> What I said was, there was a hypothesis, it made a testable prediction, and measurements support that hypothesis. This is sometimes called evidence.

If the hypothesis is "police are racist against black people when deciding to use force", then no, measurements don't support that hypothesis at all or too weakly to reject the null hypothesis -- we haven't measured the coupling to demographics to get a good prior estimate on the number of deaths. Without that, we need to sort of "average" over possible couplings, and end up with something like 0.5 to 2.5 times "appropriate number of blacks to number of whites being killed by police". Since that range includes 1, until we can refine the coupling between shooting distribution and demographics, we basically have a null result on our hypothesis.

> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".

> WP helpfully reminds us that in US law the lowest legal burden of proof is the far "reasonable suspicion". If you believe the data doesn't even mean that low burden of proof, then I certainly disagree.

I don't disagree that there's a "reasonable suspicion" of racism affecting the outcomes of policing -- but I think that's been the case for, oh, the entire lifetime of the country.

I disagree that there's a "preponderance of evidence" (which I'd argue is the lowest standard to reach a conclusion besides "we should check more" or "there isn't enough evidence to tell") that the dominant cause of the high number of black deaths is racism, that we even have a number of black deaths which are in some sense "in excess" of what we'd expect from "fair" or "not racist", and think people are likely a bit more... uh... "reasonable" than I am if they think there's a "reasonable suspicion" that racism is the dominant cause of the discrepancy between black per capita and white per capita death-by-police rates.

I'm not, however, against looking in to it more. People should totally do that, and I bet they'll get their name in some sociology book for proving the racist component exists.

I just think, you know, we should talk about the fact that police kill twenty people per state every year, rather than the few people in the entire country that happens to who happen to have it happen just because they're black. That is, perhaps we should talk about how POLICE ARE JUST BEATING AND SHOOTING TONS OF PEOPLE UNNECESSARILY, rather than about how we should fix it so that they do so to the same number of white and black people, who once you account for confounding factors, seem to get abused at a roughly even rate already (eg, +/- 10%).

> Then again, it doesn't sound like you have done the analysis either, and you are reacting on the basis that you don't like the conclusion and you think "proof" only means something like "beyond reasonable doubt".

I think that the "evidence" backing the claims hasn't even cleared basic Bayesian analysis, and is a case of people jumping on an emotionally charged things that sounds good.

It's not that I need 5-sigma to accept a social issue, it's that I need proponents to at least pass the basic threshold of "entirely statistical artifact". And right now, the rate at which blacks are being killed relative to whites is anywhere from 0.5-2.5x, which because it includes 1, is only a slightly skewed-basically-null result.

So with the police-are-racists claim hovering at "statistical anomaly", but the police-are-violent-psychopaths claim well documented, I think people who are focusing on the "racism of the police" are... well... misguided.

There's a very real, well-documented issue. It's just seems that it's a complex classism one, not a racism one, which is way less sexy to talk about.