What I’d like to see is numbers based on income/poverty level. I bet that if we grouped by wealth rather than race we would see that the wealthy are least arrested, least brutalized, while the poor are more often involved in crime and far far far more brutalized.
I don’t think it’s (entirely) an issue of race but an issue of the privilege of wealth, disparity is wealth, etc.
People are far less likely to commit crime if their needs are all meet and they don’t feel so disadvantaged.
And let’s be honest, the wealthy get to get away with all kinds of shit we “peons/plebs/rabble” would be in jail for.
Edit: thanks for the awards guys. I didn’t say anything other than what my life experience has shown me and I’ll leave it at that. Honestly I wish I was on that space shuttle because I don’t want to live on this bullshit planet anymore. It’s cruel, spiteful, and often times truly evil. My heart goes out to all those struggling due to financial difficulty, racial bias, difference of religion, or anything. I wish everyone could just be treated as a human and not have to struggle tooth and claw just to live each day.
Sure there are bright spots of happiness but often times I feel like they are far too rare compared to the shear onslaught of abject suffering.
If you can, pay it forward, share some kindness with anyone you can and let’s all try to love each other a bit more no matter our differences.
When I make figures, I consider these two main factors.
provide evidence that the information/numbers I'm showing are correct make sure I effectively convey to the viewer what my numbers suggest.
This post has issues with both.
Let's start with the first point. OP didn't provide any explanations or calculations that would allow us the check the validity of point 1. Yes, the source is attached below but that won't explain what the OP was doing exactly when they got these values (from the numbers taken from the source). We need to see calculations, scripts, explanations. Providing these is essential and must be done every time someone publishes a figure. Without this, there's no assurance that one just didn't make up numbers to convey their own agenda. Anyways, for the sake of argument, let's assume the values are correct. (And they are indeed as I performed the calculations myself, but OP should have shown them instead of me having to guess what they did and then do the calculations by myself.)
My second point is the fact that this figure is very misleading, and this is the main issue here. In its current form it suggests that 43% of the victims of fatal police shootings were Black Americans. I know, I know... this is NOT what it really means. I realized it after looking at the figure and the source for 5 minutes. But c'mon man, you got make this more obvious! If your figure with a relatively simple message needs 5 minutes to properly interpret due to misleading elements, your figure is totally wrong. Just look at the comments below and count the ratio of people (on both sides of the agenda) who interpreted it as 43% of victims of fatal police shootings were black as opposed to 17% of white (if one looks at the source, they can realize that the real values are 26% and 51%, not 43% and 17%). And I can't blame them, because that's what your figure suggests unless one looks at the underlying details. Instead, I blame the OP for this! I don't know if this was intentional or not, but either way it's a very harmful thing to do.
It's wrong to publish something like this post. You got to make it robust if it's related to such a critical issue. By providing a bad and questionable figure you're decreasing the trustworthiness of your arguments and thereby you're undermining your own agenda.
Like I was saying, despite breaching the two main requirements of published figures, OP's figure is still correct. And its message that says Black Americans are disproportionately affected is correct if we perform calculations with values taken from the source. This makes sense given that 1291/31M (Black Americans) is significantly higher than 2472/197M (white). But again, the figure fails to convey this properly and thereby does more harm than good. There are just so much better ways to visualize this disproportion. What you did here, OP, is probably the worst way of doing so and you're basically wasting a really good agenda by exposing it like this to the other side of the argument.
Although a much smaller but an additional problem: It's obvious that there is no temporal information on this figure, but the curved lines are very misleading because they are usually used to depict temporal behaviour. OP should have used straight lines for this purpose. That, again, would have made this figure much clearer to the viewers.
TL;DR: OP's figure is misleading. Look at the reference. 51% of victims of fatal police shootings were white, not only 17%. People are totally misinterpreting it. However, if compared to total population, it is still true that Black Americans are disproportionately affected. But this figure fails to clearly convey this and therefore does more harm than good. Always look at the sources!
![image showing Fatal police shootings in the U.S. since January 01, 2015 [OC]](f4064aeb-9538-575f-9a8c-7e4d8f32fb90.jpg)
Gooseman488 on June 7th, 2020 at 16:19 UTC »
What I’d like to see is numbers based on income/poverty level. I bet that if we grouped by wealth rather than race we would see that the wealthy are least arrested, least brutalized, while the poor are more often involved in crime and far far far more brutalized.
I don’t think it’s (entirely) an issue of race but an issue of the privilege of wealth, disparity is wealth, etc.
People are far less likely to commit crime if their needs are all meet and they don’t feel so disadvantaged.
And let’s be honest, the wealthy get to get away with all kinds of shit we “peons/plebs/rabble” would be in jail for.
Edit: thanks for the awards guys. I didn’t say anything other than what my life experience has shown me and I’ll leave it at that. Honestly I wish I was on that space shuttle because I don’t want to live on this bullshit planet anymore. It’s cruel, spiteful, and often times truly evil. My heart goes out to all those struggling due to financial difficulty, racial bias, difference of religion, or anything. I wish everyone could just be treated as a human and not have to struggle tooth and claw just to live each day.
Sure there are bright spots of happiness but often times I feel like they are far too rare compared to the shear onslaught of abject suffering.
If you can, pay it forward, share some kindness with anyone you can and let’s all try to love each other a bit more no matter our differences.
CanisLupusLycaon on June 7th, 2020 at 18:21 UTC »
TL;DR at the bottom.
When I make figures, I consider these two main factors.
provide evidence that the information/numbers I'm showing are correct make sure I effectively convey to the viewer what my numbers suggest.This post has issues with both.
Let's start with the first point. OP didn't provide any explanations or calculations that would allow us the check the validity of point 1. Yes, the source is attached below but that won't explain what the OP was doing exactly when they got these values (from the numbers taken from the source). We need to see calculations, scripts, explanations. Providing these is essential and must be done every time someone publishes a figure. Without this, there's no assurance that one just didn't make up numbers to convey their own agenda. Anyways, for the sake of argument, let's assume the values are correct. (And they are indeed as I performed the calculations myself, but OP should have shown them instead of me having to guess what they did and then do the calculations by myself.)
My second point is the fact that this figure is very misleading, and this is the main issue here. In its current form it suggests that 43% of the victims of fatal police shootings were Black Americans. I know, I know... this is NOT what it really means. I realized it after looking at the figure and the source for 5 minutes. But c'mon man, you got make this more obvious! If your figure with a relatively simple message needs 5 minutes to properly interpret due to misleading elements, your figure is totally wrong. Just look at the comments below and count the ratio of people (on both sides of the agenda) who interpreted it as 43% of victims of fatal police shootings were black as opposed to 17% of white (if one looks at the source, they can realize that the real values are 26% and 51%, not 43% and 17%). And I can't blame them, because that's what your figure suggests unless one looks at the underlying details. Instead, I blame the OP for this! I don't know if this was intentional or not, but either way it's a very harmful thing to do.
It's wrong to publish something like this post. You got to make it robust if it's related to such a critical issue. By providing a bad and questionable figure you're decreasing the trustworthiness of your arguments and thereby you're undermining your own agenda.
Like I was saying, despite breaching the two main requirements of published figures, OP's figure is still correct. And its message that says Black Americans are disproportionately affected is correct if we perform calculations with values taken from the source. This makes sense given that 1291/31M (Black Americans) is significantly higher than 2472/197M (white). But again, the figure fails to convey this properly and thereby does more harm than good. There are just so much better ways to visualize this disproportion. What you did here, OP, is probably the worst way of doing so and you're basically wasting a really good agenda by exposing it like this to the other side of the argument.
Although a much smaller but an additional problem: It's obvious that there is no temporal information on this figure, but the curved lines are very misleading because they are usually used to depict temporal behaviour. OP should have used straight lines for this purpose. That, again, would have made this figure much clearer to the viewers.
TL;DR: OP's figure is misleading. Look at the reference. 51% of victims of fatal police shootings were white, not only 17%. People are totally misinterpreting it. However, if compared to total population, it is still true that Black Americans are disproportionately affected. But this figure fails to clearly convey this and therefore does more harm than good. Always look at the sources!
jq4511ups2x on June 7th, 2020 at 18:36 UTC »
"per million" -- it's displayed in percentage...