My internet telepathy is telling me you’re white. Don’t get creeped out, I’m just psychic.
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this is kind of a side note, but do keep in mind that in our country laws are also setup so that what the poor, and the non-white among us, do are also considered crimes.
when you consider the history of the us, and current policies of things like stop and frisk, or – in ferguson where whites are much more likely to be carrying drugs, but blacks are much more likely to be pulled over or searched – sometimes the same person time and time and time again – policing is not fully about law and lawlessness. ( and lets not even start on the concept of illegal immigrants; what about illegal employers? )
we have a network of laws and custom which deliberate or not encourage a form of white supremacy. we give cops guns to help enforce this. cops – in fear for their life because we are awash in guns – shoot a bunch of black folks, and incidentally a bunch of other people along the way.
none of this is right, but it is currently normal.
edit: it’s not probably very clear. but basically, it’s not always that some “turn to crime when they are desperate”, it’s that we define the circumstances of being desperate a crime.
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Confidence limits, basically.
If you had a town with 2 suicides in one year that would not be a good statistic unless you had long term historical records that showed a consistent pattern. At such small numbers and with a “hard zero” - i.e. you can’t have fewer than zero suicides per year - you would be looking at a Poisson distribution rather than normal and you would need quite a lot of years averaged to give a meaningful result.
You would therefore only report the statistics that were credible, i.e. where the incidence of whatever you are measuring is large enough or has sufficient history to give a reasonable confidence limit.
But good luck with getting people to do that. In popular news it’s common to find things ranked in a list where the confidence limits most likely mean that they cannot be safely ranked. Doesn’t stop journalists doing it.
Edit - better example than the one I’ve now blurred below.
The one time British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a statistician of academic ability - sadly when I finally got to meet him he had started to suffer Alzheimer’s and I couldn’t tell him how much I had appreciated his work. One of his studies was of the results of then then First Division of football - which has a scoring pattern which, like baseball home runs, is basically Poisson.
He was able to analyse records for clubs back to the foundation of the division system, and showed that goal scoring was, effectively, random; no pattern could be detected. This information was, obviously, of great use to the people who ran betting on football.
(As an example our town ranks at about the national average on quality of life measures. But if you break down the numbers, it is in or near the top echelon on everything except “business friendliness”, and for this it is aggregated with a number of rural and somewhat backward towns in the area, to the extent that we actually get almost all the inward investment. The weighting in the overall results given to “business friendliness” doesn’t reflect the spottiness of the real-world data.)
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That is an odd choice of icon for that graph.
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I’ll try to read this later today.
Yes, the current system is rigged against the poor, and especially against minorities.
My exwife was relieved that the new neighborhood we moved too didn’t have any sex offenders near by. I was like, “There aren’t any CONVICTED sex offenders. These people have money and can afford lawyers, as opposed to our old neighborhood.”
THANK YOU for your very informative post!
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This is a very good first step, and needs to continue with finer granularity, but there seems to be a false equivalency taking place with part of it. Specifically, “Arrest-related death” being considered the same thing as “killed by police”. If we are really wanting to figure out where the problems with policing policy lie, and which individual cops need to be held accountable, it is vital that we don’t fall into the fallacy that “blue lives murder” as being any more valid than that of the so-called “law-and-order” types giving carte blanche to police.
I’m not ready to blame the police for every stroke, heart attack, or respiratory distress event because some of them are not the suspects but others put under stress by the situation, including the people who called the police. Also, some people attempting to commit suicide-by-cop decide to finish the job themselves if the police can’t be goaded into shooting them.
France has some inner city problems comparable to those of US inner cities, hence the rise of the FN. They also have an armed police force with a reputation in Europe for excessive violence. Although they don’t have the after effects of slavery they have the after effects of the Algerian war and a ghettoised black population.
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