That's a good link. What conclusions do you draw from that information?
Here's what I see when I look at that link:
What's left out?
Socioeconomics - Most high crime areas tend to be racially skewed towards non-white population centers (note the linked citation is for a different set of years, and the conclusions might not really support what the author of this article said).
Race of police officers - May or may not be relevant, but is it still 'racism' if the police that are doing the shootings are all black? Sure, but its not the same kind of racism if all the police are white. To me, I think that kind of information (which isn't available), would change the conversation a lot.
What kinds of other conclusions could be drawn?
The take away could be that the real problem is sexism. Men get killed proportionally more than women, by an enormous margin.
Same with age. Huge margins.
Where are those protests? Men's Lives Matters. Children's lives matter. Non existent, why might that be?
Suggesting, by looking at those numbers, that the only problem (or biggest problem) is racism, requires cherry picking data. If anything, its very clearly
unclear, at least to me.
How good is this information?
Only about 50% of the people who are killed are of a known race (according to this article).
50%? How can you draw any statistically valid conclusions with a margin of error of 50%?
For me, in the end, in the last two years this article indicates that some 2000 people have been killed by police. In the same time period, 5 million people have died in the US. Nearly 100,000 have died from suicide over the same two year period. (
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm - extrapolate for 2 years). The idea that every time someone is killed by a police officer it needs to be national news is totally ludicrous to me. At best, its local or state news. Expanding that to weeks long national news seems odd to me.
It seems what we're talking about are statistical anomalies based on incomplete data sets that don't properly cross reference other relevant data sets.
I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist, nor that it isn't a problem. I'm saying that one must be careful what conclusions are drawn - and closely examine the why behind those conclusions. If you're stance is that these numbers portray an obvious racism problem, why? It could be that they do, but I'm interested in
why.