The protestors don't care if they know the "truth". They believe that everyone should understand their view of the world. They latch onto numbers as "proof" of their perceived grievances and they see all information as somehow twisted into "evidence" that they are right and their cause is "just". It's a strange mob madness or perhaps group hallucination, in my opinion.
At
http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2014.html the chart lists the information that the project has collected from news reports. The third column in from the left is titled "g/r" and the entries, for example "M" or "M/L" or "M/B", reflect gender and race, if given. The chart also includes a link to the Killed By Police Facebook entry and a link to the news report used as sourcing for the entry.
Statistics don't lie, but they can be misreported, misused and misdirected. This chart does NOT tell us anything about "police brutality" or about "innocent" deaths. It does NOT tell us that these deaths were unjustified or malicious or illegal. Those details would require an evaluation of the context, cause and nature of each entry. These "statistics" tell us that someone collected a news report about a death that somehow involved a cop; that's all. We don't know how well news reports actually reflect information about deaths. It should be noted that in a country our size, with our population, 1100 deaths in a year is not excessive. When you realize they included deaths that occurred during the commission of a crime (for example, the deceased was threatening to kill or had killed someone else already), then at least some of these numbers reflect the reality that criminals tend to die violent deaths by their own choice and instigation.
My health is returning, and I do a lot of reading and/or lurking these days, so I will look at the chart more later today.
Thanks for the tweet. I just recently signed up to tweet. I mostly lurk there, too...
I'm slower than ever, but working on it.
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