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Saying the Left is being deceptive about police violence because police killings have gone down while omitting that police violence overall has increased is just as fallacious as saying climate change isn't real because of one day of snow in October. Silly this needs to be said.
Also it is near impossible to accurately get statistics on any kind of police violence including killings. The go-to cites wind up being NYC and LA, not because they're representative (they have far fewer killings but also far higher encounters), but because they're convenient.
The majority of the ~80,000 police departments in the U.S. simply don't report data to anyone and allegedly many of them don't track it all. There is no uniform method of tracking the data, of cataloguing (let alone resolving) civilian complaints, etc.
Comparing empirically police violence to climate change, an issue with more verifying data than almost any other in human history from the last ten years of research alone, is a willfully ignorant false equivalency, on par intellectually with ideas like "intelligent design."
It's honestly sad. I once cited Lee Fang in an article about how Todd Zywicki's testimony to Congress had merely the veneer of empiricism but in actuality was just finance industry propaganda. He has truly lost his way in his obsession with dunking on identity politics.
It at least provides a chance to talk about how killings by itself as a measure of the harm of police can mislead. As people like Fang love to point out, big city police tend to have very low murder rates, but they are also some of the most inhumane: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=ihrc
I know I should probably just leave this be BUT one last thing, it isn't even a proper analogy! Conservatives use the "snowball in July" thing to try to *disprove* climate change, the Left uses videos of police killing as *examples of* racism and violence in US policing.
There isn't a single serious critic of police violence that cites to videos of police violence as anything but an illustration of the problem. And uses examples to illustrate a problem is just Advocacy 101. If using examples made claims fallacious, there would be few that werent.
Someone on here cited this to defend Lee Fang's argument which cracks me up because the title alone shows what I'm talking about: killings down but use of force up: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-12/lapd-use-of-force-report
"Actually police killings are down" I say to the snowflake soy boy having his face non-lethally rearranged by a red-faced police officer yelling slurs.
