By the time you get to incidents like police's violent arrest of SNL's Jay Pharoah [0], complete with knee on the neck (fortunately not long enough to kill him), you have potentially hundreds of thousands of people being affected and treated like this every year.
That still implies they are killed at a higher rate. The population we're concerned about isn't "people who have already been pulled over".
Murder rates have gone down since 70's and at their lowest point, but with the introduction of national and world news it makes people think murders have gone up, so they don't let their kids walk to school. Some people have an irrational fear of flying because of news. People have fear of skydiving because they watch too many movies and think a parachute will fail, when the data shows the exact opposite. 99% of are deaths not related to parachute failing.
So I see the police killings as a world that has gotten smaller, video camera's in everyones pocket and social media that has painted a picture of world that doesn't exist. It strikes fear into people and the psychological issues will be felt for decades.
Wait, what? Take a second look at the first 3 paragraphs, and then the "Racial Patterns" section of that Wikipedia article you linked.
When people say that police killings aren't racially motivated, they are disputing the causes of the disparity in race-based deaths, not the disparity itself.
I mean, you can just do the math from recorded police shootings yourself, and you pretty consistently across multiple years get death-per-million numbers for black communities that are around 1.5-2.5x as large as for white communities. Black men are pretty objectively killed at higher rates than white men, the studies you're talking about are questioning why that is and whether officer bias and/or systemic racism plays a role in those numbers.
2015:
> A 2015 study found that unarmed blacks were 3.49 times more likely to be shot by police than were unarmed whites. [...] Another 2015 study concluded that black people were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
2016:
> According to The Guardian's database, in 2016 the rate of fatal police shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.6 for black people, 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.9 for white people and 1.17 for Asians. [...] Another study published in 2016 concluded that the mortality rate of legal interventions among black and Hispanic people was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher than that among white people.
2018:
> A 2018 study found that minorities are disproportionately killed by police but that white officers are not more likely to use lethal force on blacks than minority officers.
2019:
> A 2019 study in the Journal of Politics found that police officers were more likely to use lethal force on blacks, but that this was "most likely driven by higher rates of police contact among African Americans rather than racial differences in the circumstances of the interaction and officer bias in the application of lethal force." A 2019 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that blacks and American Indian/Alaska Natives are more likely to be killed by police than whites and that Latino men are more likely to be killed than white men.
----
I see exactly one study in this section that disputes the disparity itself, and that study was widely criticized and ended up issuing a correction:
> A 2019 study in PNAS concluded from a dataset of fatal shootings that white officers were not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers [...] The study was widely criticized by other academics, who stated that the study's conclusion could not be supported by the data. [...] PNAS issued a correction to the original article.
I don't see data from the FBI mentioned in the racial disparity section. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to.
Again though, you don't need to do a complicated study to find the disparity itself. You can literally just add up the number of deaths for each race and then divide by population numbers in the US for black/white communities. You'll get higher per-million numbers for black communities than for white ones. I'm not sure how someone could dispute that, unless you're arguing that the Guardian is under-reporting white deaths or something[0]. If you want to debate the causes behind that disparity, then that's a separate conversation.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...
> Police killings are one of the leading causes of death for young men in the United States.[5] A study by Esposito, Lee, Edwards predicts that 1 in 2,000 men and 1 in 33,000 women die as a result of police use of deadly force.[5] The same study predicts the risk is highest for black men, as approximately 1 in 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.[5]
I don't get how people don't understand the distinction. If one airplane crashes that doesn't mean there is an institutional airline safety problem. But if you don't even bother to do an honest investigation about what happened, then we absolutely have an institutional problem.
You’re conveniently forgetting the fact that most police killings doesn’t officially count as “murder,” and is effectively deemed legal by the courts.
Should it not be -> number of deaths by race DIVIDED BY police interaction by race?
Or maybe -> number of deaths by race DIVIDED BY police interaction by race but only for 911 emergencies (or something like that)
"Black people are X percent more/less likely to be killed than white people by police", is a different statement than, "Black people are X percent more/less likely to be killed than white people by police during a police interaction."
The first statement just draws attention to a very straightforwardly observable data trend, the second tries to figure out why the trend exists. It posits that the reason black people are killed at a higher rate might be because they have disproportionately higher numbers of police encounters.
And from there, people can ask why that trend exists, and so on, and so on.
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
> Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and off enders. Th e victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000). Th e off ending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000) (table 1)
From the article
> A 2015 study by Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that there was no racial bias in the use of lethal police force between black and white suspects in similar situations. The study did, however, find that blacks and Hispanics are significantly more likely to experience non-lethal use of force.
> A 2016 study published in the journal Injury Prevention concluded that African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos were more likely to be stopped by police compared to Asians and whites, but found that there was no racial bias in the likelihood of being killed or injured after being stopped
As an analogy, a truck driver might be less likely to crash or be killed on any specific drive than I am. However, a truck driver also drives a lot more than I do, so a truck driver is still more likely overall to die in a vehicle crash than I am.
In the same way, even if we lived in a world where blacks were less likely to be killed in an individual police interaction, that doesn't change the fact that a black person is still more likely overall to be killed by a police officer than I am.
Naming issues aside, reducing the amount of time the 'truck driver' spends on the road is one of the biggest goals of the "defund the police" movement. But again, that's a separate discussion.
In regards to point 1). The parent comment is expressing worry about a statistically insignificant event (framed properly (unarmed, non-justified, non-suicide)) and the following response frames the fear as statistically insignificant. I think this is undeniable and the reason why data is important. Again, this isn't a conversation about whether this is an institutional problem; it's about whether we should live in constant fear of airlines because one airline crashes.
While 2). is a bit more difficult to breakdown. Yes, I think an easy case can be made about cops needing more accountability (for the sake of police generally and society). but do we need institutional change broadly (accountability +) because the police system is racist against people of color? ....Well, that's a claim. That's where data is important and feelings are no longer relevant.