Who's dismissing? My best friend died via drowning in 8th grade, how many people do any of you know who died wrongly at the hands of the state? The numbers are the numbers, townie can choose to ride a bike to work and I can choose to rent a house with a pool, but I doubt either of us spent too much of our time walking around worrying about dying from either.
Someone who is afraid of drowning in a pool or dying on a bike can avoid those things. Someone afraid of dying at the hands of the cops cannot avoid an encounter with the police if the police want an encounter.
(one of many ways that analogy fails).
1 in 1500 chance of dying by fire, 1 in 2500 chance of death by choking on food and 1 in 8500 chance of dying via sunstroke. Take your analogy, but death by cop is likely closest to sunstroke for those not carrying a gun. Wrongful death even more unlikely.
Clearly there's a reason to embellish the risk and state "I'm afraid to go out of the house" plenty of asians are afraid to go out of the house these days. Doesn't make the fear justified.
1 in 1000 is pretty close to the odds of an Asian person in the US dying from COVID over the last year.
1 in 1500 chance of dying by fire, 1 in 2500 chance of death by choking on food and 1 in 8500 chance of dying via sunstroke. Take your analogy, but death by cop is likely closest to sunstroke for those not carrying a gun. Wrongful death even more unlikely. Going through life fearful would suck, so it's probably best to have some perspective as it appears in this most recent case (and many of these cases) the fear was making things worse. Absent a bunch of progressives deciding to up and choose to want to become a cop, there aren't too many easy solutions here.
1 in 1500 chance of dying by fire, 1 in 2500 chance of death by choking on food and 1 in 8500 chance of dying via sunstroke. Take your analogy, but death by cop is likely closest to sunstroke for those not carrying a gun. Wrongful death even more unlikely. Going through life fearful would suck, so it's probably best to have some perspective as it appears in this most recent case (and many of these cases) the fear was making things worse. Absent a bunch of progressives deciding to up and choose to want to become a cop, there aren't too many easy solutions here.
If one out of six people who died by fire died because a state agent set the fire (forest management, for example), and they were legally required to not evacuate if they saw a state-set fire coming towards them, I would think that would be a pretty big problem.
I've struggled with that math on how much time I've spent fearing COVID for quite some time, as I'm probably around that 1 in 1,000 mark of death in reality, yet my fears have me thinking there's a 10% shot I'm in the hospital. Especially when you start comparing it to how much of my remaining life expectancy I just spent not seeing any of my friends or doing many of the things I enjoy.
The odds are only that low because of all the precautions. It would be a lot more if we did nothing.
COVID is a virus. It doesn’t think. It just does. If we could just tell COVID to stop we would. Cops are people. They do think. But we don’t tell them to stop. Instead we encourage them to be violent state actors.
Is it a reasonable fear though, or a bit of a product of now we have cell phone videos of everything that social media makes go viral scaring us into 1,100 page threads about facism? It looks like ph has a 2.5x higher chance of this happening to him than me based on being a black male. It looks like I have a 2x higher chance of suffering from a violent crime by living in los angeles compared to tampa. I don't lose any sleep over that, but I guess I could choose to really get myself worked up about it if I wanted.
Your reasonable fear/swimming pool analogy is not properly framed. Of course the odds of drowning are low, but if your foot is caught in the drain and you can’t get to the surface, your odds of drowning just went up dramatically. Similarly, if a Black man is in the middle of nowhere at night in southern Virginia with two cops that have their guns drawn on him for no clear reason, then the odds of dying at the hands of a cop just went up dramatically. And having fear in that situation is completely rational.
It looks like the ratio of police deaths is about 2.5x more likely if you're black than white, which is roughly equal to the poverty rate discrepancies (25-30% of blacks vs 8-10% for whites). Solve the latter and you likely solve the former.
The only way that analogy works if to admit that being a Black man in this country is like being thrown in the deep end of the pool and having to become an Olympic level swimmer just to survive. There’s a threat of drowning from being in the pool all the time.
Your reasonable fear/swimming pool analogy is not properly framed. Of course the odds of drowning are low, but if your foot is caught in the drain and you can’t get to the surface, your odds of drowning just went up dramatically. Similarly, if a Black man is in the middle of nowhere at night in southern Virginia with two cops that have their guns drawn on him for no clear reason, then the odds of dying at the hands of a cop just went up dramatically. And having fear in that situation is completely rational.