2) Imagine that we replace the cops with intelligent robots who have zero feelings of racism or anything. Let’s assume that the robots, despite being perfectly fair, also contain a software bug which triggers at random moments and causes them to kill a perfectly randomly selected person in sight. This itself is enough to cause a disproportionate amount of the innocent victims to be black. Simply because people often live groupped by ethnicity, some groups have disproportionally higher crime rate, so even the fair robot who would completely randomly choose which crime to investigate, would spend disproportionally more time surrounded by people of this ethnicity, which in turn would make them more likely to become victims of its software bug. Is it fair? No. Is it racist? Also no. That would be a false dilemma.
PS: Also please don’t feed Eugine. You can easily guess which one is his latest account.
Thanks for the link, that’s an interesting and useful article. Updated my probabilities in a few areas. Also an amazingly civil, rational comments section given the nature of the material.
It didn’t help me very much on police shootings though—lot of way-out-of-date data that points both ways depending on area. No racial bias in shooting recorded in New York, seriously significant effect in Tennessee. Given what I know about American racism-by-state that’s almost disappointingly obvious. (Again though, out of date—relevant laws in Memphis have changed since).
Okay, strap in, this is a long one. First I’m going to cheerfully steal a chunk directly from one of those comments on SSC for your consideration:
Suppose that you notice that on average, green shows up twice as often as red, but you can’t see a pattern to it. If you want to maximise your winnings, should you on average bet on green twice as often as red to match the frequencies you’re seeing? No, you should strictly bet on green every time.
(Anyone know where I might have read about this before? Pretty sure it’s somewhere on LW, but I can’t find it.)
Similarly, if a random black person is statistically more likely to be a criminal than a white person, then a police officer’s or prosecutor’s career incentive is to focus on them.
Of course this wouldn’t fly as a practical policy. Green and red lights may be independent from your choices, but humans are not. If you completely removed police overwatch from non-black populations, this would encourage crime in those populations. Even if you didn’t care, there’s no way you’d defend yourself from accusations of blatant racism and unfairness.
Still, the incentive is there. And it’s based on math – racial prejudice not required.
Because I believe people tend to follow incentives, my current best guess is that police do over-profile (target the higher risk groups more than the actual risk differences would suggest), and they are going to, and the only question is to what extent this can be mitigated.
I’d be interested to see what you think of that.
Now, speaking for myself -
I find no flaw with your buggy-robot analogy. That would indeed in result in more shootings of innocent black people without any need for racial prejudice influencing the decision to shoot, simply because of disproportionate exposure given higher crime rates.
My contention, however, is that racial prejudice is a factor in real-world police shootings/violence. So the question I ask as a half-decent wannabe rationalist is how my belief should constrain my expectation—how do I expect my world to look different from a non-racist buggy-robot world? How do I test it? Honestly I don’t have a particularly satisfactory answer. Some attempts follow, feel free to skim if you’re not arsed reading them.
I would expect the disproportionate impact of police shootings/violence upon innocent black people (innocent meaning unarmed/non-dangerous here, not necessarily innocent of any crime) to be measurably higher even when adjusted for the higher crime-rate/residential grouping effect as it was in the Memphis study. (Though not to such a degree—important to state I do believe that this problem is getting better). However, the way a shooting event or other incident of violence is recorded depends very heavily on the word of the officer involved (the event is assumed to be “an “assault on law enforcement” and the officer is referred to as “the victim” in the report on a fatal shooting by default). If racial prejudice influenced his/her decision to shoot it could also—with or without any deliberate lying—influence his/her assessment of whether the individual shot was behaving as a threat. (You’d be amazed what some police officers will call “assault on an officer” or “resisting arrest” with a straight face—that’s a problem even without touching any racial-disparity issues). So that’s also in my model, and the fact that the two effects counter each other means they’re of little use to me as a measurable anticipation-constraint.
I’d expect a higher impact on black people of what I’d call “WTF shootings”—shootings where the victim could not have been deemed a threat by a reasonable observer. Unresisting arrestees, fleeing suspects holding nothing in their hands, kids holding toy guns shot before being given any chance to comply with verbal directions—or being given no verbal directions. Not tragic-but-understandable mistake type shootings—“itchy trigger finger” shootings that baffle reasonable explanation and appear to proceed directly from some kind of gut feeling on the part of the officer.
Interesting to think of this in relation to what seems like an odd number of reports of police shooting securely-tethered pet dogs that barked at them. I’ve seen an actual cop try to explain this phenomenon by saying that police often have terrifying, dangerous encounters with vicious guard dogs owned by drug dealers and the like, and develop a fear that leads them to react with instinctive aggression to a barking dog without taking the time to evaluate whether or not it’s a threat. Interesting, that. I have no data for it though, so just an idea.
Anyway, I’d expect these “WTF shootings” to hit black people harder, but one can only apply the “reasonable observer” test if the incident is recorded on camera or there are a decent number of witnesses—and in this case I’m willing to admit that the political heat around this issue might lead to WTF shootings of black people being *over-represented” or identified where they don’t exist. So, measurement problem here again.
Police shooting disproportionately affecting black people even when you only count the shooting events that occur in locations that mitigate the grouping effect. Put simply, your robot that shoots innocent people is disproportionately likely to hit a black person because it’s in a black neighborhood interacting with black people for a disproportionate number of hours of the day. But real policemen are assigned to patrol specific areas—the racial mix of the people they interact with is governed by the demographics of their “beat”, not overall crime stats. There are whole all-white towns in America. Pretend for a second that the crime rate among black Americans is four times that of white Americans. Now imagine a police officer in a neighborhood—or city, even—with a 3% black population. Adjust for higher crime rate and their interactions with black citizens go up to 12% which neatly matches the actual demographics (if I remember the figures.) That could be an adequate sort of “controlled environment” where interactions mirror actual population demographics. If black people are disproportionately shot within that neighbourhood, I’d say that’s a measurable indication that racism is playing a part. If they aren’t, it indicates the opposite.
But after all that, I just don’t know where to find current objective data or how to look at it, and at the end of the day I’m looking for something that is capable of covering its own tracks. I’m not quite at “no sabotage is evidence of Fifth Column” yet but I’m brushing dangerously close to a universally applicable argument. Racism not evident in data? Data could be skewed by racism! Sounds dodgy but common sense says it is possible and has happened before and I can’t discount it. But given my difficulty making my beliefs pay rent, I’ve revised my certainty down a bit just by writing all this out.
But not a lot down and here’s why—the other side—the part two of this ridiculously long comment.
A certain percentage of Americans are racists. Lots are a teeny bit racist (arguably we all are), but a few are massively, viciously racist. This isn’t distributed equally over the states or within them—there are clusters. If American police are a fair sample of the American population, then many of them are a wee bit racist and a few are massively racist, and there are clusters in certain areas. (By the way, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if American cops were less racist on average than Americans as a whole. That still leaves a goodly few “bad apples”). How could that not impact their treatment of minority-group individuals? What negates the effect of that bias in a given situation? I’m willing to accept the impact could be neutralized to a large extent by complex structures and redundancies within, say, the court system - but in the personal, individual, encounters—split-second decisions whether or not to shoot, whether or not to resist the impulse to kick someone in the head while they’re on the ground, what check is there? You can say that the buggy-robot is a simpler explanation, but to me it’s just a shorter one. The more complex idea, as I see it, is that somehow there’s far less racism among police officers than among the genpop, or that somehow the racism there is is prevented from impacting its targets in situations where no apparent check is provided. The absence of racism as a motive force in any instances of police misbehavior or misjudgment would need explaining to me.
I’m done. Sorry about the novel, it’s been a slow day at work.
TFL;DFR—the evidence is complex, patchy and difficult to interpret but doesn’t appear to be stronger for my position than the converse; however cops are people, some people are racist, therefore some cops are racist, and cops have a lot of discretion as to how and when it’s appropriate to use physical force which means some whacking great racists make decisions about whether or not to shoot or brutalize black people, and I don’t see how that can’t equal disproportionate impact, at least in certain states or areas.
My reasoning on some parts is probably lousy with holes, so if you’ve slogged through this far, have at it is with a hatchet, and if you haven’t, I don’t blame you.
You’d be amazed what some police officers will call “assault on an officer” or “resisting arrest” with a straight face—that’s a problem even without touching any racial-disparity issues.
Oh, I heard some crazy examples. Like, in theory a cop needs a legal reason to arrest you, but in practice you can be arrested for a crime, and resisting arrest is itself a crime. So the cop can create a self-consistent time loop, where he predicts that you will resist arrest, arrest you for this specific crime, and if you resist that arrest, that retroactively makes the arrest legal. (Sorry, I don’t have a link, but at least in one situation the court said that such reasoning was okay.) And how does the cop prove that you resisted the arrest? That’s trivial; his word against yours is enough. But if a technical proof on camera is needed, he can just kick you or pinch you in a place away from camera, have your reaction recorded, and interpret it as your spontaneous attack.
But this is a problem separate from racism.
the evidence is complex, patchy and difficult to interpret
Agreed. Just the fact that something is too complicated to prove, doesn’t make it automatically false. Doesn’t make it automatically true, either. It’s true that higher average racism in general society most likely implies higher average racism among cops. It’s also true that innocent black people are going to be killed disproportionally more often whether there is a racism or not. So… further research is needed?
So the cop can create a self-consistent time loop, where he predicts that you will resist arrest, arrest you for this specific crime, and if you resist that arrest, that retroactively makes the arrest legal. (Sorry, I don’t have a link, but at least in one situation the court said that such reasoning was okay.)
Here’s an example via one of my favorite blogs, if you’d like to have a look. Summary—a lawyer who was verbally objecting (calmly) to a cop’s interaction with her client was told that she would be “arrested for resisting arrest” if she did not stop verbally objecting. She said “please do” and was promptly arrested and left handcuffed in a holding cell for an hour. Whole thing caught on camera—the interaction takes less than two minutes.
On a more serious note, the arrest of Sandra Bland followed similar lines. Again, all on camera—the officer’s own dash cam, not a bystander’s recording.
Just the fact that something is too complicated to prove, doesn’t make it automatically false. Doesn’t make it automatically true, either. It’s true that higher average racism in general society most likely implies higher average racism among cops. It’s also true that innocent black people are going to be killed disproportionally more often whether there is a racism or not. So… further research is needed?
That’s a neat, clear statement of what I took over a thousand words to say. What is this sorcery!
My contention, however, is that racial prejudice is a factor in real-world police shootings/violence.
I’m not disagreeing with you but I just want to add to the conversation that I think the SSC comment is closest to the issue when he/she said:
Still, the incentive is there. And it’s based on math – racial prejudice not required.
Because I believe people tend to follow incentives, my current best guess is that police do over-profile (target the higher risk groups more than the actual risk differences would suggest), and they are going to, and the only question is to what extent this can be mitigated.
Let’s say you and another guard are manning a castle gate, and there is a serial killer outside in the village of 100 people. A peasant knocks and says “let me in”. You reply “I am sorry I value my life more than yours I can not let you in, even if you are probably not the killer”. The other guard says “I despise all peasants, I would never let you in” This repeats again and again. Both you and the other guard have caused a disproportionate amount of impact on innocent peasants, and your actions are indistinguishable, yet you are not prejudiced. If you change the mind of the other guard to not hate peasants, the predicament of the poor peasants do not change – you both still refuse entry. That doesn’t mean reducing prejudice can’t help. Imagine a third guard that is also a peasant hating misanthrope but he takes his hate to another level, so that when a peasant knocks, the third guard says to the others “Hey this guy is a peasant, let’s just kill him”. You and the second guard relieve the third guard of duty and that really did help the situation of the peasants, you saved them from violent prejudice, but the problem of innocent villagers stuck outside the wall remain. Getting rid of the third guard does help, but doesn’t solve everything.
Good point well made. I have nothing to add but agreement. Also I may steal this analogy and use it in future, just so you know.
Especially because you’ve noted that getting rid of the third guard does help. The argument that I see often but don’t understand is that trying to ditch the third guard is not worth doing because it doesn’t solve the wider peasant-injustice issue.
I don’t mean just with the police brutality/American race-relations thing either—it seems almost any time people want to put work into fixing Specific Issue X, there are other people standing back and saying it’s a waste of effort because it won’t solve Larger Issue Y. Winds me right up.
In the specific context of police brutality in America, victimization—of the innocent, by the way, as well as the guilty—is disproportionately determined by race.
Is it? Let me offer you alternative hypotheses. One is that victimization is determined by the socioeconomic status—basically your wealth and/or ability to demonstrate high-class markers. For example, I doubt that white trailer trash is treated particularly gently by the cops.
If you want something, um, more innate, I can offer you IQ. I bet that low-IQ people are disproportionately more victimized by police.
Of course these three metrics—race, socioeconomic position, IQ—are correlated with each other. Why did you pick race?
The other thing to consider is that America is a multiracial society. You say
cops are people, some people are racist, therefore some cops are racist
Sure. But a fair number of cops are black. Some of them are racist, right? You are arguing that this must lead to disproportionate impact on non-blacks. Is that so?
You might argue that black racism is not racism and that you’re talking specifically about some variation of white supremacism. OK, then consider Asians. They are not white and a white supremacist should be strongly biased against them (as indeed white supremacists are). So, are Asians brutalized by police more than whites? No? Why not?
Let me offer you alternative hypotheses. One is that victimization is determined by the socioeconomic status—basically your wealth and/or ability to demonstrate high-class markers. For example, I doubt that white trailer trash is treated particularly gently by the cops.
Actually I think that’s true too. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about them, as you point out yourself. When I said “disproportionately determined by race” I didn’t mean determined only by race. I’d guess—just a guess, no data—that there’s a gender disproportion too—men are probably more likely to be victims of police brutality even adjusting for their greater likelihood to commit violent crimes. But biases are stackable. A cop who is more likely to be inappropriately violent towards poor people in general might be more likely again to be hard on poor, black people.
Why did you pick race?
I didn’t pick it, that’s what the discussion is about. OP picked it. If it was just a thread about police brutality in general I don’t think I’d have stuck to race alone.
Sure. But a fair number of cops are black. Some of them are racist, right? You are arguing that this must lead to disproportionate impact on non-blacks. Is that so?
Sure, there are black cops, a certain percentage of whom must be racist. I don’t know why I wouldn’t consider that “racism”. So that could lead to a disproportionate impact on non-black people in terms of the actions of those specific cops. But given that A. the black population share is about 13% of America and B. the percentage of cops who are black is lower than that again, I don’t see how the disproportion could be equivalent unless each racist black cop was having ten times the negative impact of each racist white cop—and that’s not even accounting for the possibility of black cops discriminating against black people, because of internalized prejudice or over-correction to avoid the appearance of going easy on members of their own race.
talking specifically about some variation of white supremacism
No, I didn’t have white supremacists specifically in mind, as I think of them—though there must be some white supremacist cops. We might be defining them differently though, I strongly associate white supremacism with some kind of group-membership or at least a very explicit, conscious avowal of racism as right. Someone else might argue that all white racists are white supremacists by definition but I think that would be an oversimplification.
Consider Asians. They are not white and a white supremacist should be strongly biased against them (as indeed white supremacists are). So, are Asians brutalized by police more than whites? No? Why not?
Aren’t they? I have no idea. If not, I’d point out that someone can be biased against different groups while not necessarily treating them the same way. What I’ve seen of white-to-Asian racism in the US it looks more contemptuous and dismissive—negative stereotypes of Asian men seem to revolve around “weak, geeky, submissive”. That kind of view might well lead to less violence than the negative stereotypes about black men.
I’d also like to point out here that I don’t think police brutality is America’s biggest race-problem or even America’s biggest policing problem. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to cops in general, as I am to anyone who does a job I need someone to do but wouldn’t want to do myself. Pointing out that they sometimes do wrong is not to call them all a bunch of fascist pigs or whatever. I think overwork and undiagnosed mental health issues probably played a role in some of their more high-profile fuckups, not just assholery, racism or incompetence.
I didn’t pick it, that’s what the discussion is about.
Well, your original point was that Black Lives Matter is justified in insisting upon Black Lives and that countering with All Lives Matter was a bad thing to do. I would guess that BLM would strongly object to e.g. Poor Lives Matter as well.
I think overwork and undiagnosed mental health issues probably played a role in some of their more high-profile fuckups, not just assholery, racism or incompetence.
The thing is, there are systematic selection biases. People with certain character traits (note: not clinical mental health issues) self-select into specific jobs.
Well, your original point was that Black Lives Matter is justified in insisting upon Black Lives and that countering with All Lives Matter was a bad thing to do. I would guess that BLM would strongly object to e.g. Poor Lives Matter as well.
Maybe they would, but I don’t think I would be quite so quick to dismissive Poor Lives Matter, as they would have legit beef, so to speak.
Actually if a real movement sprung up with the intention of uniting poor blacks and poor whites in a shared resistance to police brutality and systemic injustice generally, that could be a really good thing. And maybe BLM would be pissed, and maybe they would have some reason on certain grounds, but I don’t think I’d dismiss PLM without a hearing.
ALM, on the other hand, is vacuous crap. It’s basically true but that’s where the merit ends. It means nothing, it adds nothing, it represents nothing. Imagine in it in other contexts. Someone’s talking about a cystic fibrosis charity and I respond “all diseases matter!”. Someone’s raising money for Dog’s Trust and I chime in with “all vertebrates matter!”. (This could actually be a fun parody Twitter account if I were trollishly inclined).
The thing is, there are systematic selection biases. People with certain character traits (note: not clinical mental health issues) self-select into specific jobs.
Yes, absolutely, good point. But for jobs like policing, paramedics etc. there’s a high occupational risk of picking up mental health issues on the job too.
Suppose that you notice that on average, green shows up twice as often as red, but you can’t see a pattern to it. If you want to maximise your winnings, should you on average bet on green twice as often as red to match the frequencies you’re seeing? No, you should strictly bet on green every time.
(Anyone know where I might have read about this before? Pretty sure it’s somewhere on LW, but I can’t find it.)
Similarly, if a random black person is statistically more likely to be a criminal than a white person, then a police officer’s or prosecutor’s career incentive is to focus on them.
This analogy would work if there was only one cop. However, if all the other cops are only looking for black criminals, you will have a much easier time finding white criminals because no other cops are looking there. The equilibrium distribution is that cops look for white and black criminals in proportion to their criminality.
A certain percentage of Americans are racists.
What do you mean by “racist”? Is someone who, correctly, believes that blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites “racist”. What about someone who’s internalized this true belief?
Ah. Thank you for the reminder about Science. Under the assumption that user Science is the same person who previously used a software exploit to give −10 to all comments that disagreed with him back in 2016, i will be treating them as a troll from now on.
(I was wondering why Science had so many upvotes here.)
Agree, and I think this is a really important and overlooked implication, that two tribes will talk past each other on. Unfair discrimination persists even with rational, non-racist, greedy capitalist.
A less charged example would be life insurance policies. Almost everyone would agree that mortality tables are acceptable; almost everyone could also imagine themselves getting older, and could imagine themselves as above average with in their group. The insurer will rationally charge the older group more premium. Atypical healthier older people within this group have experience unfair discrimination and the insurer is rationally non-prejudiced.
So when one tribe says that markets will punish racist, it doesn’t fix unfair discrimination. And when other tribe says that there is unfair discrimination, that doesn’t mean there is rampant racism. I personally feel a lot of compassion towards atypical individuals within a disadvantaged group, but how could we improve?
I personally feel a lot of compassion towards atypical individuals within a disadvantaged group, but how could we improve?
Well, do we want to fix the problem, or only to reduce its visibility?
By “reducing visibility” I mean solutions where some individuals are still discriminated more than others, but the numbers don’t show up when you do the statistics by race. As a reductio-ad-absurdum example, having cops additionally shoot a few innocent white people would fix the race statistics. I can imagine a few less obviously absurd solutions which would work in a similar way, some of them might even sound acceptable to an average reader.
But if we want to solve the essence of the problem, well, either we need to make sure innocent bystanders are never killed, or that all people have the same chance to be in a proximity of crime. I don’t think either is achievable. But there can be partial improvements in both directions.
For example, if we could reduce the total number of innocent people killed, then in absolute numbers there would also be less black innocent people killed. Ironically, for the BLM purposes, this might not register as an improvement. Imagine that the probability of innocent people being killed drops to a half, and it drops to a half for each ethnic group. Obviously, this would be an improvement for everyone. But if you would calculate the ratio of the probabilities for different ethnic groups, in this model it would remain exactly the same, so BLM would have the same reason to complain.
I am not sure about this, but maybe things like basic income could help poor people to get out of places with high crime. Imagine that whenever there is too much crime at some place, people who don’t participate in the criminal activities start moving away, because it’s easier for them. But probably I am just imagining things here.
Two important things, both already said at the comments below the linked article:
1) http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
2) Imagine that we replace the cops with intelligent robots who have zero feelings of racism or anything. Let’s assume that the robots, despite being perfectly fair, also contain a software bug which triggers at random moments and causes them to kill a perfectly randomly selected person in sight. This itself is enough to cause a disproportionate amount of the innocent victims to be black. Simply because people often live groupped by ethnicity, some groups have disproportionally higher crime rate, so even the fair robot who would completely randomly choose which crime to investigate, would spend disproportionally more time surrounded by people of this ethnicity, which in turn would make them more likely to become victims of its software bug. Is it fair? No. Is it racist? Also no. That would be a false dilemma.
PS: Also please don’t feed Eugine. You can easily guess which one is his latest account.
Thanks for the link, that’s an interesting and useful article. Updated my probabilities in a few areas. Also an amazingly civil, rational comments section given the nature of the material.
It didn’t help me very much on police shootings though—lot of way-out-of-date data that points both ways depending on area. No racial bias in shooting recorded in New York, seriously significant effect in Tennessee. Given what I know about American racism-by-state that’s almost disappointingly obvious. (Again though, out of date—relevant laws in Memphis have changed since).
Okay, strap in, this is a long one. First I’m going to cheerfully steal a chunk directly from one of those comments on SSC for your consideration:
I’d be interested to see what you think of that.
Now, speaking for myself -
I find no flaw with your buggy-robot analogy. That would indeed in result in more shootings of innocent black people without any need for racial prejudice influencing the decision to shoot, simply because of disproportionate exposure given higher crime rates.
My contention, however, is that racial prejudice is a factor in real-world police shootings/violence. So the question I ask as a half-decent wannabe rationalist is how my belief should constrain my expectation—how do I expect my world to look different from a non-racist buggy-robot world? How do I test it? Honestly I don’t have a particularly satisfactory answer. Some attempts follow, feel free to skim if you’re not arsed reading them.
I would expect the disproportionate impact of police shootings/violence upon innocent black people (innocent meaning unarmed/non-dangerous here, not necessarily innocent of any crime) to be measurably higher even when adjusted for the higher crime-rate/residential grouping effect as it was in the Memphis study. (Though not to such a degree—important to state I do believe that this problem is getting better). However, the way a shooting event or other incident of violence is recorded depends very heavily on the word of the officer involved (the event is assumed to be “an “assault on law enforcement” and the officer is referred to as “the victim” in the report on a fatal shooting by default). If racial prejudice influenced his/her decision to shoot it could also—with or without any deliberate lying—influence his/her assessment of whether the individual shot was behaving as a threat. (You’d be amazed what some police officers will call “assault on an officer” or “resisting arrest” with a straight face—that’s a problem even without touching any racial-disparity issues). So that’s also in my model, and the fact that the two effects counter each other means they’re of little use to me as a measurable anticipation-constraint.
I’d expect a higher impact on black people of what I’d call “WTF shootings”—shootings where the victim could not have been deemed a threat by a reasonable observer. Unresisting arrestees, fleeing suspects holding nothing in their hands, kids holding toy guns shot before being given any chance to comply with verbal directions—or being given no verbal directions. Not tragic-but-understandable mistake type shootings—“itchy trigger finger” shootings that baffle reasonable explanation and appear to proceed directly from some kind of gut feeling on the part of the officer.
Interesting to think of this in relation to what seems like an odd number of reports of police shooting securely-tethered pet dogs that barked at them. I’ve seen an actual cop try to explain this phenomenon by saying that police often have terrifying, dangerous encounters with vicious guard dogs owned by drug dealers and the like, and develop a fear that leads them to react with instinctive aggression to a barking dog without taking the time to evaluate whether or not it’s a threat. Interesting, that. I have no data for it though, so just an idea.
Anyway, I’d expect these “WTF shootings” to hit black people harder, but one can only apply the “reasonable observer” test if the incident is recorded on camera or there are a decent number of witnesses—and in this case I’m willing to admit that the political heat around this issue might lead to WTF shootings of black people being *over-represented” or identified where they don’t exist. So, measurement problem here again.
Police shooting disproportionately affecting black people even when you only count the shooting events that occur in locations that mitigate the grouping effect. Put simply, your robot that shoots innocent people is disproportionately likely to hit a black person because it’s in a black neighborhood interacting with black people for a disproportionate number of hours of the day. But real policemen are assigned to patrol specific areas—the racial mix of the people they interact with is governed by the demographics of their “beat”, not overall crime stats. There are whole all-white towns in America. Pretend for a second that the crime rate among black Americans is four times that of white Americans. Now imagine a police officer in a neighborhood—or city, even—with a 3% black population. Adjust for higher crime rate and their interactions with black citizens go up to 12% which neatly matches the actual demographics (if I remember the figures.) That could be an adequate sort of “controlled environment” where interactions mirror actual population demographics. If black people are disproportionately shot within that neighbourhood, I’d say that’s a measurable indication that racism is playing a part. If they aren’t, it indicates the opposite.
But after all that, I just don’t know where to find current objective data or how to look at it, and at the end of the day I’m looking for something that is capable of covering its own tracks. I’m not quite at “no sabotage is evidence of Fifth Column” yet but I’m brushing dangerously close to a universally applicable argument. Racism not evident in data? Data could be skewed by racism! Sounds dodgy but common sense says it is possible and has happened before and I can’t discount it. But given my difficulty making my beliefs pay rent, I’ve revised my certainty down a bit just by writing all this out.
But not a lot down and here’s why—the other side—the part two of this ridiculously long comment.
A certain percentage of Americans are racists. Lots are a teeny bit racist (arguably we all are), but a few are massively, viciously racist. This isn’t distributed equally over the states or within them—there are clusters. If American police are a fair sample of the American population, then many of them are a wee bit racist and a few are massively racist, and there are clusters in certain areas. (By the way, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if American cops were less racist on average than Americans as a whole. That still leaves a goodly few “bad apples”). How could that not impact their treatment of minority-group individuals? What negates the effect of that bias in a given situation? I’m willing to accept the impact could be neutralized to a large extent by complex structures and redundancies within, say, the court system - but in the personal, individual, encounters—split-second decisions whether or not to shoot, whether or not to resist the impulse to kick someone in the head while they’re on the ground, what check is there? You can say that the buggy-robot is a simpler explanation, but to me it’s just a shorter one. The more complex idea, as I see it, is that somehow there’s far less racism among police officers than among the genpop, or that somehow the racism there is is prevented from impacting its targets in situations where no apparent check is provided. The absence of racism as a motive force in any instances of police misbehavior or misjudgment would need explaining to me.
I’m done. Sorry about the novel, it’s been a slow day at work.
TFL;DFR—the evidence is complex, patchy and difficult to interpret but doesn’t appear to be stronger for my position than the converse; however cops are people, some people are racist, therefore some cops are racist, and cops have a lot of discretion as to how and when it’s appropriate to use physical force which means some whacking great racists make decisions about whether or not to shoot or brutalize black people, and I don’t see how that can’t equal disproportionate impact, at least in certain states or areas.
My reasoning on some parts is probably lousy with holes, so if you’ve slogged through this far, have at it is with a hatchet, and if you haven’t, I don’t blame you.
Oh, I heard some crazy examples. Like, in theory a cop needs a legal reason to arrest you, but in practice you can be arrested for a crime, and resisting arrest is itself a crime. So the cop can create a self-consistent time loop, where he predicts that you will resist arrest, arrest you for this specific crime, and if you resist that arrest, that retroactively makes the arrest legal. (Sorry, I don’t have a link, but at least in one situation the court said that such reasoning was okay.) And how does the cop prove that you resisted the arrest? That’s trivial; his word against yours is enough. But if a technical proof on camera is needed, he can just kick you or pinch you in a place away from camera, have your reaction recorded, and interpret it as your spontaneous attack.
But this is a problem separate from racism.
Agreed. Just the fact that something is too complicated to prove, doesn’t make it automatically false. Doesn’t make it automatically true, either. It’s true that higher average racism in general society most likely implies higher average racism among cops. It’s also true that innocent black people are going to be killed disproportionally more often whether there is a racism or not. So… further research is needed?
Here’s an example via one of my favorite blogs, if you’d like to have a look. Summary—a lawyer who was verbally objecting (calmly) to a cop’s interaction with her client was told that she would be “arrested for resisting arrest” if she did not stop verbally objecting. She said “please do” and was promptly arrested and left handcuffed in a holding cell for an hour. Whole thing caught on camera—the interaction takes less than two minutes.
On a more serious note, the arrest of Sandra Bland followed similar lines. Again, all on camera—the officer’s own dash cam, not a bystander’s recording.
That’s a neat, clear statement of what I took over a thousand words to say. What is this sorcery!
I’m not disagreeing with you but I just want to add to the conversation that I think the SSC comment is closest to the issue when he/she said:
Let’s say you and another guard are manning a castle gate, and there is a serial killer outside in the village of 100 people. A peasant knocks and says “let me in”. You reply “I am sorry I value my life more than yours I can not let you in, even if you are probably not the killer”. The other guard says “I despise all peasants, I would never let you in” This repeats again and again. Both you and the other guard have caused a disproportionate amount of impact on innocent peasants, and your actions are indistinguishable, yet you are not prejudiced. If you change the mind of the other guard to not hate peasants, the predicament of the poor peasants do not change – you both still refuse entry. That doesn’t mean reducing prejudice can’t help. Imagine a third guard that is also a peasant hating misanthrope but he takes his hate to another level, so that when a peasant knocks, the third guard says to the others “Hey this guy is a peasant, let’s just kill him”. You and the second guard relieve the third guard of duty and that really did help the situation of the peasants, you saved them from violent prejudice, but the problem of innocent villagers stuck outside the wall remain. Getting rid of the third guard does help, but doesn’t solve everything.
Good point well made. I have nothing to add but agreement. Also I may steal this analogy and use it in future, just so you know.
Especially because you’ve noted that getting rid of the third guard does help. The argument that I see often but don’t understand is that trying to ditch the third guard is not worth doing because it doesn’t solve the wider peasant-injustice issue.
I don’t mean just with the police brutality/American race-relations thing either—it seems almost any time people want to put work into fixing Specific Issue X, there are other people standing back and saying it’s a waste of effort because it won’t solve Larger Issue Y. Winds me right up.
A couple of things for you to ponder.
You take for granted that
Is it? Let me offer you alternative hypotheses. One is that victimization is determined by the socioeconomic status—basically your wealth and/or ability to demonstrate high-class markers. For example, I doubt that white trailer trash is treated particularly gently by the cops.
If you want something, um, more innate, I can offer you IQ. I bet that low-IQ people are disproportionately more victimized by police.
Of course these three metrics—race, socioeconomic position, IQ—are correlated with each other. Why did you pick race?
The other thing to consider is that America is a multiracial society. You say
Sure. But a fair number of cops are black. Some of them are racist, right? You are arguing that this must lead to disproportionate impact on non-blacks. Is that so?
You might argue that black racism is not racism and that you’re talking specifically about some variation of white supremacism. OK, then consider Asians. They are not white and a white supremacist should be strongly biased against them (as indeed white supremacists are). So, are Asians brutalized by police more than whites? No? Why not?
Actually I think that’s true too. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about them, as you point out yourself. When I said “disproportionately determined by race” I didn’t mean determined only by race. I’d guess—just a guess, no data—that there’s a gender disproportion too—men are probably more likely to be victims of police brutality even adjusting for their greater likelihood to commit violent crimes. But biases are stackable. A cop who is more likely to be inappropriately violent towards poor people in general might be more likely again to be hard on poor, black people.
I didn’t pick it, that’s what the discussion is about. OP picked it. If it was just a thread about police brutality in general I don’t think I’d have stuck to race alone.
Sure, there are black cops, a certain percentage of whom must be racist. I don’t know why I wouldn’t consider that “racism”. So that could lead to a disproportionate impact on non-black people in terms of the actions of those specific cops. But given that A. the black population share is about 13% of America and B. the percentage of cops who are black is lower than that again, I don’t see how the disproportion could be equivalent unless each racist black cop was having ten times the negative impact of each racist white cop—and that’s not even accounting for the possibility of black cops discriminating against black people, because of internalized prejudice or over-correction to avoid the appearance of going easy on members of their own race.
No, I didn’t have white supremacists specifically in mind, as I think of them—though there must be some white supremacist cops. We might be defining them differently though, I strongly associate white supremacism with some kind of group-membership or at least a very explicit, conscious avowal of racism as right. Someone else might argue that all white racists are white supremacists by definition but I think that would be an oversimplification.
Aren’t they? I have no idea. If not, I’d point out that someone can be biased against different groups while not necessarily treating them the same way. What I’ve seen of white-to-Asian racism in the US it looks more contemptuous and dismissive—negative stereotypes of Asian men seem to revolve around “weak, geeky, submissive”. That kind of view might well lead to less violence than the negative stereotypes about black men.
I’d also like to point out here that I don’t think police brutality is America’s biggest race-problem or even America’s biggest policing problem. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to cops in general, as I am to anyone who does a job I need someone to do but wouldn’t want to do myself. Pointing out that they sometimes do wrong is not to call them all a bunch of fascist pigs or whatever. I think overwork and undiagnosed mental health issues probably played a role in some of their more high-profile fuckups, not just assholery, racism or incompetence.
(Am I allowed say fuckups?)
Well, your original point was that Black Lives Matter is justified in insisting upon Black Lives and that countering with All Lives Matter was a bad thing to do. I would guess that BLM would strongly object to e.g. Poor Lives Matter as well.
The thing is, there are systematic selection biases. People with certain character traits (note: not clinical mental health issues) self-select into specific jobs.
Yes :-D
Maybe they would, but I don’t think I would be quite so quick to dismissive Poor Lives Matter, as they would have legit beef, so to speak.
Actually if a real movement sprung up with the intention of uniting poor blacks and poor whites in a shared resistance to police brutality and systemic injustice generally, that could be a really good thing. And maybe BLM would be pissed, and maybe they would have some reason on certain grounds, but I don’t think I’d dismiss PLM without a hearing.
ALM, on the other hand, is vacuous crap. It’s basically true but that’s where the merit ends. It means nothing, it adds nothing, it represents nothing. Imagine in it in other contexts. Someone’s talking about a cystic fibrosis charity and I respond “all diseases matter!”. Someone’s raising money for Dog’s Trust and I chime in with “all vertebrates matter!”. (This could actually be a fun parody Twitter account if I were trollishly inclined).
Yes, absolutely, good point. But for jobs like policing, paramedics etc. there’s a high occupational risk of picking up mental health issues on the job too.
This analogy would work if there was only one cop. However, if all the other cops are only looking for black criminals, you will have a much easier time finding white criminals because no other cops are looking there. The equilibrium distribution is that cops look for white and black criminals in proportion to their criminality.
What do you mean by “racist”? Is someone who, correctly, believes that blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites “racist”. What about someone who’s internalized this true belief?
Ah. Thank you for the reminder about Science. Under the assumption that user Science is the same person who previously used a software exploit to give −10 to all comments that disagreed with him back in 2016, i will be treating them as a troll from now on.
(I was wondering why Science had so many upvotes here.)
Agree, and I think this is a really important and overlooked implication, that two tribes will talk past each other on. Unfair discrimination persists even with rational, non-racist, greedy capitalist.
A less charged example would be life insurance policies. Almost everyone would agree that mortality tables are acceptable; almost everyone could also imagine themselves getting older, and could imagine themselves as above average with in their group. The insurer will rationally charge the older group more premium. Atypical healthier older people within this group have experience unfair discrimination and the insurer is rationally non-prejudiced.
So when one tribe says that markets will punish racist, it doesn’t fix unfair discrimination. And when other tribe says that there is unfair discrimination, that doesn’t mean there is rampant racism. I personally feel a lot of compassion towards atypical individuals within a disadvantaged group, but how could we improve?
Well, do we want to fix the problem, or only to reduce its visibility?
By “reducing visibility” I mean solutions where some individuals are still discriminated more than others, but the numbers don’t show up when you do the statistics by race. As a reductio-ad-absurdum example, having cops additionally shoot a few innocent white people would fix the race statistics. I can imagine a few less obviously absurd solutions which would work in a similar way, some of them might even sound acceptable to an average reader.
But if we want to solve the essence of the problem, well, either we need to make sure innocent bystanders are never killed, or that all people have the same chance to be in a proximity of crime. I don’t think either is achievable. But there can be partial improvements in both directions.
For example, if we could reduce the total number of innocent people killed, then in absolute numbers there would also be less black innocent people killed. Ironically, for the BLM purposes, this might not register as an improvement. Imagine that the probability of innocent people being killed drops to a half, and it drops to a half for each ethnic group. Obviously, this would be an improvement for everyone. But if you would calculate the ratio of the probabilities for different ethnic groups, in this model it would remain exactly the same, so BLM would have the same reason to complain.
I am not sure about this, but maybe things like basic income could help poor people to get out of places with high crime. Imagine that whenever there is too much crime at some place, people who don’t participate in the criminal activities start moving away, because it’s easier for them. But probably I am just imagining things here.