We are fond of polls showing that liberals have a better grasp on reality than conservatives. But it's not always the case. Matt Yglesias points us today to this poll from the Skeptic Research Center:
According to the Washington Post's Fatal Force Database, the correct answer was 13 in 2019. That includes only Black men killed by guns, so the broader answer might be 20-30.
In any case, conservatives clearly have a much closer estimate than liberals. What's more, there are far fewer conservatives than the 10-20% of liberals who think the correct answer is 10,000 (!) or more.
These kinds of polls should always be taken with a shaker of salt. The answers rarely depend on actual knowledge—how many people have the slightest idea how many unarmed Black men are killed by cops each year?—and instead represent little more than guesses based on ideology. If the correct answer is a liberal one, then liberals do better. If the correct answer is a conservative one, conservatives do better. Most of the time, that's all there is to it.
Except 'unarmed' is doing heavy lifting here.
Police have been getting more creative of 'armed' including things like pocket tools and cars - not just a credible threat - in the 'armed' category.
WaPo's database for 2019:
249 Black Americans were shot dead by police.
Of those shot dead, the number with a "weapon":
167 - gun
33 - knife
19 - vehicle
6 - toy weapon
11 - other
In how many of these cases was the weapon being brandished? Was Philando Castile "armed" when he told officers there was a licensed gun in his car?
Yeah, I spent fifteen minutes going through that database. Start with 27, the number killed by police cited in the study (including those not killed with a gun). Add in 6 who had toy weapons (none of whom, coincidentally, had body cam footage) and 3 who I found who were armed with a "car" and were not, according to news coverage, trying to hit anyone with that car when they were shot. That puts you at 36 already, with a lot of "maybe"s. Plus there are >500 people killed by police who were of unknown race, according to the Post's database, and that doesn't count people not killed by car. And all of this ignores people who were killed without hitting the media.
I think that ~100 is actually probably just about right.
Sorry, I meant *people not killed by gun
Good analysis. I took a look myself and noticed that Chris Joseph, who was listed as armed with a car, was actually a passenger.
Big Rodney King energy.
Well, at least 'vehicle', we can be pretty sure it wasn't a drop piece.
That feels like a loaded question, implying that armed black men deserve to be shot to death because they're black *and* armed.
The fairer question, IMO, would be, "How many black men were killed by police in 2019?"
In that case, the answer is 249 in 2019.
So, regardless if you're armed or not, if you're Black in America, you're 13.4% of the population but account for 25% of the deaths at the hands of a police officer.
Agreed, especially in a country where allegedly everyone - even black men if you can believe it! - have the 2nd Amendment right to be armed at all times. So if that’s true, the cops shouldn’t be killing armed black men just for being armed.
Of course, here in our reality, it’s obvious black men don’t really have 2nd Amendment rights. If they’ve got a gun, they’re automatically allowed to be executed without trial by the police... and “moderate liberals” like Kevin will give a free pass to our law enforcement system for all that “due process denied” by focusing solely on the low-ish official number of unarmed black men killed by police. (Which other people have pointed out includes black men allegedly using cars and toys as “weapons.”)
Shame on you Kevin.
What percent of blacks do things that put them in situations where they may be shot by police versus the percent of whites that do such things? That's the relevant statistic.
What percentage of attacks ON police do you figure blacks commit? 25%? You figure it's lower than that?
Which sort of gets to the question of "is that a lot?"
I think the Guardian did a good job a couple of years ago with "the Counted" the comprehensive list of police killings.
Its astonishing that every group thinks that the number is more like 100 to 1000, and 1000 closer to the overall number of killings of all ethnic groups.
Of course, killings of unarmed people are, for African Americans, the tip of an iceberg of wildly disproportionate law enforcement against them.
From the Guardian's perspective, the number of non-black killings was just as outrageous.
Are the real numbers irrelevant? A lot of the woke people I know say they will never call 911 if a Black person is involved - not even for domestic assaults they see with their own eyes or for what is likely a medical emergency. They are convinced that the rate of police killings is so high that it's safer for a black person to lie passed out in the street than have a cop show up. What should a bystander do instead of calling 911? See if a friend with medical experience can drop everything and come to the scene, of course!
It does scare me that we may be leaving people to suffer in pain, or possibly die, because of fear of something that is incredibly unlikely.
This does beg to give people better courses in basic statistics.
Like, 13 surprises me. I would have guessed between 100 and 500. More would be an epidemic level of police shooting, though not impossible, up to a 1,000. Past that point, we're talking war tallies. And, while I don't doubt for a second that police brutality towards Black people in America is real and serious and widespread, I don't think it reaches war zone levels...
Bear in mind, the 13 is self reported by law enforcement agencies. So the same police departments that kill a black man are the ones who decide whether the toy gun he was carrying through Walmart, the car he was driving when he was pulled over or the unloaded gun that he had a permit for and which was in the glove compartment counts as “armed with a weapon” or not.
I’d take that 13 with a grain of salt. As others here who looked at the data pointed out, there were 200+ more instances in which the “weapon” was questionable.
Prime age population says the number of black men and the number of white men is about the same, unarmed, killed by police. Everybody knows groups like "BLM" is a racial movement that cares little about anybody else. Its a loser and needs thrown out. Social Nationalism laughs at the progtards on this one. Shame on you. The media refusal to list the number of white/brown men/women shot by the cops makes it worse. Gaslighting for the sake of it. Regulation is needed obviously.
Oh, my - why don't you stay with your buddies instead of resorting to immature name-calling here?
Most if us have had enough of that behavior since 2015 unleashed it.
Citation not included?
That you, Shootie?
Kevin seriously needs to create a way for users to block the crazies and the sh!tposters if he doesn’t want his comments section to become a toxic sewer.
Try this one:
How many murders were committed in the US in 2019 (2020 data are not yet available):
10,000 or fewer
10,001 - 20,000
20,001 - 30,000
30,001 - 40,000
More than 40,000
This is
Fewer than in 1992
About the same as in 1992
More than in 1992
Sorry. I thought my comment had not posted, so I redid it with more detail. My bad.
Try this poll:
How many murders were reported in 2919? (Data for 2020 are not yet available.)
15,000 or fewer
15,100 - 25,000
25,001 - 40,000
400,001 or more
What has happened to t he murder rate, measured as murders per million of the population?
Decreased by 50% or more
Decreased by 20% to 49%
Decreased by less than 20%
About the same.
Increased by20% or less.
Increased by 21% to 40%
Increased by more 40%
Best review of Tenet I have read.
Do not let the loading of this question escape you. The question was designed so that the range of choices stretched from the correct value at the low end through several much higher numbers, geometrically rising, so that the highest choice offered was wildly off the mark. It's trying to get people who aren't that numerically adept to guess high.
Conservatives should get no points for just letting their political id run as they chose the option least friendly to the struggle against racial inequality. What if 0 and 3 were offered as possibilities? They'd have crowded into those buckets. Liberals, on the other hand, proved far less likely to veer off into the end of the chart that suited their emotional leanings. The poll results reflect many liberals thinking, "It happened a lot, but not that many times." They mostly kept it real.
This is a good point. Where was the zero and five? The two hundred and the fifty?
My thoughts exactly ... only you said it first and better than I would have to boot. The only other thought I would add is to ask why there's not a "don't know" option to pick. There's a lot of research out there to the effect that a) people don't like to say they don't know (not because they don't want to admit it, but because they're trying to be helpful), and b) that when people don't know the answers to multiple choice questions, they tend to pick the 'middle' answer, for various values of 'middle'.
numeracy...
scale...
statistics....
Unfortunately,we are not well versed in these things. And few discussions put things into perspective, since many times that might dull the impact.
House fires are down--much better building codes.
Deaths in car accidents down--better safety requirements.
Crime down from last century's high levels--we finally got a lot of the lead out
The number of deaths at the hands of officers is not huge, but certainly is higher than it should be. However, it's the daily run ins that are probably the problem--the multiple stops of driving or walking while black and the violence or threat of violence that entails. That ends this round of white man-splaining.
Sure. I think the wildly unfair deaths serve as extreme "revealers" for the daily abuse you describe.
Basically, it forces us, the white majority, to agree that "yes, this is going on and yes, it is not fair and we should do something about it"...
The correct answer isn’t 13 (which as others have pointed out doesn’t include dead black men who legally were permitted to carry a gun nor dead black men whose “weapon” was a car, a toy or other non-gun object).
The correct answer to “how many unarmed people (of any race) were killed by police?” should be 0 in a decent advanced society. It’s something lots of other advanced countries achieve year after year, conducting major inquests in the off years when a cop wrecks the streak by murdering an unarmed citizen. It’s something we should be striving for in this country too, and not settling for “only 13” of this racial group and other “low” figures for other racial groups. There is pretty much zero reason for unarmed people to be shot, and there is definitely zero reason for the police shooters to go unpunished in any way for their lack of judgment in not turning on their body cams before executing someone who turned out to be unarmed.
"These kinds of polls should always be taken with a shaker of salt. The answers rarely depend on actual knowledge—how many people have the slightest idea how many unarmed Black men are killed by cops each year?"
Well you'd bloody think they'd have a good idea of how many, considering that's about 50% of what the media talks about in the last year.