the Sobering truth

So often we do not know ourselves. We do not know what we are capable of, how we process information or why we believe what we believe. This unfortunate vulnerability leaves us open to upholding beliefs that have little to no foundation. Humans are prone to bias and susceptible to misinformation. It comes to us by way of emotionalism and cherry-picked data clusters that serve to support preconceived ideas. This condition we all share coupled with a strong distaste for being wrong enslaves us to the zeitgeist. Then COVID-19 hit.

March, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) affirmed that Covid-19 had become a pandemic. In droves, we separated from family, friends and work mates into our homes isolated with our televisions, laptops and phones. Already inflicted with an array of cognitive malfunctions we sat in echo chambers having our fears, anger and sensitivities amplified. The spread of misinformation through manipulative media engulfed our country. We were on the brink, and we never saw it coming. Now as we seek to justify the aftermath of destruction and anger in the wake of George Floyd’s death, we have a chance to reflect on some details we may have missed. Mr. Floyd’s death is tragic but not as common as we have been led to believe.

I am sitting at my computer checking the math and the numbers do not add up. This in no way is meant to diminish the tragedy of a person being taken from us violently. All matters relating to violent death by peace officers, or anyone is high stakes and must be given due diligence. This is a call to reason. A call to our higher thinking capacity. It is from an executive thinking state where we can creatively problem solve together. 

The FBI tracks crime and makes the information public online. The Washington Post is claiming to track death at the hands of police. I will use the two sources from the year 2018 as the data set we need from the FBI as 2019 isn’t available at the time of this writing. There were 10,310,960 arrests reported in the U.S in 2018. It is safe to say that nationwide there was contact with peace officers that did not end in arrest so the number of times persons had peace officer contact is much higher. According to the Washington Post data,  992 persons who had contact were killed by peace officers in that year. With over 10 million opportunities to kill a person the 992 fatalities amounts to a statistically insignificant 0.00009 probability of death while being arrested. 

Using table 43, provided by the FBI,  2,115,381 of those arrested for crimes other than traffic violations, were Black or identified as African American. Of the 992 persons killed it has been reported 24% were Black or African American. That is about 238 people. Using the smaller number of total arrests by race  7,710,900, we have a risk of death for a Black or African American person being arrested at a statistically insignificant, 0.00003 probability. Assuming there was much more contact than was reported, the risk of death for a Black or African American person encountering a peace officer is even less. What about the risk to all approx 43,984,096 number of Black or African American persons in the U.S. population? Then we get a whopping probability of 0.000005. 

This same data has been used to demonstrate that Blacks or African Americans are more likely to be killed by police than Whites, and that is true, depending on where, what kind of crime is involved, and whether a weapon is present. On a case by case basis all incidents need to be considered in the context of which they happen.

Regrettably most of us will be unable to process this information in a meaningful way because of our tendency to reject new information when it doesn’t fit the norm. This isn’t our fault. We are just people. In a vulnerable state we have been subjected to a cascade of images and stories on repeat of an unlikely event making it appear to be much more common. Convincing us to accept we could be wrong and all of this destruction comes down to a suffering public, driven indoors to be brainwashed into a frenzy by the World Wide Web, is a big pill. And it may feel like a big risk, still, perchance there does exist among us those willing to use reason to scrutinize commonly held beliefs to check their validity. Together we could actually jump off the band wagon and be big out of the zeitgeist thinkers. 

“…Woke…but critically so.”

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf