Not apples to apples at all. This is the average daily COVID-19 deaths with extreme restrictions - so imagine comparing this heart disease with large-scale mandatory exercise, or cancer if cigarettes were eliminated entirely.
I'm comparing actual stats of natural deaths that have happened, and you are saying it is better to compare hypothetical/imagined stats with the real ones to be more accurate?
Should we now also imagine/project the homicide death rates if all civilians were peaceful and happy and compare it with that of the real deaths caused by the police?
> Should we now also imagine/project the homicide death rates if all civilians were peaceful and happy and compare it with that of the real deaths caused by the police?
Almost. We'd need to compare actual homicides to an imaginary world where everyone cooperated with the police while being arrested.
The police killing someone is, on the face of it, a significant problem. But some percentage of police-caused deaths are justified and would be acceptable after careful review of what happened.
I think everyone would prefer 0 police-related deaths, and all options are on the table to get there. But to compare oranges to oranges properly it would be necessary to split the category into police abuses of power vs unavoidable/reasonable uses of force.
Well, I suppose I wasn't being entirely clear. Let me try to put it all in one post with vague apologies for letting the thread build up:
Your "oranges-to-oranges" comparison isn't. It compares homicides - which are overwhelmingly going to be negligent accidents or intentional crimes - with police caused deaths. The police are people we purposefully send into situations where violence is likely or respect for the law has broken down. It is expected that they will cause some deaths in the execution of their duty.
I can certainly see an argument that getting the deaths caused by police to 0 or close to is a worthy goal. But it isn't comparable to homicides because it is normal for the police to be sent in to uncontrolled situations. It'd be nothing short of a minor miracle if police-caused deaths were comparable to background rates given how seedy the US gets. We certainly can't get a feel for the justified/unjustified/negligent breakup of the figures which is germane to the debate.
Its unfortunately time to get philosophical, which is usually a signal to me that a debate has veered off the topic and become pointless. Anyway, here goes...
In philosophy, there is a subject and an object. An object is what the subject observes. An object consists of of properties (has-a) and relations (is-a). Take an orange for example. An orange is-a fruit, and an orange has-a rind, flesh and seeds. It makes sense to compare oranges with oranges (a type of fruit); and orange seeds with orange seeds (the same parts of an orange fruit). Its a stretch to compare an oranges with orange seeds, as they are not the same type of object. Or to put it another way, its like comparing oranges to apples.
> Your "oranges-to-oranges" comparison isn't.
It is, because I'm comparing instances of the same type of philosophical object. Lets take another very relevant example: homicide.
A homicide is simply defined as "the act of one human killing another". So comparing homicides done by policemen with homicides done by civilians, in the same year and country is a valid oranges-to-oranges comparison. Regardless of the circumstances of the homicides, they are all homicides whether justified (e.g. self defense), unjust (murder) or unintentional (man-slaughter). My comparison is not concerned with the parts of the orange (rind, seeds, flesh), but the oranges as a whole. If you'd like to compare police acts of man-slaughter against civilian acts of man-slaughter, that's fine. That's a valid oranges to oranges comparison, just on a lower level of the conceptual heirachy. And even if you did present these statistics, my original point still stands. You cannot however, come up with an invalid comparison (oranges to orange seeds) then try and use it as a straw-man argument against my valid comparison (oranges to oranges).
I'm with you in that there are other stats which we can compare which may be more similar, but I do feel that the context is still important for those that don't have a real frame of reference for death tolls. "apples to oranges" is very context specific and becomes an argument of semantics quickly. Yes, heart disease kills more people... but is that really pertinent to the discussion of whether or not the protests are worth the risk of the further spread of covid 19?
The US is no5 in the world for police homicides, just behind countries like the Philippines, Syria, Brazil. Not a record to be proud of - 1,536 in 2019 according to wikipedia.
Other countries manage to achieve numbers like 2 for Japan, 3 for the UK, 11 for Germany which is nowhere near even adjusted for population. American police kill more people per capita than almost every other country. Per 10 million people that's:
Do you think it's intellectually honest to compare countries with very, very low rates of firearms access to a country where firearms are available to anyone who wants one?
You're comparing the USA, which has about 100k shootings per year, 36k deaths involving guns of which 33% (~12k) are homicides, to the UK which has 50-60 cases of homicide involving a gun per year.
The fact is that the US police are far, far, far more likely to encounter a suspect with a gun in the course of their duty than the UK police are.
38 US police officers were shot dead in the line of duty last year. The UK had 3.
300 million stat is old, I think now it's somewhere around 393 million.
Coronavirus and the riots have also created far more new gun owners among a lot of people (making an observation from my friends and other people I know).
Of course there is. There are legitimate reasons for owning a rifle in rural America (hunting), there are no legitimate reasons for owning an assault weapon, and guns can easily be made gradually less attractive. If you don't accept this even as a possibility you are part of the problem.
The other major news story is about police brutality and defunding/reducing the police force.
Exactly how do you expect people to defend themselves from violent threats when the number 1 counterpoint of "call the police" is taken away or severely limited?
The defund/dismantle/disband movement is, as I understand the movement, more about replacing the police-as-an-institution with a fundamentally different approach or set of approaches to law enforcement, not reducing the total resources or number of persons assigned to law enforcement functions.
The same way every other country has gone about this.
This has been done after wars for example (after WWII), and after many different conflicts in different countries in Africa. It would take a long time and would require tightening laws gradually and at the same time encouraging people to hand in their weapons.
This is not particularly difficult logistically, the only difficulty is in the American psyche apparently, which seems completely incompatible with this simple common-sense measure. The outcome would be fewer deaths by cop, fewer deaths in burglaries, and fewer mass shootings.
There is abundant evidence from around the globe that limiting the ownership of guns helps limit deaths.
No other country has anywhere near the absolute or per capita number of firearms that the USA has. We own almost half of all civilian firearms, more than 100x the US military, more than every military and law enforcement agency in the world combined[1]. Nor would a forced attempt at disarment be peaceful given our history and attitude towards government infringement.
Moreover, the Supreme Court has already ruled that total ban on firearms in common is unconstitutional[2][3]. Hence why DC and Chicago no longer completely ban handguns. I also don't think the in common use standard will hold since the Supreme Court more recently reiterated "the Second Amendment ex-tends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms"[4]. It is the opinion of some that DC v Heller was watered to get Kennedy on board. Moreover, as California has already argued, you cannot ban something then down the road argue that it's not in common use since the low numbers are artificial.
> To the extent that magazines holding more than 10 rounds may be less common
within California, it would likely be the result of the State long criminalizing the buying,
selling, importing, and manufacturing of these magazines. Saying that large capacity
magazines are uncommon because they have been banned for so long is something of a
tautology. It cannot be used as constitutional support for further banning. See Friedman
v. City of Highland Park, Illinois, 784 F.3d 406, 409 (7th Cir. 2015) (“Yet it would be
absurd to say that the reason why a particular weapon can be banned is that there is a
statute banning it, so that it isn’t commonly used. A law’s existence can’t be the source
of its own constitutional validity.”).[5]
Actual looting has been occurring in New York [0] as we discover that the police either lack the willpower or resources to actually protect American businesses. And who knows what is happening for ordinary law-and-order problems.
If someone manages to carry a "disarm and leave it to the police" argument with that evidence in recent memory it will go down in the history books as one of the great political accomplishments of the 21st century. Anyone who ever argued in favour guns in self defence was talking at least in part about moments in history like these.
It's not crazy to understand that limiting firearm access to law abiding citizens will provide an upper hand to criminals who couldn't care less about breaking laws, with the number of firearms currently in the U.S.
This is the kind of thing that gun advocates like to tout as "a priori" knowledge. However, "criminals" respond to incentives just as all people do. You need to make the incentive to not own a gun stronger than the incentive to own a gun. Weak gun laws currently make it very easy to obtain a gun without any permits or background checks.
There's also a false dichotomy between law-abiding citizens and criminals. Anyone who has always been law-abiding can commit a crime, and if they own a gun, there's a much higher chance that someone is killed as part of that crime. There's a much higher chance they kill someone accidentally, and that someone is often a member of their own family. And a higher chance that they will successfully commit suicide. These are all facts when comparing gun owners to non-owners.
The government should disincentivize persons from owning guns no more than it should disincentivize persons from voting, from associating, or from speaking, etc.
Unfortunately, the US is incomparable (in the neutral sense of the word) when it comes to most socio-economic issues. There literally is no other country that is similar to the US across more than one or two important factors.
Yeah, but GDP is one of the most important socio-economic factors there is. Which makes drawing analogies between the US and Brazil not very useful most of the time. And even race, where I think the comparison is most apt, there is an important difference, in that the US has more ethnic diversity among its elite class. I believe Brazil's elites are almost entirely descended from European Catholics, whereas the US elite class has been split between WASPs and Jews for at least 100 years and is now being cracked open quite rapidly by people of East Asian and South Asian descent.
Yes I do. That easy access to guns on both sides is a big part of the problem. Militarised police and easy access to guns are IMO one of the biggest reasons for this discrepancy. It can be fixed, it just requires gradually tightening gun laws and changing police culture.
There are also cultural issues - policing should be with the consent of the population, if you lose that trust and end up in an adversarial position, violence moves from the last resort to the first resort.
In Europe in general police operate on the principle of “plice lives < civilian lives”. This means that you as a police officer do not shoot if you are threatened, you shoot only if _other civilions_ are threatened.
Or put it another way your job is to protect civilian lives, even at the cost of your own life.
As far as I understand in the us its the other way around - “police lives > civilian lives” - e.g. shoot when threatened directly. Or it is acceptable to kill civilians to save police lives.
In the long term that kind of doctrine is bound to have consequences on stats like deaths caused by the police, no matter how good / bad the intentions of individual officers are.
And it frames how the public reacts to events as well. Like if you are a cop and you shoot a person trying to rob a bank in the US your friends and family might congratulate you on a job well done, where as in europe you’ll be looked at with disdain by your loved ones.
Lack of guns and also a totally different attitude to policing.
British policing isn't without problems but the idea of (say) police barging into someone's house guns blazing without announcing themselves (as happened recently) is absolutely unimaginable in the UK.
British police operate on consent whereas American police operate on fear (is the stereotype)
What point are you trying to make? Systemic racism is way bigger than just police killings.
Do you want to ignore the (non-lethal) evils of prejudice, and just play a numbers game with fatalities? From some back-of-the-envelope math, the average POC in America will still lose more years of their life from simply living in a racist society than from COVID-19.
Life isn't a pissing contest of "my problem is bigger than your problem".
The first means "it doesn't make sense to compare these."
The second means "Even though you're trying to compare these problems, you've massively underrepresented the impact of systemic racism by simplifying it to the number of police killings."
>Systemic racism is way bigger than just police killings.
A single protest movement isn't going to end systemic racism, no matter how large it becomes. Even revolutions don't end conservatism -- just ask Leon Trotsky.
However, the coronavirus epidemic is here today and it may well be gone in a year. This may be the worst possible time for a protest movement since the Spanish Flu.
Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short.
(There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.)
COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly that many years. According to [2] (about 1.5 weeks old), 1 in 1850 (or around 0.05% of) black Americans have died from COVID-19. Even if this continues for the rest of the year, it still can't hold a candle to plain old racism.
Joking aside, you can sometimes prove causality. It's just not as easy as proving a correlation. The most broadly accepted method would be a RCT (randomized controlled trial), though it is often unethical or unfeasible.
You can also build on causal assumption that everyone agrees on. (Like: A person's gender cannot be caused by a government policy. A person winning the lottery is not caused by anything other than playing the lottery.) From such knowledge you can build a causal graph, and (in some cases) draw new causal conclusions from statistical data.
Long story short: you cannot just dismiss a correlation as being useless for any proof of causality.
I sympathize with a lot of these problems, but I wonder if the police issue getting all the attention is going to prevent these other issues from getting serious attention. :|
Their letter has a paragraph addressing some of their concerns:
> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.
Edit: these aren't the calculations you asked for, but should give you an indication of what they are thinking about.
Yes, unfortunately black people are disproportionately poor, so they bear the brunt of issues associated with a lack of money in America. In the present day, I suspect most things people call systemic racism is rooted in and perpetuated by how disproportionately poor blacks in America are.
It's really hard not to read this as "my mass killing is okay because I have a good reason." I assume that's not what you mean. Can you help clarify the differences between deaths downstream of these mass gatherings and deaths downstream of more conventional violence?
I quite like it when someone drives by with a two sentence decontextualised comment that goes on to invoke hours of conversation.
Is your intentional action here to be purposely superficial in order to invoke to deeper discussion? It’s an interesting style that seems particularly suited to this forum.
Not many lives are ended via homicide vs other ways of dying (eg heart disease), but it’s just the unfairness and preventability that makes people angry about the former. Injustice also creates stress inn society, it is difficult to live with it.
I see the intent... but scale is drastically different. You’re comparing a yearly figure to a daily one that is nowhere near the daily max to begin with.
Without context, it’s hard to ascertain if the point the parent is trying to make is either:
1) Police Killings are low.
2) Covid deaths have bottomed.
In the context of police killings, that 1,000 figure doesn’t indicate if it’s innocent killings- sure some may be, but how many are suicide by cop? How many are due to hostage situations? Or how many are due to being fired upon first?
In regards to Covid deaths, 1,000 daily deaths is low compared to the 3,000 we saw at the peak.
Total deaths in US caused by coronavirus (last Friday, one day): 975 [2]
[1] https://www.theroot.com/here-s-how-many-people-police-killed...
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries