Sorry conservatives, new research from Harvard shows a profound amount of racism by police…not less

[Judi Lynn]

Thursday, Jul 14, 2016 04:56 AM CDT

Sorry conservatives, new research from Harvard shows a profound amount of racism by police…not less of it

Don't believe the right-wing spin about Harvard's damning study that illustrates how cops target blacks

Chauncey DeVega

Philando Castile was killed by a Minneapolis-area police officer while giving him his identification. Like so many other black men, Levar Jones was also shot by a white police officer while fully complying with his commands. Eric Garner was choked to death while screaming “I can’t breathe.” John Crawford III was killed in a Walmart by police because he was carrying a toy gun that he wanted to purchase. Jonathan Ferrel was killed by a white police officer while seeking help after a car accident. 12-year-old Tamir Rice was street executed by the Cleveland police in less than 3 seconds.

Stories and personal experiences of police thuggery and violence are so common in the black community that they constitute a type of collective memory and group trauma.

Thus, it is a type of common sense fact that America’s police are more likely to use lethal force against black people than they are whites. But what if this is not true?

New research by Harvard University economist Roland Freyer severely upsets this narrative.

More:
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/14/sorry_conservatives_new_research_from_harvard_shows_a_profound_amount_of_racism_by_policenot_less_of_it/

[merrily]

1. If the amount of violence against whites equals the amount of violence against people of color,

Last edited Thu Jul 14, 2016, 12:25 PM - Edit history (1)

someone has been doing a great job of hushing up stories about white victims and that not what our media is known for.

[Igel]

3. Read at least the non-tech parts of the paper.

Then we can discuss what it says, instead of what's said about it or what others wished this research had been (but, sadly, failed to control their "pet" so he did the research *he* wanted).

In short: If you're a Latino or black and stopped by cops, you're more likely to experience greater levels of non-lethal force or the same level more often. If you're Latino or black and stopped there's no elevated risk of being shot. Nothing said about likelihood that the shot will result in death or not. Community surveys done by others roughly agree with this, but the reports are worse from people long after the fact than from the police, unless you're white. If you're white, then the police reports show more non-lethal force than whites report. That's a conundrum for the research, who speculates on the basis of statistics and not psychology--and that is the standard, "Perhaps there's something non-random about this dataset". If so, they don't know what it is. The dataset isn't national--there is no national dataset, so expectations of a national sample are just misguided--but was from there large cities and a bunch of counties that had the appropriate data available. Even then, it took a lot of reading and coding to produce something that could be analysed as numbers instead of a mass of anecdotes. This, it turns out, was good, because it gave them precinct-level data usually stripped out of departmental data filings, and there's a wide range of variation in the use of force by precinct.

Yes, that's "in short." But people have jumped on the "no elevated risk of being shot" part (my quote is from the previous paragraph) and denounced it. Or they look at the elevated risk of non-lethal force and trumpet it. One point that the researcher does make, though, is that everybody's perceptions are skewed because they're presented with a very small, very non-representative sample of police violence on which to form their opinions and beliefs, and with the presentation comes spin and confirmation bias. As though this wasn't obvious from the word "go".

[1StrongBlackMan]

2. Posted to for later.