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| David Hockney, Two Figures |
- The number of unarmed black men killed every year by the police in the US
- The number of otherwise healthy children under 17 in the US who have died since Covid
I know from asking around, and from the intertubes, that people invariably overestimate these two numbers. In both cases estimates range from “several hundred” to “Oh, goodness, I don’t know, but I guess, what?… tens of thousands?”
The actual figures are below the fold. A clue: they are similar. Another clue: the highlighted qualifiers above. One of the reasons I posted this: that the reason we overestimate is because of the media; and that this has damaged us all. In short, the media, mainstream and social, has harmed us all.
Go below to see the actual figures.
The figures:1. The number of unarmed black men killed every year by the police in the US. 10 to 20. Source
Key word: “unarmed”. Thus if you wonder about the headline at that link, “919 people killed by police” (as at 22/10), that’s because it’s a total of all police shooting, the vast majority of which, ~98%, are of armed suspects. I’m not making the case that “oh, that’s ok then”; just that, in the US, if you’ve got a gun and resist police arrest, you’re going to be shot. Fact of. Chris Rock made a vid of it here.
Further, even the total figure, inciting armed and unarmed is lower than the most often guessed figure, which is “tens of thousands”.
2. The number of otherwise healthy children under 17 who have died since Covid struck: 10 to 20. Source And
Key words: “otherwise healthy”. The overall death rate of children is higher, but most with separate underlying health conditions, averaging 4 per sick child.
What we might conclude from the figures, the data, the science, is that there’s no cause for moral panic. But we have the opposite happening, at least in the US. Thanks to the Media. And I guess I must lump in social media in there as well. Pity us.
We are encouraged to believe (1) that racist police get up in the morning determined to kill an unarmed black man. Or (2) that the pandemic affects us all, man, woman and child, equally. Both of these narratives are false. But to attempt to rebut them brings charges of “racism” or “you don’t care a lot deaths”.
The media are culpable for making our lives more tense and divided.
Why do they do this: a combination of click bait and a belief, possibly sometimes genuine, that the greater narrative (helping the BLM movement and “anti-racism”, for example) warrants what they see as justified exaggeration. In some cases perhaps it’s just sloppy journalism, taking as read what’s passed in without doing a genuine fact check.
But, net-met: they’re culpable. Of making the world a measurably worse place, a more brutish place, a more .
