Statistical Ideas
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Saturday, July 16, 2016
Black Lives Matter paradox
Update: this article was read over 85,000 times, and has had a hefty >250 social media engagements. The sequel article "Whose Lives Matter?" continues to be enjoyed by advisors on both sides. Thanks.
Given recent distressing killings between Blacks and police -in the past week - it is worth poring into the broad statistics that underlie homicides in this country, by race. The subject here has become far more emotional of late due to three reasons: (A) a lack of recent official national data covering homicides by race and by the police, (B) activists have somewhat diverted our attention away from the broader statistics and instead focused us on a few edited videos of murders under the premise that this is what all Whites are about, and (C) we have an election season where both sides of the aisle want a voice on this topic as it comports with their "broader" socioeconomic policies. It is as important to get the truth out there in terms of where the threat lies, as it is to be compassionate to the many thousands of murdered innocent Americans (of all stripes) each year but that happen disproportionately by one race. It is also worth reminding that the vast majority of initial deplorable headlines, about Blacks killed by police, have never later led to convictions by a balanced jury of peers who saw more concerning evidence than the (social) media showed you. Clearly there are some false positives, though there are far many more false negatives.
Let’s start by dissecting some headlines recently by both Former Mayor Giuliani, and also blogger Nate Silver. Both have made slightly different points, though both are factual in some sense, one is generally closer aligned to the broad statistics.
In the U.S. Blacks are killed at nearly 8x the rates of Whites. (based on this Silver is pointing to Rwanda, though bringing this up in this past week only conflates and misdiagnosis the situation)
Now let’s dig into these deaths, by race:
If you are Black, then you were nearly 9x as likely to have been killed by another Black versus by the police. And there was a very little chance at all that a White civilian killed you. (based on this Giuliani is wrong only in the accuracy of his stated probability, during a conversation about Black Lives Matter, but he is certainly close)
If you are instead White, then you were nearly 3x as likely to have been killed by another White versus by either the police or a Black civilian (this too would have supported Giuliani’s point, though he chose to never make it)
To drive home the point of where the threat is, something critical should be retold as we will below, that the 8x murder rate for Blacks versus Whites would rise to 8.5x if there were no police murders at all. (this reflects how much more impactful police killings are on White people then they truly have on Blacks)
Now in the past year of data there have been 5,556 homicides of Americans by members of their own race, or by police. The Washington Post and The Guardian have unofficial estimates, and I averaged their databases together. See the split of these murders, which are now precisely sized proportionally by the number of homicides in each of these four categories below.

We show this same information, charted chart two different ways so that the most crucial storyline can be reinforced. First we should state that while there are nearly 5.5x as many Whites as Blacks in the U.S., it is disquieting that Blacks still kill their own almost as much as Whites do (using the left chart above: 45% for the left portion versus 55% for the right portion)! Additionally, within the left-side’s number of Blacks killed, it’s actually a smaller portion are killed by police versus the similar comparison for Whites. This is despite the fact that Whites are living in lower-crime neighborhoods (and yes they too are under economic duress just as Blacks are) to begin with. If Whites are actually killing each other at a lower rate, it also must imply those neighborhood have less violent criminals! For more information, recheck the bullets highlighted above describing Former Mayor Giuliani’s comments.
Now when looking at who is committing these dire murders, it is clearly more often than not being done by “everyday” neighborhood civilians, and not by the police. We prove this by portioning the same 5,556 murders on the right chart above. We see that the right portion of that ride-side’s chart shows that civilian murders are nearly equal (47% are Blacks versus 53% are Whites). Yet the only 1 in 7 annual number of of all homicides are due to police (the left portion of the right-side’s chart) and not civilians. When the police kill, 2/3 of the time it is Whites being killed! We can ask where is the furor over that, when Whites don’t even account for >2/3 of the same-race civilian killings (as a reminder, it was only 53%)?
To be thorough, it is wistfully accurate that police too are victims of unnecessary murders by American civilians (these shootings are up >50% versus 2015's year-to-date statistic). This type of murder happens at 8% the level of civilians killed by police, and 1% of the overall 5,556 level of annual killings in total we’re discussing here. So this may appear to be a small number, but it is certainly not insignificant at all, to those we put to work in law enforcement. Who’s killing these police? We dejectedly note that relative to Whites, Black civilians kill police at an astonishing 4-5x (Blacks are the same ones who are killing each other at 8x the national rate and paradoxically expecting law enforcement to stop that, but then shriek when the police do). The Dallas sniper murders last week (and possibly the Baton Rouge killings today) have not done anyone favors, and numerically it will inexpugnably and instantaneously spike the number of police killed by Blacks, by ~15%! None of this is to say that we advocate any Blacks being stalked and hunted anywhere, but the broad information we hear in the media doesn't offer proof that this is what is happening nor proof of economic discrimination. It is also a gloomy reality that Black civilians are also killing Whites at a significantly higher rate than the other way around.
An impressive academic peer-reviewed paper, which I spent considerable time reviewing as the an editor, was well-referenced earlier this year (for example written up in the Wall Street Journal). It explores threat factors associated with police who shoot at a scene (including critical insights such as Black officers are >3x more likely to shoot versus Whites when both confronted as a team within the same situation). The author and the renowned American Statistical Association journal were a vital probability and statistics citation for the recently viral Harvard University/National Bureau of Economic Research economics working draft on police aggression (and showing that shooting isn’t even the largest component of police aggression to begin with!)
Here is the topical research article we made free:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2330443X.2015.1129918
To summarize, we have a tapestry of racial homicide information that demonstrates that within the U.S., Black lives are committing crimes at an awfully-high disproportionate rate (again we can isolate the Blacks-on-Blacks homicide numbers above). Additionally, Black civilians account for a disproportionately higher number of all murders of police, who do care about Black lives and are trying to reduce violent crimes in Black neighborhoods. And while police kill fewer Blacks than Whites, Black police are >3x likelier to shoot versus White police. Whites tend to murder anyone at a lower late, and this is despite the glorification in the media of a small fraction of incidences the don't represent the righteous struggle for many.
It is clear where the threat is where it comes to violent crimes, and so too why the recent movement against Whites is an awkward paradox. Whites certainly have their flaws and discriminations and certainly struggling to make ends meet just like everyone else, but we also see that Black lives do matter to Whites. And all innocent lives should matter. The question is, why do Black lives (or any innocent lives) not matter to Blacks who disproportionately murder? This makes the appeal that Whites don’t care about anything, hard to absorb.
Let’s put this all a little differently. If we were in a situation in America, where we had an equal proportions of Blacks as Whites, in this hypothetical the number of butchered Americans in the hands of Blacks would burgeon (and astonishingly by police would fall) uncontrollably and our entire society would be left effectively unbalanced. That would not be a stellar result

Whose Lives Matter?

by Tyler Durden
Jul 30, 2016 9:00 PM
Submitted by Salil Mehta via Statitiscal Ideas blog,
In our prior article we exposed that a murdered Black had a 90% chance of being killed by another Black (8x the rate of Whites being killed by another White). And a murdered Black had a 10% chance of being killed by police (usually Black police, and anyway it is at a high 2.5x the rate of Whites). We integrated recent popular academic research (some of which I peer-reviewed), and lastly we noted that for every 10 Blacks killed by police, 1 police was killed by a Black. We intend to explore these trends further, since after that article we saw more shooting deaths of police in Baton Rouge (and less covered by the media were deaths in Kansas City and Austin and just now in San Diego, plus this week near-deaths of multiple officers in both Indianapolis and Jefferson Parish). The debate about the 'killings' statistics between predominantly Blacks and police has brought up in the recent political conventions. It’s also worth noting from the onset that this all appears to be a system that has gotten out of control.
Police are ubiquitous in low income neighborhoods, and in these neighborhoods Blacks are killing disproportionately. This summer in particular is going to set records going back more than a decade (even if you remove mass terrorist shootings from the time series). There is a lack of social service safety nets for these multitude of decent Americans, and instead the government's Lottery is ironically a disgraceful sponge drawing away from these communities that need assistance most. I helped some of their neighborhoods rebuild, with economic assistance provided during the TARP bailout program. But now attaining lethal weapons is simply too easy. Blacks should know better, and the killings of these courageous public servants needs to stop. Innocent Americans are needlessly becoming victims with the idea that police lives don’t matter. They don’t matter to the point that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) -per the words of one of their three leaders- is now pushing to defund the police altogether. And White people certainly shouldn’t feel somehow guilty because a small fraction of them are crowded into the Top 1%. The rest of the White communities are going through as difficult a time as well, but just not as violently. Given our last article gained 90k reads, and >275 social media engagements, this follow-up seemed necessary to present a broader case (taking in comments from both sides) than merely the grim murder statistics that provide bad optics for Blacks. It is my hope that we learn from these most violent statistics, since this is also where data (difficult to come by) is just a tad easier to manually assimilate.
There is plenty of information circulating that homicides of civilians through some methods has gone down (our blog has discussed this as well). Overall police deaths have gone down (but through all means, including common causes such as simple working accidents or vehicle crashes). In the chart below we see that for the specific case of cold-blooded shooting of police to death, so far in 2016 this has gone up by about 60%, versus the YTD levels in previous years. It goes up, even as the month of July is not yet over. It goes up even if we don’t count the Dallas and Baton Rouge killings at all. And it is nearly a 1 standard deviation event, implying that recent killings are either purposefully too high in response to BLM, or because we simply have a rise in disobedient killings anyway, and likely both. Disturbingly, the police are the only sub-population being killed at an increasing rate over time! And while in recent years about 55% of these murders were done by Blacks (who represent 13% of the U.S. population); and in 2016 this surged to a goliath three-quarters of police murdered by Blacks throughout 2016. This evidence of the uptick in police being killed by Blacks is statistically significant at >95%.

Such a spike in police being killed is enough discourage otherwise good, decent Americans from taking up this noble public service. We all rely on the police at some point in our lives. We ask them to work in our most dangerous cities, and they are mostly good officers (of course a few bad ones well). The anecdotal shootings of Blacks that are edited and glorified on social media are still terrible tragedies and bad optics for communities that feel the police are intervening in their progress to live a healthy and productive life. I do agree that black lives matter. Most Americans should agree with that as well. There are many, many extraordinary ones among our colleagues, friends, and -in my case- my students. But they also agree that over time so too matters the lives of everyone else, including children, vulnerable women, police and everyday Whites in the same tender socio-economic status.
We live in a country where there is too much overall homicide (nearly 6 thousand annually). And at the racial intersection we also have Black officers more likely to shoot Whites than White officers are to shoot Blacks. But behind all of these statistics we all must work together and have a clear sense of responsibility to each another. We share this country, and rise and fall together. With hope, we will spend more time brightly raising each other up as fellow countrymen, rather than finding it easy to speak hateful words of one another (which then slides into killing one another).
