NFL Protest

[CJD]

(09-29-2017, 01:09 PM)bengalhoel Wrote: Why dont the black athletes protest the white people being murdered by the cops too then?  I think people would more likely get on board with backing people up if it was equal. Even though the percentage is higher there are still twice as many white people killed by the police as blacks. 

I guess I am different. If I see an unarmed black/white man gunned down by cops when he is complying, then I am equally pissed off and I want answers.  When I see a cop doing his job and a career criminal is resisting arrest and he gets shot, too damn bad. 

The problem is unarmed white man gunned down, statistically, is relatively rare, especially compared to the unarmed black men being gunned down.

a stat like this comes to mind: "Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?utm_term=.e9cec15f5886





I am not a mathematician, so I don't want to try to determine the relative chance of 6% of a population making up 40% of a scenario, but a layman approach is that's approximately 6.66x higher than it should be (40/6). In theory, a percentage of victims of a crime being black should perfectly mirror that the percentage of the population that is black. It'll never be perfectly like that, but you'd hope it would be close.


over 6x higher than it should be doesn't seem right.


Conversely, that only leaves 60% of the victims that are not black.  White people are ~62% of the American population, so that means that white people are shot less than the equivalent of their population density. I.E. There are more white people in America than any other race, but they are not shot as often as any other race.


You could argue that this is due to the way the different races react to the police or the relative crime rate of said races, but you can't deny that those numbers are troubling.


So should we be outraged when a white person who is unarmed is shot? Of course. But is it actually a problem in America right now that white people are essentially being hunted by the police? It doesn't appear to be.


If there was a story about a white unarmed man being killed by the police, I think outrage is the correct response. The problem is those stories aren't even remotely as common as the ones regarding unarmed black men. 


And that's what this protest is trying to point out and correct.