What needs to be done with police and communities of color?

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Something needs to be done about the root causes of crime in the black community, including poverty, fatherlessness, and gang culture. These problems are an important reason for the poor state of relations between police and the black community and any solution that does not address these will struggle to effect real change.

[Associate Justice PiT]

Recognize that this is an issue of class with race being a tertiary, and distracting, factor.

Sorry, but that's just not true. Police certainly fails working-class Whites too in some ways, but racism IS a real issue.

I'm not saying that racism isn't a real issue. I'm making the case that class trumps race when dealing with social class and status.

I think I would have to agree. The given statistics do show a problematic skew in the race of police shooting victims, but a super majority of people shot by the police are not black. I haven't seen data on the income level of police shooting victims but I'd bet a super majority of them are lower income.

     If we're talking about the proportions in which a particular group is victimized, controlling for confounding factors is a necessity. That's really fundamental to social science research, yet it is somehow ignored all too often.