Fact; Whites who shoot blacks: 350% more likely be ruled justified with Stand Your Ground

[Playinghardball]

rosierifka @rosierifka

Fact》 Whites who shoot blacks: 350% more likely be ruled justified with Stand Your Ground http://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fro …

5:42 AM - 16 Feb 2014

Found on the Obama Diary

[noiretextatique]

1. it is just personal prejudice

not systemic racism.

[napkinz]

2. because whites have Zimmeranda Rights

[napkinz]

3. SYG equals ...

[lpbk2713]

4. Your PBS link is incomplete and does not work.

[petronius]

5. I suspect it's supposed to be this one:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminal-justice/is-there-racial-bias-in-stand-your-ground-laws/

Link

[lpbk2713]

6. OK, thanks.

[whathehell]

7. I'm 64 years old and this has to be the WORST law I've encountered in my lifetime.

It's an outrage...All but a license to kill!

Please tell me there's a strong push back in the state to overturn this monster

[Igel]

8. This was a Big Deal last summer.

What were some of the problems? ...

Okay. I think this is what I remember. Details are fuzzy, I posted last summer. There's racism already involved--sexism too, if you want to know the truth--and the SYG analysis basically leverages off of more generalized racism. They made no attempt to distinguish between SYG and racism rates, yet tried to conclude that SYG itself was responsible for the disparity.

The researchers looked at an incomplete database for certain classes of homicides over a range of years, tweaking the data as necessary to account for when SYG was implemented. I'm not sure they looked specifically at SYG defenses and they didn't consider any other information other than race and whether the SYG law was on the books at the time of the trial.

I went through the numbers for some states and in some less than one defendant was involved over the course of a decade--that's the wonders of using regression data to "normalize" real data, your analysis starts seeing things that aren't necessarily there. The overall difference for their dataset was something like either 8 or 15 cases out of ... 300 homicides? 250? 425? It was a reasonably large number of homicides and a small number of white-on-black killings that formed the basis for the difference.

But they didn't think that perhaps public defenders would use SYG less than private lawyers or the reasons for the homicides. They removed any "unnecessary" data from the dataset, like "Asian" or "gender bias" or "Latino."

Then they just had a regression that had an absurdly small number of factors: Race and SYG. And it was damned annoying to try to track the story back to understand what, exactly, that graph was trying to say, where the data came from, and to sort through the analysis. It wasn't peer reviewed. It was advocacy stats for the purpose of making a political point and getting people riled up.

The headline is actually a bit off, too. SYG adds not so much to the stats. Mis-citing data-dredged research ... Sigh.

[napkinz]

9. kick

nt