I haven't been sure where to dump this, but I'll do it here, since it's related to your discussion on statistics re: racial disparities in police interactions and outcomes. It ultimately comes down to the claim that poor outcomes for black interactions with police are roughly proportional to blacks' share of violent crime commission.
But do we really know if that's true? What we're really measuring isn't the violent crime rate, but the arrest rate. Isn't it possible that those two numbers don't match up? Here's my thinking. First, many police departments put extra resources into policing high-crime areas. We'd expect them to do that, of course. Second, however, for numerous reasons, there is quite a bit of overlap between high-crime areas and minority (especially black) populations. This could create a positive feedback loop, wherein the arrest rate disparity actually surpasses the crime commission disparity. This, in turn, would naturally adversely affect the relationship of the police and those communities, and further the distrust that members of those communities harbor when they find themselves in a police interaction.
In other words, everything you're saying could be true, and it could also be true that the perceived racial disparity is rooted in a real phenomenon. And to make it worse, this real phenomenon could arise even if none of the members of a particular police force are racist, and they are all performing their duties with the utmost professionalism. It would simply be the unfortunate natural consequence of the fact that we live in a country where predictors of criminal activity - poverty, lack of education, etc. - happen to have a statistically significant correlation with race.
