• FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    Yes I agree with you 100%, I’ve never on any occasion argued against any of that.

    Actually, the data has been largely unreliable since at least 2015, as James Comey while he was head of the FBI puts it: “I think it’s embarrassing for those of us in government who care deeply about these issues, especially the use of force by law enforcement, that we can’t have an informed discussion because we don’t have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by police in the United States last month, last year, or anything about the demographics, and that’s a very bad place to be.” All US Federal data on police use of force is self-reported since forever.

    For about 2 decades, largely one of the biggest sources for data was Philip M. Stinson, who tracked nationwide shootings with Google Alerts. There was also another great study on the matter by PNAS called “Risk of being Killed by Police in the United States by Age, Race-ethnicity, and Sex”.