Amnesty has a rosy eyed view of the world where manufacturers of end products have infinite resources at their disposal to go and audit their suppliers' suppliers' suppliers... to n degrees of separation with n being as large as necessary to get back to the source.
No, Amnesty International know that a PR statement about Zhejiang Huayou will get no press attention. So they mention Apple, Samsung and Sony instead; going after the "deep pockets" with respect to media attention. The ambulance chaser analogy fits too.
Just because I use a company's products, that does not mean I approve of every aspect of their behavior...
Using exactly the same logic, just because Apple uses a manufacturer's service does not mean Apple approves of every aspect of the manufacturer's supply chain.
... nor does it mean I forfeit my right to criticize them
The criticism against Apple is misdirected as the criticism again Amnesty International workers and supporters. The Criticism is rightfully directed at Congo Dongfang Mining and its owner Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd. But who would read a headline criticizing Zhejiang Huayou? So like an ambulance chasing lawyer Amnesty International goes after someone with "deeper pockets" in the media attention sense. Attacking their good name and good efforts when they are no more guilty than the Amnesty International staff who made this call. Hypocrites.
The fact is the FBI says that the Guardian has better stats.
No, the FBI says that the news media has more comprehensive data. And I have already explained that more data is not necessarily better data. Its about how representative the sample is, not its size. The FBI sampling has not been shown to be unrepresentative and The Counted sampling has not been shown to be representative (demographically skewed tips being a potential problem). Conclusions about who has better data are premature. Well, from a mathematical perspective. From of political advocacy perspective where math is secondary it might seem otherwise. Perhaps you can borrow someone's Statistics 101 textbook or watch a Khan Academy video if your interest is anything other than political.
"Subcontractor" is business speak for "positive deniability", hence the current popularity of contractors.
And what of the Amnesty International workers and supporters who are using Apple, Samsung and Sony phones and laptops. Aren't they engaging in deniability?
They have to be accountable for the actions of a 3rd party? I understand sourcing responsible materials is ethically and morally sound, but there has to be a point at which the blame is on the supplier and not the buyer....right?
Yes, absolutely, buyers should be blameless. Especially the Amnesty international workers and supporters who use Apple, Samsung or Sony phones or laptops.
Hypocrites. Amnesty International workers and members who use an Apple, Samsung or Sony phone or laptop are just as "guilty" as Apple, Samsung or Sony.
Amnesty International is no better than the ambulance chasing lawyer looking for the person/organization with the deepest pockets to exploit rather than going after the truly guilty. In this case Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd.
Ah yes, think of the children! Another tactic use by the socialists.
Well, yes, the socialists are thinking of the children. The socialists think they make pretty good workers in their mines. The mainland Chinese socialists. Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd.
The public has a right to know if a cop is being honest, truthful, etc. But that is something quite different than seeing every minute of the cop's day, hearing every conversation.
It's not like they're public servants or anything. If they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear and all that.
Cops and lawyers need to review the video to make sure victim privacy rights are not infringed and that classified information is not disclosed (identity of people disclosing information privately, references to ongoing investigations, etc). Some things a cop sees or hears should not be on TV; only review boards, judges and juries should see or hear it.
Your claim was that the FBI had better stats - despite the fact that the FBI itself says otherwise. Do you really want to continue beating your dead horse?
Re-read, you are confused. I said that its premature to claim that The Counted has "better" stats. That you erroneously confuse a larger set of data with "better". That even with only a small statistical sampling one can get good data, it depends entirely on how well the sample data represents the entire population. To claim that the FBI has bad data you have to show that there is something unrepresentative about the reporting departments, not that only some departments are reporting. I also pointed out that The Counted is a crowd sourced effort and therefore self-selection is a problem, so its premature to say that they have good data as well. Different demographics and communities may be more or less prone to participate and submit tips.
What he's saying is that they can't be trusted to not use that as an excuse to censor the film, even if it never happened. (If you can't look, you don't know it didn't happen.)
Did you miss the part where I mentioned review boards (that often include civilians) and judges. That recording are reviewed, redactions are only for public releases when necessary to protect sources, officers, etc.
And while I think $200/hour is unreasonable, I also think that a reasonable fee might be $50-$100/hour.
Reviews may involve attorneys, so $200 is not unreasonable.
Not to point out the obvious, but you are saying that: 1) The police review board can *say* that the officers were talking about an informant, and suppress releasing the video of a police shooting.
Review boards often involve civilians. The conversation with/about an informant can be deleted, its unlikely to affect the portrayal of events in a shooting. Note that the TV station is requesting about 200 hours, not the minute or two leading to a shooting.
2) The police can begin talking about informants *on purpose* as they drive up to a crime scene, so that a video of them shooting someone can be suppressed.
Why do you think the entire video needs to be suppressed rather than simply remove the conversation?
190 hours, at 36,000 dollars. ~200 dollars an hour to produce. How many workers does it take to do this?
Its not just some IT guy making copies of files. Its probably cops and lawyers reviewing the video to make sure victim privacy rights are not infringed and that classified information is not disclosed (identity of people disclosing information privately, references to ongoing investigations, etc). Some things a cop sees or hears should not be on TV; only review boards, judges and juries should see or hear it.
Its not unreasonable to expect the for profit media corporation that wants a copy of the video to pay for the lawyers time to review it. Its part of the "processing" in the processing and handling fee.
Yes, we DO know that the most notorious department that do not self-report. That's why the guardian had people on the ground getting the real stories.
Departments do not report for a variety of reason. Most common of all is that it is an extra effort and expense. They already have enough to do without adding to their workload. This includes many departments that are not "notorious". You are starting from the biased assumption that departments are trying to hide something, the fact is that they are often avoiding something unnecessary.
And no, the guardian wasn't "soliciting tips."
"The Counted"'s web site is soliciting tips. The "About" page describes their crowdsourced efforts. Clue: Crowdsource is tips.
They went through every news report, even those from hick towns to find shootings,...
When tips direct them to that "hick town", to verify the tip. The Guardian clearly describes their project as being partly their reporting and partly verifying tips. Not all shootings are in the Guardian's existing database of news stories. That's why they are appealing to the public for tips.
And the decision not to report was not done on a case-by-case basis - ever.
That's my point. Its generally departmental policy to report everything or nothing. Its not police omitting questionable incidents.
You obviously have done zero research, And no, I didn't do a "quick search" of the Guardian web site...
Yes, apparently you have not done even that little. Hence your denial of "The Counted" relying on tips despite the fact that its web page includes things like "Contributions of any information that may improve the quality of our data will be greatly welcomed as we work from a dearth of available information toward better accountability. Please contact us to pass on tips, links and multimedia as well as new information on existing cases already recorded."
I highlighted "we work from a dearth of available information" for you convenience.
Just exactly how can first-person video of what a cop sees cost someone their life if revealed?
If the cop talks to a person who is then considered an informant or snitch by the wrong people.
If when talking to another cop an informant or snitch is referred to.
If anything said to a cop can wind up on TV what do you suppose will be the impact with respect to people coming forward with information? Even reporting a crime?
If disclosure of raw unreacted video identifies a person coming forward with information and that person is killed in retaliation don't you expect that victim's family to file suit against the police?
The public has a right to know if a cop is being honest, truthful, etc. But that is something quite different than seeing every minute of the cop's day, hearing every conversation.
Being able to monitor police actions is a very real benefit to society with huge value.
Absolutely, but that monitoring is not necessarily best done by TV personalities. It may be best done by review boards, judges, etc.
The most notorious departments are the ones that are NOT going to self report to the fbi.
We don't know that.
Therefore, the FBI figures are badly skewed because of self-selection bias.
To be comparable to "The Counted" the decision to report or not would have to be made on a death by death basis, not a department by department basis. There is no evidence of "selection" being made is a racial context.
The Counted, on the other hand used tons of volunteers to check up on every police shooting.
False. The Guardian is soliciting tips.
You shouldn't be the the one lecturing on ignorance of statistics without first verifying in detail how it was done.
A quick visit to the Guardian's web page demonstrates you do not know how it is being done.
This technique yielded much higher figures, not because of a wrong implementation, but because the stats you and the FBI use collected in a totally invalid way, rendering their figures worse than useless.
Wrong. Whether the FBI data is skewed or not depends upon why the decision to report or not is made, and we don't know that. What we do know is that having crowds report tips during a time of political activism is a skewed methodology. The motivation and enthusiasm and even the knowledge that this The Counted project exists will vary wildly from community to community.
Plus we still have the Guardians failure to characterize the deaths are justifiable or not, even justifiable in their analysis not necessarily the reported sense. Being well meaning does not make such a project less superficial.
There is no requirement to report to the FBI yet many departments do. If those reporting departments are a reasonable sample of departments across the country then the percentages they indicate may be accurate. It is severely ignorant of statistics to suggest that more data points indicates more accurate data. Its not quantity, its quality, that data points in a sample accurately represent the entire population.
As long as you conflate "more" with "better" you are the one not getting it.
"The Counted" is self described as a crowd sourced project. That is self-selection.
Even if some shooting are misidentified as "justified" that is no reason to ignore this critical piece of information. The Guardian is free to draw their own conclusion as to justified. As to unarmed. Locally, many years ago a an armed intruder murdered and man and raped a woman in their home. He was pursued from the scene by police. During this nighttime pursuit he tossed away the gun, he was not observed doing so. When cornered, ordered to freeze, and then making a quick move he was shot by officers who still believed he was armed. Do you really think such cases should be counted as unjustified because the suspect was technically unarmed, despite the fact that it was reasonable for the officer to assume he was still armed? By the way, the murderer/rapist was white.
Meaning, guilt by association. Yeah, that should work....
Not guilt, but suspicion by association, and yes it has worked. A while ago the FBI got phone bill type information ("metadata", both phone numbers, date/time, duration) for known organized crime members and built a graph of all the connections these phone calls revealed. The FBI knew most of the nodes in the graph would be innocents; even criminals make restaurant reservations, see if dry cleaning is ready, etc. However analysis of the graph helped discover people actively involved in organized crime who had been completely unknown. This graph analysis was not simply looking at proximity as you suggest, I believe it looked at the number of unique connections from known organized crime members and various other factors.
FBI chief: 'unacceptable' that Guardian has better data on police violence
James Comey tells crime summit that ‘it’s ridiculous’ Guardian and Washington Post have more information on civilians’ deaths at hands of US police than FBI
Read your own cited article and the sentence above. They are clearly using "better" in the sense of a numerical count and **not** the quality of the sampling. Again, good statistics is not about more data points in your sample, its about your sample being a more accurate representation of the total population. Fewer data points in a more representative sampling is better and more accurate than than more data points in a skewed representation of the population. Self-selected data points is a big warning sign of a skewed representation.
So your claim of "superficial is total BS. Even the FBI admits they have worse records. And no, it's not mandatory to report police shootings to the FBI.
Re-read, you are mixing two different points. Its superficial in both the sense of self-selected data points and in the sense that it does not adjust for critical pieces of information like justifiable shootings. How can one use these numbers as evidence of police misconduct when you are not even considering if the shooting was justifiable or not. So yeah, "The Count" is superficial until it addresses these issues. Its methodology and analysis would get a mediocre grade in Statistics 101.
The data is far better than what the government has. Even the government admits it.
No. What the government admits is that their data is incomplete. What makes data better is how the sample pool of the total population is selected. That is an unknown. What is known is the "The Counted" is using a sample technique that involves self selection of the data, this is generally considered a warning sign.
Go read the series.
I did read the citation you supplied. I noticed other problems with their data too, for example with "unarmed" people. "Unarmed" suspects sometimes start out armed. "Unarmed" only refers to the exact moment of the shooting. Murderers and armed rapists and such caught fleeing from the scene who secretly discarded their gun during their flight are counted as "unarmed". Any attempt to count police shooting must make a serious attempt to identify justifiable shootings.
Basically the work of "The Counted" seems superficial. The FBI data may have a better sampling and I believe they do identify justifiable shootings.
From your source: "The Counted, a project working to report and crowdsource names and a series of other data on every death caused by law enforcement in the US this year, found that 547 people had been killed by the end of June."
This data will also be incomplete. And it will be skewed by those participating in this project, not that those participating are falsifying anything but there is likely to be unequal regional and demographic participation in the project.
Furthermore the FBI data may still be an accurate sampling with respect to percentages. Whether or not a death is reported won't be made on a case-by-case basis, it will be a department-by-department thing. Participating departments reporting all deaths. This may be more accurate than the tip based approach of "The Counted".
More importantly, as I said it my first post, the deaths are probably far more strongly correlated with poverty than with race. Race being an incidental secondary thing.
Then how come the white poor aren't proportionately represented in police killings? It's about race.
The whites are. Look at the FBI stats rather than what some activist falsely claims on TV. If I recall the FBI stats whites actually are slightly overrepresented in police killings, blacks slightly underrepresented. The massive death toll in the black community is not due to the police, it is largely due to criminal violence.
No, all that would do is further anger potential recruits, as well as all muslims, for desecration of a dead body.
There is no desecration. Just standing over the body with a captured weapon. Besides, its already been shown that being killed by a female fighter is something that jihadis actually do fear.
Again, your understanding of european history is erroneous. The fanatics were not the norm nor were they in charge. Those in charge were largely motivated by power (glory) and gold, not god. Even various popes. You confuse part of the PR campaign with the actual motivations of decision makers. Again, ISIS is very unique in history because the fanatic minority is having an effect far beyond their numbers.
On the topic of middle eastern history, you are again woefully ignorant. ISIS-type fanatics have always existed in small numbers. Century after century they were considered heretics who did not correctly understand Islam by the majority of muslims. And over the centuries it has been these moderates who would put down the heretics when they later became too troublesome. A power vacuum in Iraq and Syria is preventing this normal historical process.
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Amnesty has a rosy eyed view of the world where manufacturers of end products have infinite resources at their disposal to go and audit their suppliers' suppliers' suppliers... to n degrees of separation with n being as large as necessary to get back to the source.
No, Amnesty International know that a PR statement about Zhejiang Huayou will get no press attention. So they mention Apple, Samsung and Sony instead; going after the "deep pockets" with respect to media attention. The ambulance chaser analogy fits too.
Why the anger, did you just now realize your hands are not as clean as you imagined?
Just because I use a company's products, that does not mean I approve of every aspect of their behavior ...
Using exactly the same logic, just because Apple uses a manufacturer's service does not mean Apple approves of every aspect of the manufacturer's supply chain.
... nor does it mean I forfeit my right to criticize them
The criticism against Apple is misdirected as the criticism again Amnesty International workers and supporters. The Criticism is rightfully directed at Congo Dongfang Mining and its owner Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd. But who would read a headline criticizing Zhejiang Huayou? So like an ambulance chasing lawyer Amnesty International goes after someone with "deeper pockets" in the media attention sense. Attacking their good name and good efforts when they are no more guilty than the Amnesty International staff who made this call. Hypocrites.
The fact is the FBI says that the Guardian has better stats.
No, the FBI says that the news media has more comprehensive data. And I have already explained that more data is not necessarily better data. Its about how representative the sample is, not its size. The FBI sampling has not been shown to be unrepresentative and The Counted sampling has not been shown to be representative (demographically skewed tips being a potential problem). Conclusions about who has better data are premature. Well, from a mathematical perspective. From of political advocacy perspective where math is secondary it might seem otherwise. Perhaps you can borrow someone's Statistics 101 textbook or watch a Khan Academy video if your interest is anything other than political.
"Subcontractor" is business speak for "positive deniability", hence the current popularity of contractors.
And what of the Amnesty International workers and supporters who are using Apple, Samsung and Sony phones and laptops. Aren't they engaging in deniability?
They have to be accountable for the actions of a 3rd party? I understand sourcing responsible materials is ethically and morally sound, but there has to be a point at which the blame is on the supplier and not the buyer....right?
Yes, absolutely, buyers should be blameless. Especially the Amnesty international workers and supporters who use Apple, Samsung or Sony phones or laptops.
The beavers are being force to work from sunup to sundown, sleep/eat on the job site and are being contaminated with non-free radicals from the trees.
Hypocrites. Amnesty International workers and members who use an Apple, Samsung or Sony phone or laptop are just as "guilty" as Apple, Samsung or Sony.
Amnesty International is no better than the ambulance chasing lawyer looking for the person/organization with the deepest pockets to exploit rather than going after the truly guilty. In this case Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd.
Ah yes, think of the children! Another tactic use by the socialists.
Well, yes, the socialists are thinking of the children. The socialists think they make pretty good workers in their mines. The mainland Chinese socialists. Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd.
The public has a right to know if a cop is being honest, truthful, etc. But that is something quite different than seeing every minute of the cop's day, hearing every conversation.
It's not like they're public servants or anything. If they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear and all that.
Cops and lawyers need to review the video to make sure victim privacy rights are not infringed and that classified information is not disclosed (identity of people disclosing information privately, references to ongoing investigations, etc). Some things a cop sees or hears should not be on TV; only review boards, judges and juries should see or hear it.
Your claim was that the FBI had better stats - despite the fact that the FBI itself says otherwise. Do you really want to continue beating your dead horse?
Re-read, you are confused. I said that its premature to claim that The Counted has "better" stats. That you erroneously confuse a larger set of data with "better". That even with only a small statistical sampling one can get good data, it depends entirely on how well the sample data represents the entire population. To claim that the FBI has bad data you have to show that there is something unrepresentative about the reporting departments, not that only some departments are reporting. I also pointed out that The Counted is a crowd sourced effort and therefore self-selection is a problem, so its premature to say that they have good data as well. Different demographics and communities may be more or less prone to participate and submit tips.
What he's saying is that they can't be trusted to not use that as an excuse to censor the film, even if it never happened. (If you can't look, you don't know it didn't happen.)
Did you miss the part where I mentioned review boards (that often include civilians) and judges. That recording are reviewed, redactions are only for public releases when necessary to protect sources, officers, etc.
And while I think $200/hour is unreasonable, I also think that a reasonable fee might be $50-$100/hour.
Reviews may involve attorneys, so $200 is not unreasonable.
Not to point out the obvious, but you are saying that: 1) The police review board can *say* that the officers were talking about an informant, and suppress releasing the video of a police shooting.
Review boards often involve civilians. The conversation with/about an informant can be deleted, its unlikely to affect the portrayal of events in a shooting. Note that the TV station is requesting about 200 hours, not the minute or two leading to a shooting.
2) The police can begin talking about informants *on purpose* as they drive up to a crime scene, so that a video of them shooting someone can be suppressed.
Why do you think the entire video needs to be suppressed rather than simply remove the conversation?
190 hours, at 36,000 dollars. ~200 dollars an hour to produce. How many workers does it take to do this?
Its not just some IT guy making copies of files. Its probably cops and lawyers reviewing the video to make sure victim privacy rights are not infringed and that classified information is not disclosed (identity of people disclosing information privately, references to ongoing investigations, etc). Some things a cop sees or hears should not be on TV; only review boards, judges and juries should see or hear it.
Its not unreasonable to expect the for profit media corporation that wants a copy of the video to pay for the lawyers time to review it. Its part of the "processing" in the processing and handling fee.
Yes, we DO know that the most notorious department that do not self-report. That's why the guardian had people on the ground getting the real stories.
Departments do not report for a variety of reason. Most common of all is that it is an extra effort and expense. They already have enough to do without adding to their workload. This includes many departments that are not "notorious". You are starting from the biased assumption that departments are trying to hide something, the fact is that they are often avoiding something unnecessary.
And no, the guardian wasn't "soliciting tips."
"The Counted"'s web site is soliciting tips. The "About" page describes their crowdsourced efforts. Clue: Crowdsource is tips.
They went through every news report, even those from hick towns to find shootings, ...
When tips direct them to that "hick town", to verify the tip. The Guardian clearly describes their project as being partly their reporting and partly verifying tips. Not all shootings are in the Guardian's existing database of news stories. That's why they are appealing to the public for tips.
And the decision not to report was not done on a case-by-case basis - ever.
That's my point. Its generally departmental policy to report everything or nothing. Its not police omitting questionable incidents.
You obviously have done zero research, And no, I didn't do a "quick search" of the Guardian web site ...
Yes, apparently you have not done even that little. Hence your denial of "The Counted" relying on tips despite the fact that its web page includes things like "Contributions of any information that may improve the quality of our data will be greatly welcomed as we work from a dearth of available information toward better accountability. Please contact us to pass on tips, links and multimedia as well as new information on existing cases already recorded."
I highlighted "we work from a dearth of available information" for you convenience.
Just exactly how can first-person video of what a cop sees cost someone their life if revealed?
If the cop talks to a person who is then considered an informant or snitch by the wrong people.
If when talking to another cop an informant or snitch is referred to.
If anything said to a cop can wind up on TV what do you suppose will be the impact with respect to people coming forward with information? Even reporting a crime?
If disclosure of raw unreacted video identifies a person coming forward with information and that person is killed in retaliation don't you expect that victim's family to file suit against the police?
The public has a right to know if a cop is being honest, truthful, etc. But that is something quite different than seeing every minute of the cop's day, hearing every conversation.
Being able to monitor police actions is a very real benefit to society with huge value.
Absolutely, but that monitoring is not necessarily best done by TV personalities. It may be best done by review boards, judges, etc.
The most notorious departments are the ones that are NOT going to self report to the fbi.
We don't know that.
Therefore, the FBI figures are badly skewed because of self-selection bias.
To be comparable to "The Counted" the decision to report or not would have to be made on a death by death basis, not a department by department basis. There is no evidence of "selection" being made is a racial context.
The Counted, on the other hand used tons of volunteers to check up on every police shooting.
False. The Guardian is soliciting tips.
You shouldn't be the the one lecturing on ignorance of statistics without first verifying in detail how it was done.
A quick visit to the Guardian's web page demonstrates you do not know how it is being done.
This technique yielded much higher figures, not because of a wrong implementation, but because the stats you and the FBI use collected in a totally invalid way, rendering their figures worse than useless.
Wrong. Whether the FBI data is skewed or not depends upon why the decision to report or not is made, and we don't know that. What we do know is that having crowds report tips during a time of political activism is a skewed methodology. The motivation and enthusiasm and even the knowledge that this The Counted project exists will vary wildly from community to community.
Plus we still have the Guardians failure to characterize the deaths are justifiable or not, even justifiable in their analysis not necessarily the reported sense. Being well meaning does not make such a project less superficial.
There is no requirement to report to the FBI yet many departments do. If those reporting departments are a reasonable sample of departments across the country then the percentages they indicate may be accurate. It is severely ignorant of statistics to suggest that more data points indicates more accurate data. Its not quantity, its quality, that data points in a sample accurately represent the entire population.
As long as you conflate "more" with "better" you are the one not getting it.
"The Counted" is self described as a crowd sourced project. That is self-selection.
Even if some shooting are misidentified as "justified" that is no reason to ignore this critical piece of information. The Guardian is free to draw their own conclusion as to justified. As to unarmed. Locally, many years ago a an armed intruder murdered and man and raped a woman in their home. He was pursued from the scene by police. During this nighttime pursuit he tossed away the gun, he was not observed doing so. When cornered, ordered to freeze, and then making a quick move he was shot by officers who still believed he was armed. Do you really think such cases should be counted as unjustified because the suspect was technically unarmed, despite the fact that it was reasonable for the officer to assume he was still armed? By the way, the murderer/rapist was white.
Meaning, guilt by association. Yeah, that should work....
Not guilt, but suspicion by association, and yes it has worked. A while ago the FBI got phone bill type information ("metadata", both phone numbers, date/time, duration) for known organized crime members and built a graph of all the connections these phone calls revealed. The FBI knew most of the nodes in the graph would be innocents; even criminals make restaurant reservations, see if dry cleaning is ready, etc. However analysis of the graph helped discover people actively involved in organized crime who had been completely unknown. This graph analysis was not simply looking at proximity as you suggest, I believe it looked at the number of unique connections from known organized crime members and various other factors.
No. What the government admits is that their data is incomplete.
As I said, the chief of the FBI admits that the Guardian has better stats than they do:
FBI chief: 'unacceptable' that Guardian has better data on police violence
James Comey tells crime summit that ‘it’s ridiculous’ Guardian and Washington Post have more information on civilians’ deaths at hands of US police than FBI
Read your own cited article and the sentence above. They are clearly using "better" in the sense of a numerical count and **not** the quality of the sampling. Again, good statistics is not about more data points in your sample, its about your sample being a more accurate representation of the total population. Fewer data points in a more representative sampling is better and more accurate than than more data points in a skewed representation of the population. Self-selected data points is a big warning sign of a skewed representation.
So your claim of "superficial is total BS. Even the FBI admits they have worse records. And no, it's not mandatory to report police shootings to the FBI.
Re-read, you are mixing two different points. Its superficial in both the sense of self-selected data points and in the sense that it does not adjust for critical pieces of information like justifiable shootings. How can one use these numbers as evidence of police misconduct when you are not even considering if the shooting was justifiable or not. So yeah, "The Count" is superficial until it addresses these issues. Its methodology and analysis would get a mediocre grade in Statistics 101.
The data is far better than what the government has. Even the government admits it.
No. What the government admits is that their data is incomplete. What makes data better is how the sample pool of the total population is selected. That is an unknown. What is known is the "The Counted" is using a sample technique that involves self selection of the data, this is generally considered a warning sign.
Go read the series.
I did read the citation you supplied. I noticed other problems with their data too, for example with "unarmed" people. "Unarmed" suspects sometimes start out armed. "Unarmed" only refers to the exact moment of the shooting. Murderers and armed rapists and such caught fleeing from the scene who secretly discarded their gun during their flight are counted as "unarmed". Any attempt to count police shooting must make a serious attempt to identify justifiable shootings.
Basically the work of "The Counted" seems superficial. The FBI data may have a better sampling and I believe they do identify justifiable shootings.
From your source: "The Counted, a project working to report and crowdsource names and a series of other data on every death caused by law enforcement in the US this year, found that 547 people had been killed by the end of June."
This data will also be incomplete. And it will be skewed by those participating in this project, not that those participating are falsifying anything but there is likely to be unequal regional and demographic participation in the project.
Furthermore the FBI data may still be an accurate sampling with respect to percentages. Whether or not a death is reported won't be made on a case-by-case basis, it will be a department-by-department thing. Participating departments reporting all deaths. This may be more accurate than the tip based approach of "The Counted".
More importantly, as I said it my first post, the deaths are probably far more strongly correlated with poverty than with race. Race being an incidental secondary thing.
Then how come the white poor aren't proportionately represented in police killings? It's about race.
The whites are. Look at the FBI stats rather than what some activist falsely claims on TV. If I recall the FBI stats whites actually are slightly overrepresented in police killings, blacks slightly underrepresented. The massive death toll in the black community is not due to the police, it is largely due to criminal violence.
No, all that would do is further anger potential recruits, as well as all muslims, for desecration of a dead body.
There is no desecration. Just standing over the body with a captured weapon. Besides, its already been shown that being killed by a female fighter is something that jihadis actually do fear.
Again, your understanding of european history is erroneous. The fanatics were not the norm nor were they in charge. Those in charge were largely motivated by power (glory) and gold, not god. Even various popes. You confuse part of the PR campaign with the actual motivations of decision makers. Again, ISIS is very unique in history because the fanatic minority is having an effect far beyond their numbers.
On the topic of middle eastern history, you are again woefully ignorant. ISIS-type fanatics have always existed in small numbers. Century after century they were considered heretics who did not correctly understand Islam by the majority of muslims. And over the centuries it has been these moderates who would put down the heretics when they later became too troublesome. A power vacuum in Iraq and Syria is preventing this normal historical process.