I don't know that his premise is accurate. He says that WaPo shows a gap between UNARMED being shot that indicates bias, then says we can't use that but must use armed suspects, where the bias does not appear.
First, great the bias does not appear in armed suspects. But let's get back to the first point, why should we NOT care that unarmed Blacks are shot disproportionate to Whites? I don't accept his explanation that it has to be apples to apples because an unarmed White and an unarmed Black IS apples to apples. The fact that an armed Black in Chicago killed an officer does not give the officers a pass to shoot an unarmed Black in LA. But below he seems to be suggesting it does.
Statistics from
the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in
legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.
But it’s more complicated than that. Police are authorized to use lethal force only when they believe a suspect poses a grave danger of harming others. So, when it comes to measuring cops’ racial attitudes, it’s important that we compare apples and apples: Black suspects who pose a grave danger and white suspects who do the same.
...
According to
calculations (published by Patrick Frey, Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles County) based on
FBI data, black Americans account for 37 percent of those who murder police officers, and 34 percent of the unarmed suspects killed by police. Meanwhile, whites make up 42.7 percent of cop killers and 42 percent of the unarmed suspects shot by police—meaning whites are killed by police at a 7 percent higher rate than blacks.
If you broaden the analysis to include armed suspects, the gap is even wider, with whites shot at a 70 percent higher rate than blacks.
Other experts in the field concur that, in relation to the number of police officers murdered, whites are shot disproportionately.
Again, why does the bolded matter in a shooting of an unarmed Black (or unarmed White)?
He quotes Fryer's data which is good, but Fryer also points out his limitations:
Our results have several important caveats. First, all but one dataset was provided by a select group of police departments. It is possible that these departments only supplied the data because they are either enlightened or were not concerned about what the analysis would reveal. In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data! There may be important selection in who was willing to share their data. The Police-Public contact survey partially sidesteps this issue by including a nationally representative sample of civilians, but it does not contain data on ocer-involved shootings.
Would it be fair to wonder if police departments that have problems would be less likely to have shared their data?
There are other indications of issues:
Traffic stops are the most common interaction that citizens have with law enforcement. But what happens after the stop is not a universal experience for everyone, says Kelsey Shoub, an assistant professor of political science and one of three co-authors of "Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million...
sc.edu
bariweiss.substack.com
