In an interesting, if unavailing, Boston Globe op-ed, Aubrey Clayton offers a valuable contribution to the discussion of the racism of police killings. As it’s kind of a big subject at the moment, with nearly everyone who’s math challenged certain that police are slaughtering black people, it provides some worthwhile concerns.
Unfortunately, Clayton opens by begging the question.
There is overwhelming evidence of racial bias in the criminal justice system, in everything from policing to sentencing. Nonetheless, the ongoing protests against racism and police brutality have prompted a familiar, fallacious reply from armchair statisticians in op-eds, social media, and police departments: that racial bias in the use of force by police is a myth, easily debunked with statistics.
By using the conclusion as the opening, one might assume there’s no particular reason to read further, since the outcome is already a certainty, proved by a column by Radley Balko that states:
In any case, after more than a decade covering these issues, it’s pretty clear to me that the evidence of racial bias in our criminal justice system isn’t just convincing — it’s overwhelming.
Seems mathematically conclusive, and, as Clayton asserts, all the studies to the contrary are fallacious.
Could the reaction to high-profile killings like those of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd be a matter of confirmation bias? Could the narrative of police racism be disproved with a tweet-sized calculation?
No.
Who could have seen that “no” coming? But aside from the absolute certainty presented, what basis is there to back it up? Simpson’s Paradox.
Math is hard. Statistics are hard and boring. Still, if we’re to credit them when some wag challenges your incredibly emotional anecdote from which you demand the extrapolation that everything is racist, it’s worthwhile to consider some of these terribly boring details.
The key point is that not all encounters with police are equally deadly. In any given kind of encounter with the police, a Black person can be likelier to be killed than a white person even if the overall rate of deaths per encounter appears lower for Black people. This would happen because Black people have many more interactions with police in non-deadly situations — a dynamic exacerbated by racism. And all those extra encounters dilute the rate.
On the one hand, there is a valuable point here, there are millions of interactions between police and the public, and the infinitesimal number of people physically harmed or killed as a result. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Some interactions involve police investigating serious crimes and some involve police tossing black kids to make their numbers. They are not equivalent interactions. Some involve cops being professional. Some involve cops being animals. They are not equivalent interactions. Some involve people grabbing a cop’s taser and running and some involve people complying and being beaten anyway. They are not equivalents. Well, you get the point.
Consider two extremes of police encounters: traffic stops and active shooter scenarios. Suppose, hypothetically, that a white suspect is killed by police in one out of 100,000 traffic stops and nine out of 10 shootings. And imagine that Black suspects are killed by police after 20 out of 1,000,000 traffic stops and in 10 out of 10 active shooter incidents. In each kind of incident, Black suspects are killed more often than white suspects. In aggregate, though, the percentage is higher for white people: 10 out of 100,010 white people are killed vs. 30 out of 1,000,010 Black people, because the white people tend to encounter the police in more grave situations.
Clayton recognizes that these aren’t the only scenarios where cops interact with the public, but nonetheless employs Simpson’s Paradox to dismiss studies that don’t support her conclusions.
That’s why one study, frequently cited as evidence that Black people are killed just as often (or less often) as others in similar situations, has been critiqued by other researchers who noted that “its approach is mathematically incapable of supporting its central claims.”
While some researchers critiquing a “frequently cited” study doesn’t help in determining whether the study or the critique is right, it does alert us to the fact that empirical studies, whether or not they confirm our bias, can be questioned. It’s curious that Clayton neglects to mention Harvard’s Roland Fryer study, but it didn’t make the cut.
Empiricism, real or imagined, has become a critical weapon in the battle of proving our priors, so people latch on to stats and raw numbers, to be used in whatever ways confirm what we’re absolutely certain needs to be confirmed, even though most of us couldn’t tell a good study from rape culture at dog parks. Statistics are hard, and accounting for valid variables is even harder.
On the other hand, without empirical analysis, we’re left with anecdotes from which we’re asked to induce that this one sad story, assuming it’s been told accurately which might ask too much of the story teller, is representative of most, even all, stories and should therefore guide our policy views on the entire subject.
That, of course, is unhelpful, as each side tells the story it wants to use to manipulate our emotions and create the frame of reference for us to consider what follows. If it’s a bad cop story, cops are bad. If it’s a bad perp story, perps are bad. Neither story does much to inform us about how to guide our views. Worse, we tend to only read those stories that appeal to our bias, so we read 1000 bad cop stories and believe, with absolute certainty, that bad cops are the overarching problem. They are, of course, but not for that reason.
So how do we avoid Simpson’s Paradox, not to mention the fact that statistics is hard? Every situation is, to some extent, sui generis. Even if there are a thousand images of cops being needless violent toward protesters, or looters grabbing the leftovers at Macy*s, it doesn’t answer the question of whether Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck was the cause of death.
I’m not good with stats, and math was never my strength. But I care about facts, one case at a time, and try not to deny facts that fail to align with the fuzzy normative beliefs I have lurking around in the back of my head. Rather than do mental gymnastics to prove what I believe to be true, I accept the premise that while others better equipped to fight over empirical analysis will reject each other’s analysis, I will limit my purview to the facts of each instance of police interaction and do my best to determine what happened in that instance and what, if anything, can be learned from it.
Even though I’ve had decades longer than Radley dealing with these issues, and I’ve no doubt that pernicious racism exists and is reflected in various ways and at various points throughout the system, nothing is “pretty clear” to me, no less overwhelming, about it when any particular scenario unfolds.
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Your efforts are noticed Dave. Sometime might be the righty time soon, to bake, be so drunk it makes no sense, or better yet trip again. Listen to a few decades of Pat Matheny, Bake some bread, put on some slow stew and call your girl and find the bone with Greg Brown. Lots-a-Living.. you are missing in your drops…
thanks JB
Yup! I kept thinking I was reading something about how the Earth is heating up, or not, and humans are causing it, or not, and Co2 is the culprit, or not, and all these experts are arguing and throwing incomprehensible figures around…
Then I realised how similar the cases were and it was time to give up and have a beer instead.
I never appreciated before how much you and Barleycorn are alike.
Checking your check. Why?!
Rain and Dylan are for sure…
Where ae you?
This week perhaps?
(In your best Welsh accent) Getting warmed up are ya, aggregation first, nasty, nasty to follow…
(link deleted by author: NO Political Porn Allowed).
SHG,
The question, at least to me, is not whether there is racism in the criminal justice system (which I am happy to assume) but the degree to which that pernicious behavior is so wide spread that radical change is appropriate. One might also ask: Has racial bias in the criminal justice system declined in the recent and remote past.
My answer to the first question is an emphatic “No!” My answer to the second is an emphatic “Yes!.”
Mr. Clayton and even Mr. Balko look at these questions from the outside. I look at the questions from inside the belly of the beast, albeit in only a small part of that massive digestive organ. And, if you like, I can find statistics that back me up and even prove that we should take race into account when predicting criminal behavior. But, as you say, statistics are hard and subject to manipulation as result of conscious and unconscious bias or just stupidity.
So, in the end, I think Martin Luther King had it about right. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Emphasis on “long” and “bends”.
All the best.
RGK
Moral universe? You’ve come to the wrong place. It’s down the hall, second door on the left.
SHG,
Sorta like statistics.
By the way, its true. I almost puked when reading my comment. Perhaps I should have said, something like: MLK’s vision is an abstraction wrapped in a myth.
But I did not come to the wrong door despite your need to preserve the crown: King of the Kingdom of Curmudgeons. An Admiral too.
All the best.
RGK
Mark TwIn.
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I would add Bayesian statistics to the list.
The epiphany occurs when you ask an otherwise straight and honest engineer to do an analysis and his first question is “What answer do you want?”
42
You make it sound as if I simply stated that racism is rampant in the system because I say so. Though you link to the post, you neglect to mention that the entire purpose of it was to survey and catalog the academic research on the subject. Thus far the post lists and summarizes nearly 300 such studies, most from the last 10 or so years. All but 10 found racial bias, disparities, or discrimination. Nearly all of the 10 that didn’t have been contradicted by numerous other studies. I provided links to the studies I found that didn’t find bias, including the Fryer study you mention, as well as links to both critiques and defenses of them. It’s true that statistics and empirical data can be manipulated. But I think the lopsided ratio is pretty persuasive.
That said, I did not mean to imply that all police misconduct is motivated by racism. I suppose the confusion here stems from my inelegant use of the phrase “in any case,” which I will change. I was using that phrase as a transition, as in, “I just wrote a bunch of stuff, and now I’m going to summarize it for you.” I did not mean that literally every case of misconduct ever is motivated by racism. It was lazy wording on my part.
The point here is not that these studies prove that every instance of police misconduct is driven by racism, or that this is the prism through which you should judge every allegation police misconduct. I too believe we should evaluate individual incidents on the facts. The point of the post is that racism is built in to the criminal justice system, and that this is something we need to take into account when we discuss reform.
We’re very close to sliding down the slippery slope for lack of a conceptual ledge. There is racism. Everything isn’t racism. Distinguishing between the two is what will allow us to fix the right problems or the wrong problems. I’m not particularly persuaded by studies, which I fear either prove what they set out to prove or are done from an elevation that causes them to miss the critical details.
Either way, Clayton used your post to prove her unquestioned and unquestionable conclusion, which wasn’t what you were trying, intended to, or ultimately wrote. But you did leave yourself exposed.
As I’m sure you know, the studies at best reflect disparate impact, not causal connection or racial animus. They don’t prove what he thinks they do.
What makes it sound as if “racism is rampant because you say so” is what you wrote and what was quoted. If that’s how your quote comes off, the problem is with your quote, not someone else quoting it.
And the Agitator wouldn’t have written that.
Every serious person agrees that policing has a disparate impact on blacks. Criminalizing murder, for example, has a grossly disproportionate impact on black people since they commit the lion’s share of murders. Is it racist to criminalize murder?
But that’s not really what I wanted to say. The problem with these studies isn’t that math is hard, it’s that their authors lack credibility. That’s going to be the case as long as sociologists only hail from the left and extreme left of the political spectrum.
This distrust of academia’s political monoculture isn’t entirely irrational, either. We’ve all heard the pitch for diversity—but why does it only apply to superficial characteristics like skin color or sex? Surely our academic institutions would be more reliable as well as more credible if they didn’t systemically exclude half the population.
The philosopher Karl Popper came up with a solution to the aforementioned problems with stats and data. To Popper, the most important thing is how a theory is stated. What he came up with is that for a theory to be valid, it must be stated in a way that can be falsified. The classic example is white swans. The theory, “all swans are white” is a valid statement of a theory. It can be tested empirically, and it can be falsified. The theory is valid as long as the only swans you see are white, the theory fails the minute you see one non-white swan. A valid statement of a theory must also be capable of statement as a null or opposite theory that can be falsified. The null theory for “all swans are white” might be “not all swans are white.” If you see a non-white swan this validates the null and invalidates the original. Theories than cannot be stated this way are untenable. The problem with theories of systemic racism, is that there is no way of the stating the theory in a manner that can be falsified. Or if you can state it in a way that can be falsified, it is falsified every time.
That’s a very interesting point.
Lots of folks seem to have some cognitive dissonance between “XXX does not seem as racist as they claim” and “there is a huge effect of racism.” But both can be true.
Imagine that there is a SEVEN PERCENT difference in how each step of the system treats whites versus POC. Whites get 100%; POC get 93%.* This may not seem like much! Many people might not even notice a 7% change, at least not always, at least not for only one step. But there are a lot of stages—and each stage builds on the one before it. The result is like compound interest, but in reverse.
Differences in education; housing; police presence. Difference in police treatment; access to competent counsel; how the DA negotiates; how a jury thinks of you. Difference in poverty; ability to afford bail; ability to get “community” support in an effort to negotiate sentences. And so on.
That is only 10 examples from a much longer list. Still: This is only 7%, right? But it turns out that 7% over ten areas means that POC would be treated HALF AS WELL, overall, than whites. 93% * 93% * 93% and so on, ten times, is less than 50%.
In other words, these things can be simultaneously true:
a) POC are not treated horrifically badly at any stage; each interaction involves “only” 7% difference.
b) The overall outcome for POC is appallingly bad, less than half as good as it is for whites.
Even a tiny 3% difference–almost too small to detect (or fix) at any given stage–creates a whopping 26% differential after only 10 steps.
That is one reason why change is so slow and “bends toward justice.” Even as we move each step closer and closer to “no difference,” the evolving complexity of society and the increasing set of laws/regulations/inputs simultaneously add more steps to the equation.
*I am not claiming it’s 7%; that number is just used for illustration.
If you’re going to write stupid shit, at least be concise about it.
Race is a social construct, served up in the USA in place of class conflict. It’s pretty insidious, really. Fixate endlessly on the relative levels of melanin present in peoples’ flesh and, if the people buy in, the lower classes are split, misdirected, and confused…reduced to fighting amongst themselves.
Those rich white people are tricky.