Using Ratios vs Raw numbers for "Do black men have it worse than white men". Which is proper to use?

Oncefa2 · 2020-06-04T14:05:40+00:00

If you're a black man you're more likely to be targeted and harassed by the police.

Fixing the gendered aspect of this would save more lives, including more black lives, since gender is a much larger factor.

But you can't say that black men are on par with white men. It's simply not true.

GalileosTele · 2020-06-04T14:56:45+00:00

It all depends on the specifics of the question you are trying to answer. Different question warrant different controls, and different stats. Are you asking, who is more likely to be killed? or who gets killed most often? or are the police targeting a particular group? There is no one stat that will answer all of those. You have to control for various correlating factors (which are not always obvious to find).

Lets say you want to know about innocent people being killed by the cops. First off, some people are shot by the police because they are criminals threatening to hurt someone, in which case the shooting is likely justified, and should not be lumped with cases of innocent, non-threatening people being killed by the cops. One way you can do this is to look at shootings of unarmed people. Using the Washington post's database, about 1000 people/year are killed by cops, but only about 120 of those are unarmed (or toy weapon). So you often hear that 1000/year stat, but that's not relevant as most of them are armed criminals.

Now does the police target any demographic? Well in this case you do want to compare to the general population, because if the killings are random, then they should match the population percentages. But note, this is where everyone makes a false logical leap:

If the percentages don't match the general population, that does not mean you can conclude one group is being treated differently.

As that demographic may simply be correlated to a more important factor. So you will often hear the argument, that yes black people are disproportionally killed by cops, but they also have a higher crime rate. In this case, we've eliminated shootings of criminals, so that argument is irrelevant (even among innocent the rate is about twice what you'd expect) . The same is often said about men, and again we've taken care of that by only looking at innocent victims. Now with gender, 96% of the innocent deaths are men, and you can pretty safely conclude that it is determining factor as men and women are pretty much uniformly spread and don't really correlate to any other relevant factor (unless you can find one). With race it's more difficult, as races are not uniformly distributed. For example, race is correlated to socioeconomic status. So maybe being poor is the relevant factor, resulting in more blacks being killed, because a higher fraction are poor (notice this doesn't affect gender). So you have to control for economic status. Or maybe it's being in a high crime neighborhood that is the factor, as the police might be a little more trigger happy in those environments, resulting in more innocent deaths. And if that is correlated to race, you have to control for it.

In the end it's very easy to find correlations, but very difficult to find a causal relation, especially if the demographic is correlated to a lot of other variables.

What it does mean is that it might be a relevant factor, but further analyses is required. What I think is safe to say, is: Gender is definitely causally related (and the primary factor as way more white men killed than black women), as the only thing it's correlated to here is crime rate, and we took care of that. Age is likely a causal factor as the bulk of the victims are under 45 (but there is some correlation between age and wealth, so careful). And race needs further investigation, as it is true a disproportionate number are black (young black men to be more accurate), so it may be a factor, but it's also correlated to a lot of other potential variables. But those who say race, do have a point. It just requires more analyses to be sure.

TimeyWimey1467 · 2020-06-04T16:39:03+00:00

I think the right way would be to take, instead of whole population, number of encounters police have with each race minus all the cases where there was a legit reason for the cops to fire/kill.

Example: Let's say there were 1000 encounters with white suspects out of which 60 were killed for valid reasons (had weapons, fought back, try to escape etc) and 40 were killed for no valid reason. This means out of 940 encounters where there was no need to fire or kill the suspect, 40 people were killed. We should calculate 40/940.

Do the same for black people and compare it. Whichever has it higher is the one more oppressed.

BillyBronze09 · 2020-06-05T02:30:06+00:00

I never agreed with the idea of Black men being targeted. I'm a 6'2 black man with full sleeve tattoos on both arms and I've never been harrassed by cops.

The one thing no one likes to acknowledge is the cause for the police interactions. Like it or not, the vast majority of the cases of police killing black men over the past few years left out that they were criminals. Cops can be assholes, but if you dress and act like a criminal, you are inviting police to mess with you.

George Floyd didnt deserve to die, buy we all act like he was just going to work and cops randomly put him in handcuffs.

At some point everyone has to be honest and take responsibility for their contribution to this issue. If you commit a crime or dress like a criminal or rapper, police are more likely to fuck with you. Like it or not, that's a fact.

BillyBronze09 · 2020-06-05T02:30:25+00:00

I never agreed with the idea of Black men being targeted. I'm a 6'2 black man with full sleeve tattoos on both arms and I've never been harrassed by cops.

The one thing no one likes to acknowledge is the cause for the police interactions. Like it or not, the vast majority of the cases of police killing black men over the past few years left out that they were criminals. Cops can be assholes, but if you dress and act like a criminal, you are inviting police to mess with you.

George Floyd didnt deserve to die, buy we all act like he was just going to work and cops randomly put him in handcuffs.

At some point everyone has to be honest and take responsibility for their contribution to this issue. If you commit a crime or dress like a criminal or rapper, police are more likely to fuck with you. Like it or not, that's a fact.

robert-5252 · 2020-06-04T14:54:09+00:00

Why are people so fixated on minimizing the struggles black men go through? But over exaggerate the struggles white men go through?

Title	Using Ratios vs Raw numbers for "Do black men have it worse than white men". Which is proper to use?
Author	Mode1961
Upvotes	5
Comments	27
Date	June 4, 2020 1:38 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/gwhlrb/using_ratios_vs_raw_numbers_for_do_black_men_have/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/using-ratios-vs-raw-numbers-for-do-black-men-have.1197694 https://theredarchive.com/post/1197694

Comments