I sincerely appreciate your additional analysis! (It is exactly what I hoped to receive.)
I will check my math at some point. I did much of the stats using relatively complex formulas in Excel, so anything is possible. I did not get into the additional factors, which you convey---the number of police encounters, for example. Any way you slice it, given the number of interactions a citizen might have with police, even assuming a small percentage of them involve violence, the numbers of shooting deaths strike both of us as "almost" unavoidable. There is a concept in statistics wherein the only way to change the number of observations requires an environmental modification so severe as to render the quest idiotic. Consider, in order to further lower the number of folks hit by lightning, one might have to restrict people to indoors only, or some such!
In full disclosure, I actually think that the behavior of police with respect to Black folks specifically, and minorities in general, reflects some bias. (Not a shocking discovery, right?) The war on (some) drugs is, in my mind, an excellent example of selective or "targeted" enforcement. Those quibbles aside, one is hard pressed to conclude that police are trying--at least very successfully--to shoot as many Black folk as they can. Or maybe the small numbers we see reflect the best they can do!?!?
Update: The numbers I reported are the fraction of the entire ~1000 that were armed with a gun AND were killed by the police. This, in contrast to the entire dataset. Again, thanks to Clifton Roscoe for the coattail pulling. (Errors in data analysis make it fun!)
I sincerely appreciate your additional analysis! (It is exactly what I hoped to receive.)
I will check my math at some point. I did much of the stats using relatively complex formulas in Excel, so anything is possible. I did not get into the additional factors, which you convey---the number of police encounters, for example. Any way you slice it, given the number of interactions a citizen might have with police, even assuming a small percentage of them involve violence, the numbers of shooting deaths strike both of us as "almost" unavoidable. There is a concept in statistics wherein the only way to change the number of observations requires an environmental modification so severe as to render the quest idiotic. Consider, in order to further lower the number of folks hit by lightning, one might have to restrict people to indoors only, or some such!
In full disclosure, I actually think that the behavior of police with respect to Black folks specifically, and minorities in general, reflects some bias. (Not a shocking discovery, right?) The war on (some) drugs is, in my mind, an excellent example of selective or "targeted" enforcement. Those quibbles aside, one is hard pressed to conclude that police are trying--at least very successfully--to shoot as many Black folk as they can. Or maybe the small numbers we see reflect the best they can do!?!?
I don’t think any cop wants to be the next Derek Chauvin.
Update: The numbers I reported are the fraction of the entire ~1000 that were armed with a gun AND were killed by the police. This, in contrast to the entire dataset. Again, thanks to Clifton Roscoe for the coattail pulling. (Errors in data analysis make it fun!)