Given the recent media coverage of police pointing guns at Black men, I thought you might all be interested in some statistics. These come from "Contacts Between Police and the Public," a triannual report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report for 2018 was released a couple of months ago and starts off with this basic table:
You might be surprised by this. The key thing we're interested in is contact initiated by the police, which is about 80% traffic stops. As you can see, Black drivers and white drivers are stopped at nearly the same rate: 11.7% and 11.0%. This is based on survey data in which people report their own experience.
Now let's move on to use of force by police. Black and Hispanic respondents report that police used force on them at more than twice the rate reported by white respondents. But there's also this:
Black respondents report having a gun pointed at them at eight times the rate of white respondents. (The number for Hispanics is unreliable due to small sample size, so don't pay too much attention to that.)
If these self-reported statistics are accurate, Black and white drivers (along with street encounters) are stopped by police at roughly the same rate. But Black men (and it's mostly men) have guns aimed at them eight times more often. This probably explains why we see so many examples of this captured on video. It's because it happens so often.
Hmm. Re:
"Black men (and it's mostly men) have guns aimed at them eight times more often. This probably explains why we see so many examples of this captured on video. It's because it happens so often."
Eight times as often but roughly 19MM police initiated encounters with whites and 3.3 MM with Blacks. Roughly 6-1.
If filming was random shouldn't there be 3 white videos for every 4 Black ones?
OK, this is not just traffic stops, but per the WaPo the police kill about 1,000 civilians a year. Roughly half are white, half Black or Hispanic. That also suggests videos ought to be closer to 50/50.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/four-years-in-a-row-police-nationwide-fatally-shoot-nearly-1000-people/2019/02/07/0cb3b098-020f-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html
Why do you assume that filming is random?
I don't. I said "If".
But Kevin is suggesting we see Black encounters more often because they are more common. I'm saying there roughly equal in occurrence. Suggests something else is the explanation, yes?
Are you fixated on how race plays a role in the number of encounters that are videotaped? Why is that relevant?
Also, I didn't mention this earlier, but you do realize that the wording for Table 5 distinctly asks about a person's most-recent encounter, which means that it doesn't necessarily apply to the numbers reported in Table 1. Some folks, perhaps several, have had multiple encounters in 2018, but their most-recent one did not include use of force.
Is that addressed to me or to Kevin? His conclusion seems to be "fixated" on how often we see videos of Black encounters.
""Black men (and it's mostly men) have guns aimed at them eight times more often. This probably explains why we see so many examples of this captured on video. It's because it happens so often."
You *are* making the assumption.
Your premise is that they're random, setting up your hypothesis, that, by having roughly equal number of incidences, there must be a reason why random filming isn't shown in equal numbers.
I could go one step further and ask if you're posturing a rhetorical question.
Explain.
I'm not sure what I'm typing is actually being read, but one more time: this was Kevin's conclusion:
""Black men (and it's mostly men) have guns aimed at them eight times more often. This probably explains why we see so many examples of this captured on video. It's because it happens so often."
I would say that embeds an inaccurate conclusion of an 8-1 ratio, based on the arithmetic I described above.
It also seems to embed an assumption that we see Black encounters more often than white (or I'm misreading it). I don't even know if that is true, but I rolled with it.
To summarize what I am trying to say:
Kevin - Black encounters are eight times as frequent which is why we see them more often. No mystery, nothing to explain. We see them in the proportion they occur. I'd infer Kevin is saying the filming is random, with an natural 8-1 mix weighted to Blacks. Does he mean something else?
Tom - Black and white encounters are *roughly* equal so we... hmm... shouldn't see Black encounters a lot more often unless something else is also going on.
If you want to say Kevin and I both assume that a logical race-neutral default would be that we see videos in the same relation as the frequency or encounters, fine.
It seems probable that much of the public is aware of racial disparities in policing, and so are more likely to record an interaction between a cop and a person of color than they are to record an interaction between a cop and a white person. This applies both to the person being interacted with and to bystanders.
That is my guess as well, but that strikes me as quite different from saying we see it so much more simply because we it happens so much more.
I'd guess that roughly half the time a police officer is pointing a gun its at a white person and half the time they shoot fatally its at a white person (Blacks over-represented as percent of population, obvi, but still roughly 50/50 as to occurrence.)
If the media coverage is breaking differently (Is it? I'd guess so), one is left to wonder why.
I think the reason why there are many more videos of police pointing guns to black people is due to the nature of the encounters (where and why they happen), and how they progress (nothing memorable about it or things escalated quickly).
None of the two statistics Kevin presented here makes that distinction. If the encounter takes place in a public place and is supposed to be a routine non violent encounter, but police approach things with aggression dialed to 10 you are more likely to have witnesses and the people involved themselves filming it.
If on the other hand, if police are pointing guns in a situation where the person is already being violent and or shooting even before police arrive, witnesses would be harder to come by, as most people's instincts would be to get to safety until things are under control.
https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1382670554205990917
Very interesting, and shocking. I was quite surprised that the frequency of police-initiated contact is so similar between Blacks and Whites. I have long been of the opinion that the disparity in police killings was due primarily to more police stops of poor people, a group among which blacks are over-represented. Looks like I may have to change that opinion.
Of course these statistics don't mean the use of force and pointing a gun isn't justified and these situations.
Chris Rock was taking a selfie every time he was being pulled over for a traffic stop. Including three times in two months.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/02/chris-rock-documents-series-of-detainments-by-police-instagram
After being pulled over and having a gun drawn, multiple times, why complain about what seems "normal" behavior?
A much more interesting look at this isn't raw statistics, but a review of circumstances involved. What was going on when the gun was drawn? Did it seem excessive under the circumstances? Did it lead to actual discharge of the weapon? Under common circumstances, do police react differently, of average, if the suspect or offender is Black versus white?
As I often have to point out to people, it's not cops shooting a hugely disproportionate number of unarmed Black men that's fueling so much of the antagonism between police the the Black community, although that's obviously a catalyst for most of the major protests we see. It's the shootings *on top of* millions of everyday encounters over the years in which young Black men in particular are pulled over for bullshit DWB (Driving While Black) infractions, have orders and insults barked at them even though they're politely cooperating, have guns *drawn* on them for no reason, get tased, pepper-sprayed, beaten, and so on, in situations where none of that would have *ever* happened to a white citizen.
"Hugely disproportionate" to what? Percentage of population? Not the best metric. You want, at a minimum, an indicator of extent of contact with police.
Very revealing. But would be helpful if we had information (most likely unavailable) about how each person behaved after being pulled over in the incidents underlying these data.
Seems to me the data suggests that once an encounter goes bad, police might be much more afraid of blacks than of whites, so the escalation is more rapid with blacks.
I wonder if anyone has data on the race of people who kill police? I don't recall ever seeing any, but I caught a bit of a BBC interview with someone, who seemed to say that after a police officer was killed, police were perhaps more apprehensive in their contacts with the public.
In 2019 black folks committed 54% of the homicides but were 13.4% of the population. Everyone else committed 46% of the homicides at 86.6% of the population. If you do that math, that means that blacks commit homicide at a rate 7.5 times that of everyone else.
There is a similar disparities in robbery.
So, if blacks commit more crime, they probably are more likely to, say, be driving around with an outstanding warrant. And that might induce cops to draw guns.