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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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The reasoning you just used was in the form of an anecdote, which undermines your whole point. Anecdotal thinking is one of the most common ways that humans arrive at irrational conclusions.
Why should you care? Well, if you believe what you stated, then you should want other people to believe it too. In order to do this the first step is to learn how to present it without any of the common logical flaws humans are born with.
Your argument pattern is, "Event X happened and I saw it, therefore Y". No. You need a much larger sample size to make a point. I can't teach you rational argument in one post, but hopefully you'll become curious enough to learn. Have a nice day.
Yet most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes. And of course now we have the Internet so now there's availability bias of all of the extreme cases that go viral. When a study asked how many unarmed blacks were killed by police each year most left leaning were wrong by an order of magnitude.
Oh, I thought it came from the years of empirical evidence of corruption, bias, and state-funded violence.
There are some biases inherent to the relevant data. For example, you might be right about this specific situation (police shooting unarmed black people), but what about other instances of violence or misconduct?
We need to consider where data about that comes from. Are we to trust the accuracy of police reports and their own statements as they pertain to misconduct? IA investigations that frequently find no wrongdoing even when it's plainly obvious that the situation was handled improperly? Or at least could have been avoided? Should we rely upon charges filed against police and their conviction rate?
There's no official national database for this stuff by the way, and localities almost never produce such metrics willingly, so it's up to someone to comb through public records. And that, like the case of body cam videos, assumes that police will properly follow FOIA requests.
I'm not suggesting that we assume the absolute worst, but we need to recognize that whatever the data says, the situation is almost definitely worse than that due to these biases.
Oh I'm sure it's definitely worse than the data we have suggests. I'm not arguing against police reforms or standardization. But in the situation I stated, there were a large percentage of people who believed it was in the thousands, or 10s of thousands on an annual basis.
The prevailing opinions and rhetoric on police paint them not as individuals, but as a cabal of cartoon villains.
Nothing about this is anecdotal.
You're right, it's a broad generalization followed by a fear-based assumption.
That you segued into with an anecdote.
Okay.