(I have to remind myself that I don’t actually know you and can call you Glenn despite the fact that you and Dr. McWhorter have been a presence in my intellectual life for the past year +)
Both you and Dr McWhorter indicated in this discussion as well in multiple prior discussions that you both believe there is a problem with policing. Whether it’s the Fryer data showing worse non-lethal treatment or the rate of incarceration and disproportionate impact that has had on the black community, you’ve both been quite clear that there’s a problem with policing. You, more than Dr. McWhorter, have also been vehement in pointing out that there’s a problem of lawlessness, undereducation and undersocialization in the urban black communities in the US as well.
So I want to ask you, Dr. Loury, as man of numbers and data, what is the threshold below which you’d say the problem is primarily the latter and the former problem is really negligible as you have with claims of systemic racism?
I’m predicting this question on my understanding of the data. Certainly if The numbers are wrong then my assessment of the policing problem will be as well.
As I understand it, there are about 50,000,000 police-civilian interactions in the US annually. There are consistently about 10,000,000 arrests annually. Approximately 1,100 people are killed by cops annually. 900-1000 are shot. Roughly 100 are unarmed. And from 2015 until 2020 or so, about 40% of the unarmed people shot by cops were black. In 2019 and 2020 this numbers plummeted from around 40 to 17 and 9 IIRC.
Just a little back of the envelope math tells me that the likelihood of being killed by a cop in any interaction is 0.0022% and in an interaction that leads to arrest is 0.11% And if you’re unarmed the numbers are 0.0002% and 0.001% and that’s ALL comers, not just black victims.
So I ask, what’s the threshold for acceptability? Is it 0 killings by cops? I don’t think that’s realistic. Police and perpetrators are human after all so things will go haywire sometimes. So what’s the goal here? I’m all for better training for cops, more de-escalation training, more non-lethal submission training, higher admission standards, lower dismissal standards, the whole thing. We would ALL benefit from that. But is it reasonable to expect markedly better performance than this? Even if you assume undercounting on not only killings but also “hands on” mistreatment of black suspects or anyone else for that matter, how many magnitudes off does the data have to be to achieve a level that totals 1% of arrests? Do you really think all the available data is off by 10 fold? 100fold? And even then you’re talking about cops getting it right 99% of the time.
I was a very good student, but that’s a very high bar. I’m a physician now and I see the same impulse negatively affecting my profession as the bar has become perfection; no complications, no suboptimal outcomes, no accounting for complexity or nuance are acceptable outcomes. So what are we doing here? Or what am I missing?
I hope you can address this aspect at some point either here or maybe with Dr. McWhorter during a Q&A.
Yes, this should be the first question asked in this week’s Q & A! Look at the numbers and tell us exactly what reforms could nudge us closer to perfection. The anti-vaxxers seize on any bad outcome and trumpet it far and wide, in exactly the same way as the Defund the Police crowd do every time a person of color is killed by the police. Yet we know that vaccines are statistically risk-free.
Since you veered off topic, I will follow you into that territory: Although I have taken two Pfizer gene therapy injections, I am nonetheless stunned by the tactic of slurring people who may have concerns about the current Covid-19 "vaccines" by calling them "anti-vaxxers" and asserting that "we know that vaccines are statistically risk-free." I do NOT know that, and I have a strong perception that the public health establishment does not want me to know. If you want to veer off topic from police misconduct to vaccines, please provide cites to specific scientific studies showing that the currently available "vaccines" are risk-free for people of all ages. I know you used the weasel word "statistically," but this is a serious question. And yes, I am intelligent enough to read scientific studies, so no corporate media stories, please.
Dr. Loury
(I have to remind myself that I don’t actually know you and can call you Glenn despite the fact that you and Dr. McWhorter have been a presence in my intellectual life for the past year +)
Both you and Dr McWhorter indicated in this discussion as well in multiple prior discussions that you both believe there is a problem with policing. Whether it’s the Fryer data showing worse non-lethal treatment or the rate of incarceration and disproportionate impact that has had on the black community, you’ve both been quite clear that there’s a problem with policing. You, more than Dr. McWhorter, have also been vehement in pointing out that there’s a problem of lawlessness, undereducation and undersocialization in the urban black communities in the US as well.
So I want to ask you, Dr. Loury, as man of numbers and data, what is the threshold below which you’d say the problem is primarily the latter and the former problem is really negligible as you have with claims of systemic racism?
I’m predicting this question on my understanding of the data. Certainly if The numbers are wrong then my assessment of the policing problem will be as well.
As I understand it, there are about 50,000,000 police-civilian interactions in the US annually. There are consistently about 10,000,000 arrests annually. Approximately 1,100 people are killed by cops annually. 900-1000 are shot. Roughly 100 are unarmed. And from 2015 until 2020 or so, about 40% of the unarmed people shot by cops were black. In 2019 and 2020 this numbers plummeted from around 40 to 17 and 9 IIRC.
Just a little back of the envelope math tells me that the likelihood of being killed by a cop in any interaction is 0.0022% and in an interaction that leads to arrest is 0.11% And if you’re unarmed the numbers are 0.0002% and 0.001% and that’s ALL comers, not just black victims.
So I ask, what’s the threshold for acceptability? Is it 0 killings by cops? I don’t think that’s realistic. Police and perpetrators are human after all so things will go haywire sometimes. So what’s the goal here? I’m all for better training for cops, more de-escalation training, more non-lethal submission training, higher admission standards, lower dismissal standards, the whole thing. We would ALL benefit from that. But is it reasonable to expect markedly better performance than this? Even if you assume undercounting on not only killings but also “hands on” mistreatment of black suspects or anyone else for that matter, how many magnitudes off does the data have to be to achieve a level that totals 1% of arrests? Do you really think all the available data is off by 10 fold? 100fold? And even then you’re talking about cops getting it right 99% of the time.
I was a very good student, but that’s a very high bar. I’m a physician now and I see the same impulse negatively affecting my profession as the bar has become perfection; no complications, no suboptimal outcomes, no accounting for complexity or nuance are acceptable outcomes. So what are we doing here? Or what am I missing?
I hope you can address this aspect at some point either here or maybe with Dr. McWhorter during a Q&A.
Thanks
Yes, this should be the first question asked in this week’s Q & A! Look at the numbers and tell us exactly what reforms could nudge us closer to perfection. The anti-vaxxers seize on any bad outcome and trumpet it far and wide, in exactly the same way as the Defund the Police crowd do every time a person of color is killed by the police. Yet we know that vaccines are statistically risk-free.
Since you veered off topic, I will follow you into that territory: Although I have taken two Pfizer gene therapy injections, I am nonetheless stunned by the tactic of slurring people who may have concerns about the current Covid-19 "vaccines" by calling them "anti-vaxxers" and asserting that "we know that vaccines are statistically risk-free." I do NOT know that, and I have a strong perception that the public health establishment does not want me to know. If you want to veer off topic from police misconduct to vaccines, please provide cites to specific scientific studies showing that the currently available "vaccines" are risk-free for people of all ages. I know you used the weasel word "statistically," but this is a serious question. And yes, I am intelligent enough to read scientific studies, so no corporate media stories, please.
This is a really excellent question.
Heather MacDonald has made similar points with the same data as well.
Predicating not predicting