Force Need Not Be Lethal To Be Discriminatory — And Wrong.

Over the weekend, Mr. Hinderaker wrote that “Black Lives Matters” is a movement founded on “a lie“.

With an all too typical paucity of evidence, he makes this claim based on his own analysis of police shootings of black and white citizens, from one year of data from The Washington Post — he claims, anyway.

But he only considers lethal encounters — where the citizen is killed. So he engages in a “straw man” fallacy. His straw man falls, but so too does his claim — when more of the data is considered, and sensibly so.

As the New York Times made clear this very morning, and as my graphic at right (derived from Professor Fryer’s Harvard study — referenced in the article) reiterates — the vast bulk of the ten year longitudinal evidence confirms that significant “use of force” by at least New York City police officers is meted out in a significantly disparate (i.e., racially discriminatory) manner — even after controlling for types of escalated, and non-escalated encounters.

So — again, Mr. Hinderaker tells… a lie. A whopper, in fact. Now you know.

Nothing new there, though — and after the servers at blog.com website are resurrected, I’ll move all the four years’ of those historical posts over here — as a solid back-up.