TL;DR: Jim Hoyt-McDaniels misconstrued my use of these graphics in a comment above.

Mar 19, 2018

5 min read

David, as a POC I understand the point you’re making and agree with much of the evidence.

Jim Hoyt-McDaniels

Since 2014, police in Chicago have killed around 1 citizen per 300,000 citizens. That’s the same rate as cops nationwide. (Stats; HeyJackAss!)

TL;DR: Jim Hoyt-McDaniels misconstrued my use of these graphics in a comment above. For example, I clearly pointed out when first using it that the 2nd one is racist. Next two comments address this. My original reply:

Jim Hoyt-McDaniels, Thanks for replying. Sorry I didn’t notice that you did for 1 month. I do try to engage so we all can learn and grow from facts and context.

I have a couple questions. Here’s the first: What graphics did I present that would lead to someone accusing me of “racist basis”? (I think you mean bias.) Frankly you’re accusing me of using images I did not even USE in this post.

One image I used presents accurate Washington Post data, showing how unarmed people shot by police represent under 10% of shootings. The other one is Center for Disease Control data used on both liberal and conservative websites to portray how police shootings have dropped significantly for blacks (more than 70% drop over 40–50 years), which I first used here on my analysis of police shootings. (See excerpt below.)

Additionally, your two graphics you sent me are complete opposites: One is false, and one is accurate. The latter I’m not unfamiliar, as it was shared widely by candidate Donald Trump — which he later took down — and IS racist and filled with falsehoods. In fact, I would call it one of the more racist things he’s ever Tweeted — and that’s saying a lot.

Trump's Pants on Fire tweet that blacks killed 81% of white homicide victims

A day after a black activist was kicked and punched by voters at a Donald Trump rally in Alabama, Trump tweeted an…

www.politifact.com

The former image you shared by HeyJackAss has consistently shown accurate statistics that in no way align with the other viral meme you choose to juxtapose it with, Jim Hoyt-McDaniels. Whites are killed by blacks 81% of the time? That’s obviously a falsehood on its face as fact-checkers and social scientists have proven. (It’s closer to 15%, and whites killing blacks is closer to 7%, according to FBI data. Twice as many blacks kill whites than vice versa. Is that racist to say? Again, it depends on the context.)

Second question: What’s wrong with presenting accurate data and in context? Below you can see me using HeyJackAss stats (basically, insider data from police reports in Chicago), which I know are accurate as The Chicago Tribune’s reporting matches it. And no one has credibly disputed it.

My goals are to assure people that police aren’t killing citizens — especially black ones — in a prejudiced way. The data bares that out no matter what propaganda-spewing Vice Magazine (falsely saying 20% of people killed by police are unarmed) and Vox (omitting data, and running old data, that counters their narrative) is pushing out their media door.

I have used HeyJackAss stats many times before as they show clearly that police in Chicago are NOT killing blacks at a rate higher than the national average, despite dealing with a homicide rate that’s 4–6 times higher, and Chicago’s violent crime is increasing 5 times faster than the national average..

How Roland Fryer’s Controversial Harvard Study on Racial Bias by Police Actually Shows Negligible…

I’ll crunch the numbers. You can comment and debunk.

medium.com

In 2015 and 2016, 25 citizens were shot by police in both years, according to the Chicago crime data-crunching website HeyJackass! (The Chicago Tribune lists slightly less with 22 people shot, 8 fatally, in 2015; and if you do some quick math you’ll see the rate of lethal force in Chicago the past two years is the same as nationally, roughly 1 in 300,000.) Here are the concrete numbers for two separate years spanning four decades which are among the worst for violence in Chicago:
1974: 970 Chicago citizens murders (including 6 police shot and killed)
1974: 137 citizens shot by police (page 20 of PDF)
2016: 800+ Chicago citizens murdered
2016: 25 citizens shot by police

And used here:

An Evidence-Based Analysis of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Call to Review Obama-Era U.S.

Attorney Generals Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder Missed the Mark and The Evidence Clearly Shows: There’s No Systemic…