Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1].
There are millions and millions of daily interactions between police and civilians every year. Sadly, there will be some mistakes, some of which will be caught on camera.
It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is.
[1] Johns Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
Oh cool, a guy on Hacker News cited a John's Hopkins article. Pack it up protestors, racism isn't real and cops aren't tear gasing reporters in the face!
GP questioned how a profession can exist when it makes so many deadly mistakes. I pointed out that there is another profession, medicine, which also makes lots of deadly mistakes. Some are accidental oversights, but you can also do some searches and find some really bad medical errors. [1] but you can find lots more.
Again, what the media draws attention to, and what is going on in society on a daily basis, are not the same thing. Racism and police misconduct existed before 2020, but it just in the last few weeks really popped onto the media's attention.
And again, because of the sheer size of the United States, you have to look at statistics in addition to anecdotes when you think about policy.
[1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
[1] - https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bm...
But of those 250,000, some will be small mistake, and some will be epic fuck ups (see [1]).
Similarly, the police shoot around 1,000 people per year. Of those, many are justified, some are are questionable, and a few are epic fuck ups. If you just look at the epic fuck ups, you may believe that policing is completely broken in America. If you look at it in context, you'd probably conclude that the system works well in some cases, not well in other cases, and that there are lots of tradeoffs and no easy answer.
I'd recommend Peter Moskos's blog and podcast (www.copinthehood.com and www.qualitypolicing.com) to get a more even handed perspective than you'd find in the media. I'm not defending every single police shooting, but I think the recent shift in public opinion is not based on a good understanding of policing in America.
[1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
This is true, and these videos help show that. There are more and more cases being uncovered where the police blatantly lied about their own misconduct in official reports. For instance, the police claimed the the Buffalo protester fell when video shows the police pushed him over, and the police report for the killing of George Floyd made no mention of holding him down by the neck. If there hadn't been video, I doubt either of those two incidents would have been counted in police misconduct statistics.
Then why link to that study and specifically cite that 250,000 number?
One of the main differences with doctors is when they truly do have an epic fuck up they are personally sued and can potentially lose their medical license. How many of the epic fuck ups by police in the linked Google doc will lead to the officer being sued? How many will lead to them being forced to switch to a different profession? Why do we allow these police to epicly fuck up in ways that we don't allow other professions like doctors? Does tolerating these epic fuck ups among police make them more likely to epicly fuck up in the future?
Statistics are meant to understand and bring meaning to chaotic events, like random car accidents, or randomly rolling a dice, or random mechanical failure of some complex system.
Statistics doesn’t work so well, when human interactions become involved.
And it doesn’t work well in this situation, when it comes to policing, where the officer is of the predominant ethnicity, and the victim is of a minority ethnicity.
However, you can probably infer that if the policing is done where the ethnicity of the officer and the civilian, is of a primary vs. minority ethnicity, that there will be enhanced levels of violence involved. This can be one way to infer the statistics.
At a fundamental level, there are human biases involved. There is no escaping this.
It’s possible that if you and the police officer are of the same ethnicity, then you likely have a lower chance of being assaulted or harassed by the police officer.
However, if you are a minority, or of a different ethnicity than the police officer which is of the primary ethnicity, then your probability of being assaulted or harassed by the officer goes up significantly.
The police enforcement system, is really a reflection of society.
Because it is the society that puts these police officers into positions of authority, and it is the same society that keeps them in authority.
So if the police system is corrupt, then at a fundamental level, the society is corrupt.
You can’t fix the problem, if you can’t even acknowledge that you have a problem.
It’s like Trump’s administration that recently said: There is no systemic racism in American Law Enforcement.
Thus, how can you fix something, if you can’t even acknowledge it.
I think the issue people are rioting about is that it's not a 1 in a billion chance for everyone. It's more like 1 in a quintillion for a rich white person, and 1 in a million for a person of color. That inequality stems from systemic racism in the police force. What you're saying is that it would be less of a problem if the deaths were evenly distributed across the population. That may be true, but I don't think many people would suggest it as a viable solution to the problem.
Profiling is an aspect of systemic racism.
Ok, the EU has 445M citizens[1] which means, by your logic, there should statistically be 40% more police "mistakes" than the US. Except there isn't. It is radically lower[2] (1536 for the USA in 2019 vs 51 for the EU in 2018/19).
[1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
Systemic racism doesn't need animosity for it to happen. Systemic racism is a term for how a system discriminates against race - that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents. That's not "racist" in the sense that someone deliberately decided to give people of color get less resources, but the outcome of the decision is that people of color get less resources. That is systemic racism. There doesn't need to be any racist intent on the part of any individuals in that system for it to happen (though there often is.)
> that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents.
is purely economic discrimination. Frankly, I think the recent redefinition is lacking.
No one is drawing the line on race. No one is saying "Let's fix race issues and ignore gender and poverty issues." All of these problems need to be fixed. People are focusing on race right now because several people have been literally killed by police officers who have been charged with their murders.
Ever seen some racists pushing their views the last 5 years in the most reactionary fashion? Of course you are drawing the line on race, believe it or not. Ever noticed the talk about white privilege by some latte-slurping pseudo academics saturating any discussion on racism without necessary experience? Some people obviously did.
You can argue that there is an established academic jargon, but I would dispute its accuracy and perspective as well.
First, a disagreement. Your base assumption that police activity should scale linearly with population. This is just obviously not correct. There are huge, huge differences in countries and crime rates. You can look at differences in homicide rate, for example [1]. The united states has a pretty shockingly high homicide rate for a developed country (4.96 per 100k). This is 5x higher than France or Germany. On the other end you have Japan, which is about 5x lower than France or Germany (25x lower than United States).
But that aside, the important question is: is crime driving police activity, or are the police widely malicious and corrupt? I'll admit that I'm not knowledgable enough to give a good answer to this question, but I'm very skeptical of jumping to a conclusion based on selective evidence on social media or recent news coverage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...