One thing I want to point out is that a qualitative assessment of the situation would likely yield a lot more color to this conversation than a simple metric like death count would. For example, the Rodney King incident and the absolute failure of the criminal justice system there would not be embodied in this statistic data. We therefore could expect that a lot more of the "reality" of the police dynamic is not being captured here. I agree that there is probably a lot that is currently misunderstood, but we also shouldn't allow statistics alone to define the situation.
There are many injustices with regard to police-caused injuries and criminal sentencing, I agree. Regarding injuries, we don't have much data as to the overall numbers, as I noted in my subsequent article to this one https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/strategies-to-reduce-police-violence , but there is a ton of room for progress just knowing what we do.
I agree that the stats aren't everything. Given the character this discourse has taken on, and the jaw-dropping gap between perception and reality, I felt compelled to write about this, but the subsequent piece linked above gets more into solutions. Any injustice is too much.
I would like to know how many times a Black person with a knife in the vicinity was fatally shot by police. How many times did this happen with a white person.
While for the past year I swore by the Washington Post database, I could easily see someone saying "well, those aggregating the shootings only show what's publicly available, and since police departments systematically cover up their actions, we're only getting the tip of the iceberg." I find it very reasonable for someone to think there's hundreds or even thousands of unarmed black people getting killed by police since there is that lack of transparency in many police departments which results in reported numbers below what the actual number is, which we actually do not know.
It is true that the data is incomplete, and the Skeptic researchers estimated that the true number may be closer to 60-100 a year. Whatever the true figures turn out to be, it will almost certainly still remain vastly lower than what over 100 million Americans have been led to believe. We need more data, in fact it should be required by law for all law enforcement to collect and provide it.
Hope more people can read your posts.
One thing I want to point out is that a qualitative assessment of the situation would likely yield a lot more color to this conversation than a simple metric like death count would. For example, the Rodney King incident and the absolute failure of the criminal justice system there would not be embodied in this statistic data. We therefore could expect that a lot more of the "reality" of the police dynamic is not being captured here. I agree that there is probably a lot that is currently misunderstood, but we also shouldn't allow statistics alone to define the situation.
There are many injustices with regard to police-caused injuries and criminal sentencing, I agree. Regarding injuries, we don't have much data as to the overall numbers, as I noted in my subsequent article to this one https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/strategies-to-reduce-police-violence , but there is a ton of room for progress just knowing what we do.
I agree that the stats aren't everything. Given the character this discourse has taken on, and the jaw-dropping gap between perception and reality, I felt compelled to write about this, but the subsequent piece linked above gets more into solutions. Any injustice is too much.
First: good article.
I would like to know how many times a Black person with a knife in the vicinity was fatally shot by police. How many times did this happen with a white person.
Later, not today, I will look for answers.
While for the past year I swore by the Washington Post database, I could easily see someone saying "well, those aggregating the shootings only show what's publicly available, and since police departments systematically cover up their actions, we're only getting the tip of the iceberg." I find it very reasonable for someone to think there's hundreds or even thousands of unarmed black people getting killed by police since there is that lack of transparency in many police departments which results in reported numbers below what the actual number is, which we actually do not know.
It is true that the data is incomplete, and the Skeptic researchers estimated that the true number may be closer to 60-100 a year. Whatever the true figures turn out to be, it will almost certainly still remain vastly lower than what over 100 million Americans have been led to believe. We need more data, in fact it should be required by law for all law enforcement to collect and provide it.