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Thousands of deaths caused by police have been misclassified since 1980 (npr.org)
93 points by EastOfTruth on Oct 1, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 20 comments


> misclassified by 55.5%

That's a weird (and confusing) way to phrase it.

Better phrasing (I checked the linked source article in the Lancet) would be: "researchers found that 55·5% of deaths from police violence between 1980 and 2018 were misclassified"

It would also have been good to provide the numerator and denominator: "The Lancet estimates 17,100 of 30,800 were misclassified."

The headline is good and provides the numerator:

> More than 17,000 deaths caused by police have been misclassified since 1980

(Edit: Added clarification as to why I think this is weird confusing, with the full data from the article and suggestions for how NPR could have written this more clearly.)


So police are killing roughly 2 Americans per day, that’s more than I was expecting.


How many times a day are Americans trying to kill police (e.g. shooting them, physically assaulting them)?


I'd guess less than once a day. There is also a huge gulf between assault/resisting arrest and attempted murder.


A police person has to assume that their life is at risk if they are overpowered during an assault since there is a gun involved. Attacking a cop is a life or death struggle - they have to assume you are trying to get their gun.


By that logic, and seeing how far more people are killed by police than police officers are killed by people, anyone getting arrested would have a better claim to be at risk of death.

How much better? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_office..., twenty police officers were killed by assailants in 2020.

The list of people killed by the US police isn't a single article, unfortunately. It's a list for every month of every year. Here's January 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

It's 93 deaths for that month. For the year, it's 632.


An arrest is not the same as a physical struggle... Anyway, given there are ~10 million arrests a year + 50 million more interactions, and 100s of millions of guns in the US, there's going to be a lot of people that decide to fight back. The fact that people like you are creating a culture were illegally resisting arrest is actually an ethical/political statement contributes to this.


Running away is resisting arrest and doesn’t endanger the cop.

It’s shocking how you moved the goalposts from death, to conflict, to running away as justification for death.

Also, if your comparing numbers cops successfully kill around a thousand people per year and attempt to kill significantly more. Talking about number of interactions let alone guns is a meaningless number.


That's actually evading arrest - not the same thing. My point is that if you try and fight someone with a gun, don't be surprised if something bad happens.


People whose jobs are to protect the public should have a higher bar for acceptable behavior than "someone with a gun"


Sounds like US cops should avoid carrying a gun to stay safer.


Physically assaulting a cop is a much lower bar than your thinking, an unwanted touch is physical assault.


Data is quantitative, and metrics can be so easy to compute that it feels like it's hard to screw up that easy computation and therefore they're more trustworthy. But garbage in, garbage out. It's hard to not be overconfident sometimes, especially when it fits the narrative you already believe.


[flagged]


> Obama on the ensuing violence in Ferguson:[...]

What does this have to do with anything?

Edit: ...and the article is flagged. I guess research on black people getting shot by police gets in the way of important threats of civil liberties, like YouTube taking down GuyTalksStraightIntoCamera264623's take on Great Replacement Theory.


The media started to track it independently after the attention caused by the events that transpired. Because it was in the news cycle at the Presidential level.


Polarization. Reshares. Ad dollars.


This post was reported and dead for a few hours ... it is now back live... thanks DANG


Is there a way to quantify the good things police did? Or does anybody (journalists) even care?


What does this have to do with them murdering people? It's completely irrelevant, unless you somehow want to rationalize their behavior.


you could do a data request (using Freedom of Information Act)... Some police/sheriff harassed me in my own backyard in an helicopter... I probably should request some data on that.




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