LeBron sitting around after a game drinking a beverage sliding out of those magenta and yellow sneakers is pondering "damn them eight year olds can make hell out of them shoes".
Wandered over to fourletter network
- Thread starter Jwilliamsiii
- Start date
I know for me the concern is the use of lethal force on someone who is fleeing. If I can't legally do this as someone with CWP then the police shouldn't either.
Fleeing? When you’re getting arrested you don’t get to flee. Especially when you have domestics on your record, the cops are responding to your involvement in another alleged domestic, you have minors in the car, and you’ve already gotten physical with the cops. Dude was reaching into his car. Has multiple felonies including brandishing a firearm. Listen to the cops. Do what they say. It isn’t hard. Dude played chicken and lost, and the world lost a POS human. And, before you get your knickers twisted, I’d call a white guy with the same legal history a POS too.
The cops were responding to a domestic dispute call and from witnesses at the scene it was between two women.
One thing also, how shitty are those cops that the two of them could not control the situation any better? They let the situation escalate to the point of shooting a man who was reportedly unarmed. There has been no proof from what I have seen that he had a weapon or was reaching for a weapon.
We get it bro. You will defend him and the nba to the death. Good luck in November. Stay woke.
I have tried to read any information on this incident that I can find, and nothing I've found says he was involved in this dispute other than breaking it up, I'd like any information that you have that supports your version of this incident. Again, he was shot in the back at least 7 times with his kids in the car. It's shocking that he is alive.
Had some hope for this thread initially.
Moral of this thread: Don't wander over to the four letter network unless your mom sleeps with multiple men.
Moral of this thread: Don't wander over to the four letter network unless your mom sleeps with multiple men.
It's unclear exactly what numbers Mac Donald was looking at, but my guess is that she's looking at the number of unarmed black men being arrested compared to all murders of police: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883. But if we're going to make broad, unfounded generalizations about people being under threat, it might be more statistically true that police officers are under threat from black men than that unarmed black men are under threat from police.
I love how we polarize the .01% of bad cops yet we don't talk about the 99% that are doing a tough job of protecting you and I everyday.
But the woke mob gets told what to be concerned about or what to think. They follow like sheep
They are also the same people that if somebody broke into their house tonight they would quickly call the cops for help
But the woke mob gets told what to be concerned about or what to think. They follow like sheep
They are also the same people that if somebody broke into their house tonight they would quickly call the cops for help
None of that gives the police carte blanche to just shoot the guy. But it does appear there was a gun on the ground, he wasn't complying, and he was reaching into the car for something. It's hard to say if he was really fleeing or trying to fight the police.
Congratulations, you have the post of the day! I laffed (that’s hard not letting autocorrect fix the spelling)
What I don't understand is why we can't agree that any bad cop is an issue and should be addressed. We have a long history of police aggression towards Blacks in America. Why is it hard to believe that there might be some issues of trust remaining? I'm so tired of the "few bad apple" defense. You can't be a racist violent cop. We cannot allow that in our society.
Of course it doesn’t. It does all mean that you should probably go into any interaction with law enforcement overly cautious and more demonstratively cooperative. He took the opposite tack. It cost him.
If you are looking to rid Evil of the world..Goodluck chief. Let me know when you find that utopia.
I agree bad actions should be called out but how about the 99% of good actions? You never hear that from the woke mob. The left and the mob have made it clear. Cops are bad and they should be either defunded or abolished. But again....the same people calling for that stuff are the same people who pick up the phone and call for the police to help them when they need it.
Again.. it's about controlling the narrative and unfortunately many Americans have a hard time thinking for themselves and get told what to think by the media and millionaires who live a different life.
It is known that deaths of unarmed black men are under reported.
I can not find anything that says how many officers were killed by black men. You'll have to C/P if the article you linked says anything about that. I don't have a subscription to the WSJ.
This is some very interesting information about the deep divides in views about policing across race. Pay close attention to the perception of Black cops vs white cops towards fairness.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...s-we-know-about-race-and-policing-in-the-u-s/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...s-we-know-about-race-and-policing-in-the-u-s/
Total hyperbole. Nobody says that all cops are bad, nobody wants to eliminate police, that's not what Defund(which I don't like) means. But the first step to improving a situation is admitting that there is a problem.
The Blake shooting video looks terrible. It seems like those cops should have been able to handle it differently. Real time is a lot different than video later under no pressure. I wish they would have tackled him or tased him.
But why is nobody encouraging blacks to listen to police and comply with their orders? Seriously, why?!?
I have taught my son (we are white) to always make sure the police officer has control of the situation and that he/she knows they have control. Keep your hands on the steering wheel until they tell you otherwise. Do what they say and if something goes wrong, we'll deal with that later.
But why is nobody encouraging blacks to listen to police and comply with their orders? Seriously, why?!?
I have taught my son (we are white) to always make sure the police officer has control of the situation and that he/she knows they have control. Keep your hands on the steering wheel until they tell you otherwise. Do what they say and if something goes wrong, we'll deal with that later.
That conversation has been had within the black community for decades. It is a conversation that is had way more than in white communities.
You are assuming that every situation a black person dies from is from not listening to orders. Some listen to orders and still lose their lives. There is a real distrust and fear in the black community with police. And I can't blame them for feeling that way.
Of course, but that's begging the question. We don't know if racism has anything to do with a given police involved shooting just because the person the police shot is black and the video of the event is disturbing. Further, the stats don't show any kind of clear narrative of police racism against black people. That doesn't mean that there aren't still issues of trust there, but it does call into question simple solutions that just treat the issue as one of police racism.
The "perception of Black cops vs white cops towards fairness" was actually about "making the changes needed to assure equal rights" for black people. While that's interesting and unfortunate, isn't that more of an objective question? Like, what rights are reserved for people based on race? It seems like some people read that as being about achieving equality of outcome.
George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”
Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.
The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.
Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.
The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.
Yeah there are no sources to the police are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black man. This is a poorly sourced and thought out opinion piece that attempts to downplay police brutality and the disproportionate amount towards black people.
Alot in this article is just thinly veiled rhetoric about how black people are the issue. Not police.
You can keep that.
The guy wasn’t fleeing ( at least in the video I saw). He was reaching in his car for something.
Actually, the whole thing is well-sourced except that particular stat. If you aren't interested in facts and just want to believe that police are racist, I guess go ahead and ignore everything else. That particular author advocates for police because she believes policing helps drive down crime in high crime communities, which tend to be more black.
Oh I've clearly stated my position clearly and backed those up with the statistics on this board in numerous threads. You based your whole argument on a statistic that wasn't even sourced and now you have admitted as much.
Do better.
Also I have a question towards your last sentence. Why do you think there is higher crime in black communities?
Also, per FBI statistics, 69 percent of arrests were white people in 2018.
I don’t doubt what you’re saying but we can agree if George Floyd and this Blake guy has followed orders, they would both still be alive.
I was raised to respect policemen and teachers and my neighbors parents and all other adults. It is absolutely unfair to think anyone would be treated differently just because of their color but rebelling in the moment isn’t the answer.
Espn is fully immersed in the regular "news" business including sports these days. I have no use for it. I couldn't tell you the last time I watched an espn channel for something other than live sports. Never check the website.
That said, it's not as if the past 3-4 months have changed anything regarding police brutality against black people. The issue is just as pressing as it was before George Floyd was murdered.
I hear ya, but it's kind of like calling all teachers bad because there are a few bad teachers imo.
It's pretty clear you're either ignorant of crime statistics, or you simply don't want to know.
Using "do better" tells me you're extremely online, but at least put some effort into informing yourself before you lean on snark.
Only pointing out the flaw in your argument. Sorry that bothered you.
Also I asked you a question related to crime statistics and also posted crime statistics. You ignored both. Who's ignorant again?
I am not going to watch the NBA until there is equality of race in on the court. I know Lebron could care less what I think. But that is my form of protest. I want at least 50% white guys on the court at all times. The obvious racism is abhorrent.
NCAA basketball has about 60% white players, 21% black players, and 19% other players. NBA has 23% white players, 74% black players, and 3% other.
I love the jerseys that say EQUALITY on them though.
NCAA basketball has about 60% white players, 21% black players, and 19% other players. NBA has 23% white players, 74% black players, and 3% other.
I love the jerseys that say EQUALITY on them though.
The main study that she cited has since been retracted by its authors who explicitly stated that articles like that one draw incorrect conclusions from the research:
"To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research."
She cited quite a few studies, but most importantly, she cited crime statistics.
If you don't like Heather Mac Donald, here are others:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-data-say-about-police-11592845959
I have led two starkly different lives—that of a Southern black boy who grew up without a mother and knows what it’s like to swallow the bitter pill of police brutality, and that of an economics nerd who believes in the power of data to inform effective policy.
In 2015, after watching Walter Scott get gunned down, on video, by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, I set out on a mission to quantify racial differences in police use of force. To my dismay, this work has been widely misrepresented and misused by people on both sides of the ideological aisle. It has been wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing, that football players have no right to kneel during the national anthem, and that the police should shoot black people more often. Here’s what my work does say:
• There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force. My research team analyzed nearly five million police encounters from New York City. We found that when police reported the incidents, they were 53% more likely to use physical force on a black civilian than a white one. In a separate, nationally representative dataset asking civilians about their experiences with police, we found the use of physical force on blacks to be 350% as likely. This is true of every level of nonlethal force, from officers putting their hands on civilians to striking them with batons. We controlled for every variable available in myriad ways. That reduced the racial disparities by 66%, but blacks were still significantly more likely to endure police force.
• Compliance by civilians doesn’t eliminate racial differences in police use of force. Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites. We also found that the benefits of compliance differed significantly by race. This was perhaps our most upsetting result, for two reasons: The inequity in spite of compliance clashed with the notion that the difference in police treatment of blacks and whites was a rational response to danger. And it complicates what we tell our kids: Compliance does make you less likely to endure a beat-down—but the benefit is larger if you are white.
People who invoke our work to argue that systemic police racism is a myth conveniently ignore these statistics. Racism may explain the findings, but the statistical evidence doesn’t prove it. As economists, we don’t get to label unexplained racial disparities “racism.”
• We didn’t find racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Our data come from localities in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and Washington state and contain accounts of 1,399 police shootings at civilians between 2000 and 2015. In addition, from Houston only in those same years, we had reports describing situations in which gunfire might have been justified by department guidelines but the cops didn’t shoot. This is a key piece of data that popular online databases don’t include.
No matter how we analyzed the data, we found no racial differences in shootings overall, in any city in particular, or in any subset of the data. I have grappled with these results for years as I witnessed videos of unmistakable police brutality against black men. How can the data tell a story so different from what we see with our eyes?
Our analysis tells us what happens on average. It isn’t average when a police officer casually kneels on someone’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Are there racial differences in the most extreme forms of police violence? The Southern boy in me says yes; the economist says we don’t know.
Several scholars have rightly pointed out that these data all begin with an interaction, and suggested that racist policing manifests itself in more interactions between blacks and the police. The impact of this hypothesis in our shootings data seems minimal. The results on police shootings are statistically the same across all call types—ranging from officer-initiated contact with a suspicious person (where racism in whom to police is likely paramount) to a 911 call of a homicide in progress (where interaction with the potential suspect is more likely independent of race).
Are the data nationally representative? We don’t know. But at least two other studies, both published in 2016—by Phillip Atiba Goff et al. and Ted R. Miller et al.—have since found the same using different data. Moreover, when we use our data to calculate the descriptive statistics used in popular databases such as the Washington Post’s, we find a higher percentage of black civilians among unarmed men killed by the police than they do. Those statistics, however, cannot address the fundamental question: When a shooting might be justified by department standards, are police more likely actually to shoot if the civilian is black? Only our data can answer this question, because it contains information on situations in which a shooting might meet departmental standards but didn’t happen. The answer appears to be no.
• Investigating police departments can have unintended consequences. Following the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, the U.S. attorney general was given the power to investigate and litigate cases involving a “pattern or practice” of conduct by law-enforcement officers that violates the Constitution or federal rights. Many argue that the answer to police reform in America must include more of these types of investigations.
We conducted the first empirical examination of pattern-or-practice investigations. We found that investigations not preceded by viral incidents of deadly force, on average, reduced homicides and total felony crime. But for the five investigations that were preceded by a viral incident of deadly force, there was a stark increase in crime—893 more homicides and 33,472 more felonies than would have been expected with no investigation. The increases in crime coincide with an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago alone after the killing of Laquan McDonald, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by 90% in the month the investigation was announced.
Importantly, in the eight cities that had a viral incident but no investigation, there was no subsequent increase in crime. Investigations are crucial, but we need to find ways of holding police accountable without sacrificing more black lives.
For all of us who are frustrated about decades of racial disparities that have gone unchecked, this is our Gettysburg. Yet we do ourselves a disservice in the battle against racial inequality if we don’t adhere to rigorous standards of evidence, if we cherry-pick data based on our preconceptions. The truth is enough to justify sweeping reform.
Mr. Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard.
In 2015, after watching Walter Scott get gunned down, on video, by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, I set out on a mission to quantify racial differences in police use of force. To my dismay, this work has been widely misrepresented and misused by people on both sides of the ideological aisle. It has been wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing, that football players have no right to kneel during the national anthem, and that the police should shoot black people more often. Here’s what my work does say:
• There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force. My research team analyzed nearly five million police encounters from New York City. We found that when police reported the incidents, they were 53% more likely to use physical force on a black civilian than a white one. In a separate, nationally representative dataset asking civilians about their experiences with police, we found the use of physical force on blacks to be 350% as likely. This is true of every level of nonlethal force, from officers putting their hands on civilians to striking them with batons. We controlled for every variable available in myriad ways. That reduced the racial disparities by 66%, but blacks were still significantly more likely to endure police force.
• Compliance by civilians doesn’t eliminate racial differences in police use of force. Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites. We also found that the benefits of compliance differed significantly by race. This was perhaps our most upsetting result, for two reasons: The inequity in spite of compliance clashed with the notion that the difference in police treatment of blacks and whites was a rational response to danger. And it complicates what we tell our kids: Compliance does make you less likely to endure a beat-down—but the benefit is larger if you are white.
People who invoke our work to argue that systemic police racism is a myth conveniently ignore these statistics. Racism may explain the findings, but the statistical evidence doesn’t prove it. As economists, we don’t get to label unexplained racial disparities “racism.”
• We didn’t find racial differences in officer-involved shootings. Our data come from localities in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and Washington state and contain accounts of 1,399 police shootings at civilians between 2000 and 2015. In addition, from Houston only in those same years, we had reports describing situations in which gunfire might have been justified by department guidelines but the cops didn’t shoot. This is a key piece of data that popular online databases don’t include.
No matter how we analyzed the data, we found no racial differences in shootings overall, in any city in particular, or in any subset of the data. I have grappled with these results for years as I witnessed videos of unmistakable police brutality against black men. How can the data tell a story so different from what we see with our eyes?
Our analysis tells us what happens on average. It isn’t average when a police officer casually kneels on someone’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Are there racial differences in the most extreme forms of police violence? The Southern boy in me says yes; the economist says we don’t know.
Several scholars have rightly pointed out that these data all begin with an interaction, and suggested that racist policing manifests itself in more interactions between blacks and the police. The impact of this hypothesis in our shootings data seems minimal. The results on police shootings are statistically the same across all call types—ranging from officer-initiated contact with a suspicious person (where racism in whom to police is likely paramount) to a 911 call of a homicide in progress (where interaction with the potential suspect is more likely independent of race).
Are the data nationally representative? We don’t know. But at least two other studies, both published in 2016—by Phillip Atiba Goff et al. and Ted R. Miller et al.—have since found the same using different data. Moreover, when we use our data to calculate the descriptive statistics used in popular databases such as the Washington Post’s, we find a higher percentage of black civilians among unarmed men killed by the police than they do. Those statistics, however, cannot address the fundamental question: When a shooting might be justified by department standards, are police more likely actually to shoot if the civilian is black? Only our data can answer this question, because it contains information on situations in which a shooting might meet departmental standards but didn’t happen. The answer appears to be no.
• Investigating police departments can have unintended consequences. Following the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, the U.S. attorney general was given the power to investigate and litigate cases involving a “pattern or practice” of conduct by law-enforcement officers that violates the Constitution or federal rights. Many argue that the answer to police reform in America must include more of these types of investigations.
We conducted the first empirical examination of pattern-or-practice investigations. We found that investigations not preceded by viral incidents of deadly force, on average, reduced homicides and total felony crime. But for the five investigations that were preceded by a viral incident of deadly force, there was a stark increase in crime—893 more homicides and 33,472 more felonies than would have been expected with no investigation. The increases in crime coincide with an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago alone after the killing of Laquan McDonald, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by 90% in the month the investigation was announced.
Importantly, in the eight cities that had a viral incident but no investigation, there was no subsequent increase in crime. Investigations are crucial, but we need to find ways of holding police accountable without sacrificing more black lives.
For all of us who are frustrated about decades of racial disparities that have gone unchecked, this is our Gettysburg. Yet we do ourselves a disservice in the battle against racial inequality if we don’t adhere to rigorous standards of evidence, if we cherry-pick data based on our preconceptions. The truth is enough to justify sweeping reform.
Mr. Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard.
https://www.city-journal.org/reflec...?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Organic_Social
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-much-of-a-role-does-race-play-in-police-killings/
And here's an interesting fact about that study's rectraction: the authors retracted it while standing behind the data. The only thing they cite as a reason for its retraction is the way it's being discussed in the media. This is a pretty fair discussion of the retraction: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/controversial-police-shooting-study-retracted/
And, take it for what it's worth, but here's Mac Donald discussing the retraction: https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cited-their-study-so-they-disavowed-it-11594250254
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.
Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.
In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.
Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.” Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.
The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.
This retraction bodes ill for the development of knowledge. If scientists must disavow their findings because they challenge reigning orthodoxies, then those orthodoxies will prevail even when they are wrong. Political consensus will drive scholarship, and not the reverse. The consequences for the policing debate are particularly dire. Researchers will suppress any results that contravene the narrative about endemic police racism. That narrative is now producing a shocking rise in shootings in American cities. The victims, including toddlers, are almost exclusively black.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.
In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.
Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.” Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.
The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.
This retraction bodes ill for the development of knowledge. If scientists must disavow their findings because they challenge reigning orthodoxies, then those orthodoxies will prevail even when they are wrong. Political consensus will drive scholarship, and not the reverse. The consequences for the policing debate are particularly dire. Researchers will suppress any results that contravene the narrative about endemic police racism. That narrative is now producing a shocking rise in shootings in American cities. The victims, including toddlers, are almost exclusively black.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Why was the dude reaching into his car with the cops pointing the gun and screaming at him? I mean you are asking for a world of trouble by doing that. No telling what the dude is grabbing or if he is on drugs. When the cops tell you to do something you should do it or deal with the potential consequences, especially when you are walking back to your car and reaching into it with the guns already drawn. Use your head and stop acting like this is all about race. Stop being a sheep
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