about what soda is the tastiest? A lot of the initial reactions of law enforcement to incidents of police brutality start with denial, and they don't change their story until there is video evidence to contradict them. In so many incidents where there isn't publicly available evidence, they get to shape the narrative. No amount of data are meaningful if the source benefits from them supporting certain hypotheses.
And I focus on arrests made in situations such as incidents of weapons possession, aggravated assault, or the violent crime aggregate, I don't see much of a discrepancy versus that 2x. For example, for the violent crime aggregate it breaks down as 288620/187470. That's about 1.5x. That is, 1.5x as many white people as black people got arrested for violent crimes. Yet 2x as many white people as black people got shot by cops in that year.
You're normalizing to raw population. You want to normalize to "armed conflicts with the police" or similar.
Using the above FBI 2018 homicide statistics, blacks committed 3177 homicides in 2018, while whites committed 3011---in other words, blacks account for ~50%, despite only being 13% of the population.
Taking that proportion as a rough "criminality index," and multiply 53.5 by 13/50, and things look very different.
The whole point of the comment you are questioning is to also normalize it to something besides total percent of population. The new comparison seems to say that if you are a violent criminal your chances of getting shot by the police are higher if you are white.
This population measurement is not useful for determining racism. It does not consider that blacks make up 13% of the population, but commit 52% of the homicides. It doesn’t consider if the shootings are justified. It doesn’t consider black cops shooting black suspects.
There is in general insufficient data to support or reject that there is systemic racism.
Yeah but that’s only one way to calculate it. Other ways might be to calculate based on number of encounters, or number of criminal acts, or to control for location, or control for income. Etc.
I think it’s important to be really careful saying a given statistic, any statistic, says what we think it says.
It really doesn’t and I sense that you seem to be downplaying the whole concept that statistics can be interpreted in many different ways.
Edit: I can’t reply to your reply, I think it is a new hacker news feature that’s trying to slow down these back and forths. I listed several ways we could control the data, and I’m not proficient enough in statistics to do all that myself.
One talking point is: per police interaction, an unarmed non-Hispanic Caucasian person has a 4 in 10000 chance of being shot while an unarmed African American has a 3 in 10000 ... so the only huge person actually has a higher level of risk per interaction.
Again, this is not my area of expertise.
I’m not suggesting what all these numbers mean. I am suggesting that when you bring numbers, it’s only fair to discuss different ways to view the numbers.
> It really doesn’t and I sense that you seem to be downplaying the whole concept that statistics can be interpreted in many different ways.
Statistics can be presented in any number of ways; data can be used to lie in any number of directions.
But if you're not going to come here with a counterproposal, you're only undermining the movement Black Americans have been struggling with for so long by stating obliquely that these numbers are a lie.
Edit per yours (sorry you've been hit by rate limits. I get the feeling):
> One talking point is: per police interaction, an unarmed non-Hispanic Caucasian person has a 4 in 10000 chance of being shot while an unarmed African American has a 3 in 10000 ... so the only huge person actually has a higher level of risk per interaction.
The unknown variable here is the number of police interactions by race and whether they were the initiator or the intended target (or suspect, if a crime had taken place). That's why it's normally just reduced to shootings by police.
If you have the details and the exact breakdowns, it'd be helpful. But the BJS doesn't seem to discriminate between whether someone initiated the contact or whether they're the target of law enforcement action.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This is one of the commonest and most inflammatory clichés of race war that exists, so your comment reads like concern trolling.
Thank you for taking the time for an individual reply. The thread was young and I was genuinely baffled, as I do not get much exposure to this type of... thinking in my daily life. I regretted my engagement the moment the response came back :(
I believe you that it was unintentional. In my experience, most of what looks like trolling actually is, which is why I try to use qualifying language like "reads like". Unfortunately, the troll effects are the same regardless of intent, and effects / likely effects are what we have to moderate by. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I should have been clearer earlier: given the replies that my question prompted I completely understand why my post was flagged, even in isolation. I have no qualms about any of it.
The comment was not meant as "who does he think he is, putting words in my keyboard, I'll set him straight!", but rather a humble "whoa! instead of simply flipping an invisible switch, he took the time to explain what and why to some nobody: this is so cool!"
Thank you for sacrificing your sanity and keeping this site what it is ;)
Pretty typical of everyone that I have (anecdotally) ever met who contends that black violence on whites is the primary issue. They say one thing based on their intuition and when they hear any response that complicates their view they are out to lunch. A lack of curiosity about your own biases is not a great look.
Also worth noting is that the term homicide can only be applied by law enforcement, whose systemic bias against people of color is.. you know, the topic of the day. It does not include many or most of the cases of wrongfully being killed by law enforcement and it certainly doesn't include the illegal killing of people in other countries by our armed forces. I would be very interested in seeing these numbers included.
> Pretty typical of everyone that I have (anecdotally) ever met who contends that black violence on whites is the primary issue.
Wait, is this directed to me, or to the comment above me? Because I'm arguing the exact opposite of this, specifically that focusing on and misrepresenting Black-on-White violence takes away from the struggle against oppression endured by the Black community.
It's the OP I'm replying to who's been arguing the Black-on-White violence angle. I'm merely pointing out that they're using a strawman to defend it and that I have no intention of staying engaged when there are a broad array of fallacies being employed one after another.
This really only works if you consider said statistics to be reported in good faith. Black Americans tend to be disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and disproportionately punished. For example, black Americans are around four times as likely to be charged for Marijuana offenses compared to white people despite using marijuana at equal rates.
White-on-black crimes I would argue are far less likely to be reported, especially apparent by the bias that the police employ against black people.
This people keep pointing to black incarceration rates as a symptom of a racist judicial system. When debating I focus on murder victims as that has nothing to do with the racist judicial system.
Still there is a problem with government tyranny and it doesnt matter if it is just a handful of people. Being killed by a thug vs being killed by the govt really are two different things even if you are just as dead either way.
It's pretty easy to lie about it and say you were 'afraid for your life' or 'he charged at me' though, as we've seen in multiple high-profile murders of black people. It's almost like that's what kicked off this entire protest.
If you're not charged for murder, then it doesn't get reported.
