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Miguelitro's avatar

Steve,

You would be highly interested in the excellent quantitative research carried out by U of Michigan Professor Shea Streeter produced in her Ph.D dissertation at Stanford. Her conclusion dovetails with yours--the positive correlation between the frequency of citizen/police interactions overall between "races" and the higher number of those interactions escalating into violence. That is, the percentage of police interactions that escalate is about the same among racial categories, but since "Blacks" have a much higher percentage of overall police interactions, there is a higher percentage of these interactions that escalate into violence leading to police-caused fatalities. This runs against the common wisdom that "Blacks" handle police interactions worse than whites do or that cops are more likely to be violent against the Blacks" that they do detain. Rather, it's more because it's "Blacks" who are always the ones getting detained on a percentage basis. See https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/703541?journalCode=jop

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Chris Fox's avatar

Is that supposed to mitigate? It doesn't for me.

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Miguelitro's avatar

Mitigate what?

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Miguelitro's avatar

I forgot to add---the higher detention rates for "Blacks" have both legitimate and illegitimate bases. It is both because of the higher relative crime rates AND the well-documented phenomenon of detention for "driving while Black" and for "innocently standing on the street-corner while Black in the "wrong" (i.e., white) neighborhood."

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