You cannot solve a problem which you deliberately misdiagnose.

One of the large crop of empiricists calling the nation and the media to pay attention to the facts instead of inventing emotive narratives. An implicit call to solve real problems rather than perform political theater for partisan reasons.

From Racist Police Violence Reconsidered by John McWhorter. From the superior and one of the very few classical liberal and empiricist news outlets, Quillette.

His argument, as for so many classical liberals, is that the numbers do not support the BLM and MSM narrative. And he is correct. His argument is well substantiated by many researchers over the past forty years. Unlike most, he moves past the numbers and uses the cases to illustrate his point, making it more compelling.

Tony Timpa was 32 years old when he died at the hands of the Dallas police in August 2016. He suffered from mental health difficulties and was unarmed. He wasn’t resisting arrest. He had called the cops from a parking lot while intoxicated because he thought he might be a danger to himself. By the time law enforcement arrived, he had already been handcuffed by the security guards of a store nearby. Even so, the police officers made him lie face down on the grass, and one of them pressed a knee into his back. He remained in this position for 13 minutes until he suffocated. During the harrowing recording of his final moments, he can be heard pleading for his life. A grand jury indictment of the officers involved was overturned.

Not many people have seen this video, however, and that may have something to do with the fact that Timpa was white. During the protests and agonizing discussions about police brutality that have followed the death of George Floyd under remarkably similar circumstances, it is too seldom acknowledged that white men are regularly killed by the cops as well, and that occasionally the cops responsible are black (as it happens, one of the Dallas police officers at the scene of Timpa’s death was an African American). There seems to be a widespread assumption that, under similar circumstances, white cops kill black people but not white people, and that this disparity is either the product of naked racism or underlying racist bias that emerges under pressure. Plenty of evidence indicates, however, that racism is less important to understanding police behavior than is commonly supposed.

Timpa was, of course, just one case and might be dismissed as an anomaly. On the other hand, we are told that what happened to George Floyd is what happens to black people “all the time.” But because the killing of black suspects by white police officers receives more media attention and elicits more outrage, such instances leave us vulnerable to the availability heuristic—a cognitive bias that leads us to form judgements about the prevalence of phenomena based on the readiness with which we can recall examples. Had Tony Timpa been black, we would all likely know his name by now. Had George Floyd been white, his name would likely be a footnote, briefly reported in Minneapolis local news and quickly forgotten. In fact, white people are victims of police mistreatment “all the time” too. And just as the Timpa case tragically parallels the Floyd one, there are countless episodes paralleling those we hear about involving black people.

In 2014, John Crawford, black, was shot dead by police while waving a BB gun. In 2016, Daniel Shaver, white, was waving a pellet gun out of motel window and suffered the same fate. In 2015, officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, black, in the back and killed him as he was running to evade a traffic ticket; the following year, Andrew Thomas, white, was shot in the neck by a police officer and killed as he climbed out of the SUV he had crashed trying to evade arrest. In 2015, Sam DuBose, black, was shot dead as he tried to escape a traffic summons in his car; the same year, Michael Parker, white, was shot dead in the same way while trying escape a ticket for a moving violation. In 2016, Philando Castile, black, was shot dead in his car by a cop as he reached under his waistband for his license and registration during a traffic stop; the same year, Dylan Noble, white, was shot dead under almost identical circumstances. Also in 2016, Alton Sterling, black, was shot dead in front of a convenience store as he was being detained for unruly conduct; the same year, Brandon Stanley, white, was shot dead in a convenience store for trying to avoid a warrant.

He also makes the point too rarely made. Fatal police shootings are way too many at 1,000 but they are statistically tiny.

According to a database of fatal police shootings maintained by the Washington Post since 2015, 1,003 people in a population of 328 million were shot by police nationwide in 2019. 405 of those victims were white and 250 were black (of the remaining cases, 163 were Hispanic, 41 are listed as “other,” and 144 as “unknown”).

1,003 people killed by the police out of 328 million is a fractional percentage. Still 1,003 tragedies, but rare in the scheme of things. About twice the chance of being struck by lightning, which is 1 in 700,000 in a year.
And we cannot forget that these are not passive events that occur by themselves. They are human generated, almost entirely by civilians. Roughly 80% of those 1,003 killed in an encounter with the police were armed with a gun or knife and 75% were in the process of attacking other civilians or the responding police.

309 white victims (76.2 percent) were carrying either a gun or a knife, while 199 black victims (79.6 percent) were similarly armed. It is also worth bearing in mind that while police shootings are sometimes perceived to be abuses per se, an analysis of the Post‘s 2015 data by Kimberly Kindy and Kennedy Elliott reminded readers that:

In three-quarters of the fatal shootings, police were under attack or defending someone who was. The officers were often lauded as heroes… 28 percent of those who died were shooting at officers or someone else. Sixteen percent were attacking with other weapons or physical force, and 31 percent were pointing a gun.

Which gets to a deeper point. This is not a race issue. Except to the extent that social justice ideologues and their journalist compatriots are racist, valuing some lives above others.

America is dramatically more peaceful than in the 1990s and all the worst forms of violence are down by an order of magnitude. With gun ownership at an all time high, violent crime is approaching or is at all time lows.

But we are still a relatively violent and dangerous nation compared to most other OECD countries. Cause? Law? Social norms? Culture? Ethnic and religious diversity? Ineffective social policies? Divided federal republican form of government? Poverty?

We know it is not the latter but otherwise probably some unknown balance of the other plausible candidates.

I would weight national culture reasonably heavily. On measurements such as IQ, propensity to violent crime, income, education attainment, longevity, etc. Americans tend to perform better than their peers in the originating countries of origins.

In other words the average white American earns more income, is more educated, has higher PISA scores, commits less violent crime, accumulates more wealth, works longer hours, lives as long as the average European and even the average OECD European.

And the same is true for each ethnic origin - Asian Americans, Hispanics, African-Americans - they all live better than any of their ethnic appears in their country or continent of familial origin.

As an aside, Simpson's Paradox is in play.

A phenomenon in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in several different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.

All ethno-cultural groups in America outperform their origin region or continent on the most valued socio-economic measures but since all those groups have materially different absolute measured levels of achievement, when you average them together, the national performance level is lower than the constituent parts. When we aggregate all ethno-cultural groups together, our measures as a whole push the US down into generally the top decile or quartile of performers.

Back to the main point. There are a couple of negative comparisons as well for the US. By ethno-cultural group, we tend to have more accidents and suffer greater morbidity from sins of excess such as gluttony.

In other words, Americans, of whatever ethno-cultural group, tend to work harder, play harder, live harder, and take more risks than the corresponding region or continents of origin.

America as a whole supercharges results through freedom, choices and risk taking in a fashion different from other nations.

1,003 deaths are too many. And entirely consistent with other sociological trends we can see.

We don't have a race problem. We have a risk taking diversity of social norms and highly heterogenous government entity consistency problem. Which is also our blessing. The very freedom which makes us more open, welcoming, adventurous, risk taking, etc. in all aspects of our lives and which lead to very good outcomes for everyone, also has a downside in risky behaviors.

Our challenge is how to sustain the culture of freedom and choice while reducing the negative consequences such as choosing to attack other citizens or the police. We have made significant progress in the past decade. We have more to be done.

But we need an American solution based on freedom which does not throttle the very attribute which makes us otherwise so successful.

And most of all, we should not get distracted by anarchic racist ideologues who want to drive racial division around a problem that is shared and experienced by everyone.