If your primary response is ad-hominems, it's probably not the other person that's out of rational arguments. Needless to say, those ad-hominems are completely wrong where they make factual claims. Comically wrong, even. Of course being completely wrong when you are utterly convinced that you are right ... hmmm.. Dunning-Kruger?

Anyway: if the evidence you provide for <general state of affairs> is a single instance, that's already really really bad. It gets a lot worse when that single instance actually shows the opposite of your claim, and you then go on to claim that that instance is the exception that...proves the general rule?

Surely you should be able to easily come up with better evidence than a contradiction of your claims? At least if your case is so incredibly bullet-proof? Or is it so bullet-proof that it doesn't actually require evidence?

Why would that be? Maybe because its "proof" is emotional, not factual?

Anyway, we can agree that just looking at overall population statistic may be too simplistic, though it is hands-down no-contest than using a single example, never mind a single example that contradicts the claim.

A more nuanced approach is probably needed. So when you look at police killings relative to percentages of the population, you do get somewhat higher relative numbers for blacks than whites, though not nearly as dramatic as people think.

So triumph, right? Well, not quite.

Because just like absolute numbers are not quite the right measure, neither are raw numbers relative to population. For example, my chance of getting shot by an American cop is pretty much zero. But that's not because I am white, but because I don't actually live in the US. Race has nothing to do with it in this case. So if you want to determine if the police are disproportionately shooting a particular group, you need to take actual police encounters into account.

And once you adjust for that, the numbers come up a wash (something like 29% vs. 31%).

https://web.archive.org/web/20151016220309/https://www.nytim...

Of course, you can argue that police encounters are skewed because of racism, but it turns out that crime is also more prevalent in the black community, and pretty much in-line with the encounter numbers.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf

But let's assume for a second that it's true. Even then the charge that police somewhat over-police high-crime areas doesn't exactly have the same emotional impact as "racist police on a killing spree of unarmed blacks".

And of course, you can now go back and look at why the crime rate among blacks is significantly higher, and you might come up with relative poverty as a potential answer. And if you looked at that a bit more closely, you would see that adjusting for socio-economic status actually levels out not just the crime figures, but ALL of the other numbers so far.

So it isn't a race problem. It's a poverty problem. It turns out that poor white people can be killed by the police with just as much impunity as poor black people. And, and this is important, with far less press coverage. Even though (absolute numbers again) many more (poor) whites get killed by the police than (poor) blacks, those cases do not get reported.

And so you are looking at a simple case of availability bias as one of the cause for this particular moral panic.