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[entremet]

If you kill someone, whether the criminal justice system throws you in prison may come down to your race.

That’s the takeaway from a recent report by Daniel Lathrop and Anna Flagg at the Marshall Project. They looked at federal data to analyze the circumstances in which a homicide was deemed “justifiable” by police. Their findings were astounding:

In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing was categorized as justifiable, which is the term used when a police officer or a civilian kills someone committing a crime or in self-defense. Overall, the police classify fewer than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable. …

In comparison, when Hispanics killed black men, about 5.5 percent of cases were called justifiable. When whites killed Hispanics, it was 3.1 percent. When blacks killed whites, the figure was just 0.8 percent. When black males were killed by other blacks, the figure was about 2 percent, the same as the overall rate.

The racial disparity held up after controlling for different circumstances. When they adjusted for how well the killer and victim knew each other and how the victim was killed, white-on-black-men homicides were two to 10 times as likely to be called “justifiable.” And when controlling for age in addition to those other factors, white-on-black-men homicides remained 4.7 times as likely to be called “justifiable” as other cases. The disparity also seemed to hold up across the country, according to the report.

One caveat: The data used by the Marshall Project is incomplete, since not all police departments participate in the FBI database used for the analysis. Still, the Marshall Project looked at 400,000 cases dating from 1980 through 2014 — a large pool of data.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017...de-justifiable-black-white-race?ref=hvper.com

 

[LegendofLex]

filed in "things we already knew"

 

[SlickShoesRUCrazy]

shocking.gif.

 

[hydrophilic attack]

what happened to all men are created equal

 

[traveler]

I guess its good to have studies and statistics to back up assertions made in this area later, but, yeah, don't think this is news to anyone.

 

[entremet]

filed in "things we already knew"

Edited the title to fit, but it's much more likely to be ruled justifiable. Still good to have data on this for the empiricists asking for the receipts. This was a detailed study.

There are also other takeaways:

It's also possible that the findings aren't explained solely by racism. The Marshall Project points to another study: ”If, for instance, white-on-black homicides were mainly defensive shootings in a residence or business, and black-on-white shootings mainly occurred during the commission of a street crime, then the [racial] disparity would be warranted," researcher John Roman wrote in a 2013 Urban Institute study of justifiable homicides.

 

[Lightning_Roller]

filed in "things we already knew"

Yep. And it won't stop anytime soon. Damn, that's depressing to type.

 

[Enzom21]

 

[UnemployedVillain]

I like how they said the findings were "astounding"

 

[LegendofLex]

what happened to all men are created equal

white people killed it, and consider the act justified

Edited the title to fit, but it's much more likely to be ruled justifiable. Still good to have data on this for the empiricists asking for the receipts. This was a detailed study.

I'll be serious now.

What's really scary/shocking about this isn't that the killings are deemed justifiable in general.

It's that they're deemed justifiable by police.

 

[HeySeuss]

Not trying to derail the thread here but am I reading this correctly that police shootings are included in the data, which a large number of the sample size would be a white officer vs a black suspect?

I think the more appropriate comparison would be to remove the police shootings entirely, as only a small percentage of police shootings are even borderline, let alone actually labeled "not justified".

 

[Kin5290]

Not trying to derail the thread here but am I reading this correctly that police shootings are included in the data, which a large number of the sample size would be a white officer vs a black suspect?

I think the more appropriate comparison would be to remove the police shootings entirely, as only a small percentage of police shootings are even borderline, let alone actually labeled "not justified".

Are police killings a statistically significant portion of overall homicide? Because of not, then this should not matter.

They might be, however. Which is pretty alarming in itself. In 2015 there were just under 16,000 homicides in the US, according to FBI data, while estimates between 975 and 1186 people were killed by police.

 

[Beefy]

What about black on black crime?

Spoiler

Fuck this shit.

 

[Derwind]

I mean Zimmerman quite literally stalked and murdered an unarmed minor who was literally on his way home. I'm sorry but I guarantee you if the places were switched, that poor kid would be on death row.