Blacks suffer disproportionately under our legal system and have been hurt more than anyone else by the war on drugs.
However, I hate how Seabass posted that right after an interesting bit on the dangers of uncritically preaching white privilege. It would be normal to assume that whites are to blame, or at least that we can make progress by making whites aware of the problems they cause.
New Study Says White Police Officers Are Not More Likely To Shoot Minority Suspects
When you look at the number of police shootings in relation to the population, you find that people of color are shot and killed more often than white people. The reason for that disparity has been intensely debated for years, especially since an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo. almost five years ago.
There has been one recurring theory, that white cops are more likely to shoot black people because of racial bias. Now a new study is challenging that conclusion. NPR's Martin Kaste has more.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Since the Ferguson protests of 2014, we've learned a lot more about fatal shootings by the police. News organizations started collecting their own data on shootings to make up for incomplete federal stats, and academics started building on that. Michigan State University psychologist Joseph Cesario is part of a group that looked at fatal shootings in 2015. They added in the race of the police, and then did a statistical analysis.
JOSEPH CESARIO: The race of a police officer did not predict the race of the citizen shot. In other words, black officers were just as likely to shoot black citizens as white officers were.
An interesting bit occurs shortly after when a critic of the study claims this isn't news to anyone:
GOFF: It doesn't do very much to move us towards an understanding of how much are police responsible for racial disparities. And the things it does sort of lead us to are things that we already knew.
KASTE: For instance, he says if the study is aiming to debunk the assumption that white cops shoot people for racist reasons while black cops don't, he says that's a strawman because no one in his field actually thinks that.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/26/74573183 ... rity-suspe
But clearly many of us do:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08 ... draws-fire
You can bet I thought that way, as will most people reading Seabass.