I tend to vote Democrat and I'm going to vote against Trump. I support the separation of church and state, a woman's right to choose, LGBTQ rights and equal opportunity.
I'm also an engineer. I've looked at the numbers and I see no evidence for many of the claims of the left. What I see is anecdotal evidence being extrapolated to extreme conclusions.Let's consider this idea of large scale police brutality, especially against unarmed blacks. The police are not perfect and expecting them to ever be perfect is a forlorn hope. Of course things can always be improved.
-- There are 687,000 police officers in the United States.
-- They make over 10 million arrests a year.
-- According to WAPO database police killed 999 suspects in 2019. That's one fatal event for every 10,000 arrests.
-- Of those 999 fatal events 404 suspects were white, 250 were black, 161 were Hispanic and the rest were other or unknown race. Blacks comprise 13% of the population so 250, or about 25%, deaths is higher than expected IF one uses population size as a benchmark. But that's the wrong benchmark (Imagine if we used sex. Since 95% of suspects killed are male does it prove that police hate men?). The right benchmark is arrests and blacks account for 38% of arrests so there is no evidence there of any overt racism.
-- Of those 999 fatal events 55 suspects were known to be unarmed. So one unarmed fatal event for about every 182,000 arrests. Of that 55, 25 were white, 14 were black, 11 were Hispanic and 5 were other. So again we have about 25% being black which again, given the arrest rate of 38%, is not at all out of line.
None of this excuses horrendous events such as George Floyd but I see no evidence of a wide spread problem. I'm open to someone showing me why I'm wrong.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
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