zlacker

Wait, what’s your math here? Black deaths by police are 4.5/100k and white is 1.5, that’s a 3x or 300% difference.

>>awinde+(OP)
I think it's "30%" (it's not). If p (pct population) is scaled to units of "people", and m as crimes/year and k as (deaths in custody) / (100k people), we want to compare the magnitudes of p * (k / m) for the two groups. Plugging the numbers in as cited, and putting the African American cohort over the White cohort, we get 1.3, i.e. "30%" increase in probability of dying during a police interaction if black.

But as has already been pointed out, it's way more than 30%. The numbers given in the original comment hide the real impact of the bias, since "arrest" was implicitly being treated as a fair event (which it isn't; as just one example, blacks in particular are many times more likely to be subject to a traffic stop than whites, while they tend to have contraband on their possession less often [1][2][3][4]).

Moreover, this isn't just about deaths in police custody. This is about inhumane and repressive policing practices that perpetuate a longstanding effort to deprive blacks of meaningful political power [5]. It is both foolish and cruel to see an entire population struggling and assume it's because they are bad people.

[1] https://sfdistrictattorney.org/sites/default/files/Document/... [2] https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Fina... [3] https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/traffic-stop-data-... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traff... [5] See Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow