> Please stop with this racist skewing of statistics. There are thousands of factors involved.
But that's the whole point. If black people are disproportionately shot by police because police are racist, that's a problem with police. If it's because "thousands of factors" cause black people to have disproportionately more encounters with police, but the police themselves are acting with neutrality, then it's a problem somewhere else and you can't fix it through police reform.
The answer is fundamental if you actually want to solve the problem. But not evaluating it is convenient if you just want to keep using it as a political bludgeon forever, because by not even looking in the right places for a solution, the problem is never solved and you can run for office on it over and over.
I am not an expert on criminology. I only have a layman understanding of psychology from university so I can not tell you how the experts have reached a consensus on racial justice in urban USA is skewed against black people (but I bet there are other people on HN that can; if they are willing to spend the effort; which I doubt, since I am almost over this already).
But my layman understanding of psychology is enough to recognize how experts deal with large number factors in social models. You don’t just pick and choose (in fact that is what I’m accusing racists of doing). There is a large body of literature that experts consults. In an average social psychology study you find something like citations to 30-60 different works to back up something as trivial as a study on the stress relation effects of living in proximity to high noise pollution. It is anything but convenient. To the contrary, it is a ton of work. I’m sure expert criminologists have spent years doing nothing but familiarizing them self with the literature so they can best judge how do deal with different factors in their models. And if they do mess up (which I’m sure they do) the self correcting nature of the scientific method will make sure that the worlds knows how their models were erroneous, and subsequent models will take this extra knowledge into effect.
But that's the whole point. If black people are disproportionately shot by police because police are racist, that's a problem with police. If it's because "thousands of factors" cause black people to have disproportionately more encounters with police, but the police themselves are acting with neutrality, then it's a problem somewhere else and you can't fix it through police reform.
The answer is fundamental if you actually want to solve the problem. But not evaluating it is convenient if you just want to keep using it as a political bludgeon forever, because by not even looking in the right places for a solution, the problem is never solved and you can run for office on it over and over.