And if you want to HEAR the voices of black Americans, they're already IN the data. To quote Philippe Lemoine’s argument: "The issue of how prevalent police violence against black people is cannot be settled by listening to what black people have to say about this. We can only figure this out by looking at systematic evidence, such as victimization surveys, which is what I have done in this article. By doing that, I am listening to what black people have to say about police violence, but I’m doing so in a scientifically responsible way. "
Look to the data.
“Why Biased Policing Does Not Account for the Results” is a supplemental paper to widely respected researcher and professor Joseph Cesario’s work arguing there’s no police racial bias in lethal force. It states clearly based on crime survey comparisons, “Blacks are under-arrested given their rate of reported crime.”
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_23920f7547cc4b019b3aa915cf7e18de.pdf
Disparities in contact with police are actually quite small:
2018 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics show declining interactions with police and whites were more likely to have contact with police.
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6406
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/cpp15pr.cfm
* The portion of U.S. residents age 16 or older who had contact with the police in the preceding 12 months declined from 26% in 2011 to 21% in 2015, a drop of more than 9 million people (from 62.9 million to 53.5 million).
* Whites (23%) were more likely than blacks (20%) or Hispanics (17%) to have contact with police.
Police were equally likely to initiate contact with blacks and whites (11% each) but were less likely to initiate contact with Hispanics (9%).
A French statistician, Philippe Lemoine, broke down the much-respected Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), which provides detailed information about contacts between police and the public. It’s conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), as a supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). It is based on a nationally representative sample of US residents age 16 or older, and the data comes directly from the population instead of from law enforcement agencies. The hard numbers show little evidence of police harassing black Americans: “Among men, only 20.7% of whites, 17.5% of blacks and 17.1% of hispanics have at least one contact with the police in any given year.” And “Among men, the probability of having more than 3 contacts with the police per year is only 1.2% for whites, 1.5% for blacks and 0.8% for hispanics. … It’s unclear that bias has anything to do with it.”
https://necpluribusimpar.net/reality-police-violence-us/
Data Sources:
2005 - https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/studies/20020
2008 - https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/studies/32022
Philippe Lemoine’s related article: https://areomagazine.com/2017/10/02/there-is-no-epidemic-of-police-brutality-against-black-men/
“I know people will say that, as a white man (who to make things worse is a foreigner and didn’t grow up in the US), I should just shut up and defer to what black Americans have to say about this, because they’re supposed to have some kind of privileged epistemic access to facts about police violence and how it affects them. It’s really one of the most disconcerting facts about the contemporary intellectual landscape that such patently obscurantist nonsense has become so popular on the left. The issue of how prevalent police violence against black people is cannot be settled by listening to what black people have to say about this. We can only figure this out by looking at systematic evidence, such as victimization surveys, which is what I have done in this article. By doing that, I am listening to what black people have to say about police violence, but I’m doing so in a scientifically responsible way. There is no doubt that, as various polls have demonstrated, black people are much more likely than white people to think that police violence against minorities is very common. But we can’t infer that, just because they’re black, they are more likely to be correct.
Minorities don’t have a magical radar in their head that allows them to know how common police violence is across the country or even in their neighborhood. Since they have direct knowledge of what happened to them personally, you can trust them about that. But not when it comes to larger social phenomena, for their beliefs about that are influenced by far more than just their personal experience, such as the media which constantly hypes police violence against black people. The fact is that, if you ask them about how often the police uses force against, not them personally but black people in general, many of them (though by no means all of them) will tell you that it happens all the time. But as we have seen, if you draw a representative sample of the population and ask each black person in that sample how often the police has used force against them personally, then use their answers to determine how common police violence against black people is, you find that it’s extremely rare. Black Americans are just wrong about how common police violence against minorities is, not in spite of the fact that they’re black, but probably because they are. Sometimes being more directly concerned by a phenomenon makes you less, not more, likely to be right about it.”