^^ But then there is the Bill Cosby verdict…So maybe is JUST the $$$
If you have a gun on your person, you should put both hands on the wheel, inform the officer you have a gun, and inform the officer WHERE the gun is BEFORE getting your license, proof of insurance, or registration. Then, wait for the officer to give you instructions.
No cherry picking here - it is ALL the data.
For percentages, in this case #of people per million who are killed by the police, the highest group are Native Americans. The vast majority of deaths are from gunshots, although you can scroll around and delete the deaths by taser, etc. if you wish.
Native American 10.13
African American 6.66
Hispanic 3.23
White 2.9
Asian/Pacific Islander 1.17
For percentages, Alaska comes out highest, followed by New Mexico. Delaware is the lowest, with NY just above it.
We don’t know if the court refused to allow the admission of the post-shooting events or if the prosecution decided not to use it. I can imagine a court finding that what happened after the shooting, how agitated the officer was or wasn’t, doesn’t really matter. What mattered was what happened before the shooting.
A Minnesota jury of 10 whites and 2 blacks may be a good representation of population. The jury isn’t supposed to be a group of people who have experienced the same situations as the defendant or victim, but of the community. In fact, jurors are asked if they have experienced the same events as are the subject of the case and are excused for cause - a DWI, an accident, medical malpractice, robbery, rape.
Why would the cop (or anyone) wait to see if a gun was ‘fire ready’? It’s too late to react if it turns out to be fire ready. Some guns turn out to be starter pistols, or air guns, or paint guns, but the cops just don’t know that when they react. There was a cop here recently who stopped to help a driver pulled over on a somewhat busy road at about 4 pm, all caught on the dash cam. The cop pulled up behind the SUV and went to the driver’s side (away from traffic), but as he did the driver got out and came to the back of the car. Cop also went to the back of the car, and as they both arrived the driver had a big automatic rifle type weapon. The cop reached for his gun and the driver started running and fell down. Cop was holding his gun on the guy, cars were going by, there was chaos. Turns out the gun was not loaded or ready to be fired, but it was very scary and how was the cop to know?
Good advice for one’s personal safety when confronted by a cop. But this isn’t something they teach in driver’s ed. I was always taught that when an officer demands your ID, you produce your ID. In general, I think a lot of this line of argument is aimed at trying to blame Philando Castile for his own death, and I’m not buying it.
Better advice: don’t carry a gun. I have no idea why Philando Castile thought he needed one. But of course, the law says he was perfectly within his rights to have one when and where he had it, and it was not a violation of the law for him to inform the office that he had one, which he probably saw as a sensible precautionary measure. In fact, the law in Minnesota is that it would have been unlawful for him not to acknowledge that he had a firearm if asked by the officer. His “mistake,” if he made one, was in volunteering that information before the officer asked. That sent the officer into a panic. The officer then fired seven shots in rapid succession, and Philando Castile was killed entirely needlessly.
I submit that it is far more dangerous to his own life for a black man to exercise the supposedly inviolable constitutional and legal rights to carry a firearm than for a white man. (And odd, isn’t it, how the NRA doesn’t speak up in cases like this, when a black man is summarily executed for exercising his constitutional rights?)
I’m not a big fan of gun rights, but in my opinion it shouldn’t be a capital offense for any person not to know the unwritten and informal (i.e., not legally mandatory) albeit sensible rules that roethlisburger prescribes. And a reasonable cop should know better.
There are some here who always want to say others are cherry picking when the data shows the following. “Once again, while in raw numbers there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/
Now the snippet I pulled only talks about black men there many cases of black women being killed but they never really gain national traction.
If we add in the harassment of just being stopped driving while black that opens another can of worms. I don’t have one friend who hasn’t been stopped and harassed by a cop.
The rate of police shootings murders by race is an incomplete and often misleading statistic. This one is particularly misleading, because it chooses to focus on black men relative to the population as a whole. In terms of police shootings, the vast majority are men, regardless of race.
Elsewhere in this article, it says that blacks are shot 24% of the time despite being just just 13% of the nation’s population. Now with that revised statement we can do some real analysis.
While people of any race can and do commit crimes, the incidence of crimes committed by each race varies dramatically. We expect police to investigate crimes, regardless of the race or sex that committed them. We don’t say to them: “Women commit far fewer violent crimes than men. But to be fair, we expect you to investigate women just as often for violent crimes, even though they are far less likely to do commit them.” Think about just how absurd that sounds.
With a higher rate of crime, comes a higher rate of police interaction. With each police interaction, there is the chance that the person being investigated does something stupid that gets them killed, or the police does something stupid (as appears to be the case with Philando Castile).
About two years ago, I did a back of the envelope calculation on CC that attempted to determine whether blacks were shot out of proportion to the number of expected police interactions. To do this, I compared the percent of police shootings by race to the percent of murders committed by race. Based on that data, blacks committed 47% of all murders in the US, but were shot by police about 40% of the time. In other words, they were shot about 15-20% less often than might be expected. My post about this can be found here.
But this was a simple back of the envelope calculation, and there could have been many things wrong with it. But it is interesting that the Roland Fryer study, which came out later, came up with a similar conclusion of blacks being shot at a lower rate than expected.
Also noted in the article, “. **As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.” **
@hebegebe Stop making it seem as we should be okay with this.
Which part are you not ok with?
- That different groups commit crimes at different rates?
- That police interactions with a particular group should be proportional with the crime rate?
- That occasionally people being investigated do stupid things that gets them shot, or the police shoot when they should not.
Last time I checked, the purpose of this forum was for people to engage in discussion. Why don’t you address the merits of Hebegebe’s post instead of telling him what he can and cannot argue?
As far as I know, none of us are professional statisticians and even they are not infallible.
It’s hard for me to accept hebegebe’s theory because it is based on the number of “crimes” committed by different races and that has been historically inaccurate. White men committing the same crime (say, marijuana possession) are much less likely to be charged and convicted. Wealthier people are less likely to be charged than poor people. “White collar” crime is often not counted at all.
How do you come up with an accurate measure of crime and who commits it? If you only look at police data, you are looking at all the biases that are built into how people are stopped, charged, tried, and convicted.
@Consolation for some reason the notification of your tag went to my spam so I just saw it today.
Yes it’s a constant fear. We can’t change the color of our skin and it should t be our jobs to put cops at ease.
I’m not going to contribute to the statistical discussion as quite frankly I don’t know the stats 
My question is have most of you served on a jury? I’ve served 4 times three at the county level and one at the federal level. I’m not judging whether the jury made a right or wrong decision because I wasn’t there. Jurors are given pages of very specific instructions and sometimes these instructions can tie your hands as to what decision is made.
These discussions, as on this thread, are rooted in information we hear daily in the news. If a juror has admitted to following the news on this case they most likely would have been dismissed. Once they are chosen they are not allowed to read the news or watch TV or have any access to news media. The verdict is decided based on what they are presented in court with little to no knowledge of the case and based on the pages of instructions they must follow. Nobody could possibly get their head wrapped around what was presented to these jurors if they were not in the courtroom and as most people in this thread have followed the news on this case you can’t possibly understand having no prior knowledge and then deliberating on only information presented under the rules you were given.
My job involves working with mathematics on a daily basis, and finding insights that go against “common sense”. In the past, I have created commonly used statistical software tools and worked as a consultant to help customers on how to perform statistical analysis properly.
However, I do not have a PhD, and in any case my knowledge pales in comparison to Roland Fryer, one of the most promising young economists around. He has won both the MacArthur “Genius” Award, and the John Bates Clark medal. About 30% of these winners eventually win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The reasons I chose murder as opposed to white collar crimes or drug offenses is because:
- It is impossible to fake a dead body.
- It is hard to ignore a dead body
- The vast majority of murders (~90%) are committed by people of the same race as the victim. People tend to kill who they know associate with, rather than some random person. Therefore even though about a third of the murders are unsolved, the racial demographic of the solved murders is very likely to be similar to that of all murders.
Pithy comments from Trevor Noah on the Castile verdict starts at 4:11 although the whole segment is worth watching.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/iqhbhi/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-so-much-news–so-little-time—canceling-cuba–a-possible-trump-investigation—nra-silence?
@bhs1978 - he was acquitted of the charge of “endangering safety by discharging a firearm”. In what reality could the jurors have been given instructions that would make them acquit them of this? He fired 7 shots, at extremely close range, there were two other people in the car, etc., etc.
I don’t expect an answer because there isn’t one.
@greenwitch Have you ever served on a jury?
I guarantee you that the 12 people on the jury gave this issue much more thought than an anonymous poster on a message board or a television commentator pandering to boost his ratings.
I served on a jury when I was 19. A cop on his way to work had driven through a red light and broadsided another car, killing the passenger. We convicted him of manslaughter and he got 3 years probation. The jury instructions were VERY confusing, and we had to return to ask the judge to clarify. Even then, I didn’t feel that everyone really understood.
I think rather than focusing on statistics, there needs to be a lot of rethinking about how we do policing in this country. But that’s another (and too political, I’m afraid) thread.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/philando-castile-case-squad-car-video-shooting/
Notice how the other police officer runs when the shooting stops. The jury saw this video and still acquitted on both manslaughter and endangering safety by discharging a firearm.
No, I have never been chosen for a jury. I wouldn’t want to second guess people and their motive but some things are really, really clear.