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Originally Posted by Danzig
I'm not quite sure why they'd want to subcategorize for that, I'm not sure what that has to do with the spate of police violence on people committing no crime either. And the article also states, as has been known for some time, that no one actually knows how many shootings and killings there are by police, because no one tracks it.
The police must follow the law while enforcing it. That is regardless of who they encounter or their race.
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They know exactly how many killing there are by police. Where does the article say that no one knows how many shooting and killings there are by police? The article says that the FBI data on police shooting by race is incomplete. But you don't need 100% complete data to do an accurate analysis. For example, when polls are done they don't poll 100% of the population. They may only poll 1-2% of the population and this will yield very good data as long as there was a true random sample.
With regard to your question about why they would be looking at the racial breakdown of violent crime, this would obviously be something that needs to be done to make a fair comparison. It is extremely rare that the police shoot an unarmed person who is not in a physical confrontation with them. It happens occasionally but it is very rare. Most of the cases in the news like the Michael Brown case involve some type of physical confrontation. The vast majority of police shooting involve violent criminals.
Hypothetically, let's say the police shoot 100 people. And let's say 50 of those are white, 40 are black and 10 are Asian. We would want to look at two different things. The first thing we would want to look at is what percentage of the population each group makes up. Let's say white people make up 60% of the population, blacks make up 15% of the population, and Asians make up 25% of the population. Then we would know that way more black are being shot percentage wise compared to other groups, even though more whites are being shot total. But we would need to look at one more thing. Since the vast majority of police shootings involve violent criminals, we would need to see the statistics on who is committing the violent crime. If blacks are committing 42% of the violent crime, then it would not be unusual if 40% of the people that police shoot are black.
Anyway, we are constantly being told by the civil rights leaders and the media that the police are killing more black people than white people. I think this study shows that this is complete BS. The study may not be perfect but it obviously has enough information to show that not only are more white being killed by police in terms of raw numbers, but more whites are being killed by police in terms of the percentages of violent criminals being killed by police.
I agree with you that the police need to follow the law. Nobody wants to see the police kill anyone (of any race), unless it is a last resort of self-defense. We have seen the police use excessive force and shoot people that should not have been shot. Nobody is denying that there have been cases of excessive force and cases of unjustified killings by police. We all know that. The question is whether the police are more likely to use deadly force against people of color. The civil rights leaders and the liberal news media would lead you to believe the answer is yes. But the evidence does not support this position.