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edvardsenrasmus t1_iwl6td7 wrote

The biggest problem here is that the violent crimes is just a per-state aggregate, and not tied to an actual fatal shooting by a cop.

The violent crimes could have no overlap with any of the fatal shootings by cops.

This graph doesnt capture the differences between "someone getting shot in a McDonald's parking lot by a cop, while a violent crime is committed somewhere else" and "someone getting shot in a McDonald's parking lot by a cop BECAUSE of that someone's violent crime".

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tommytornado OP t1_iwlawvp wrote

I agree, there are problems linking the two sets together.

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LetsGoGameCrocks t1_iwm2ugj wrote

Yes. A state with 100 violent crimes and 1000 innocent people unrelatedly shot by by police is the exact same as a state with 1 violent crime and 10 innocent people shot in this dataset. 990 innocent people shot completely ignored by this irrelevant normalization.

This is a misleading analysis

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sourcreamus t1_iwlgkzb wrote

It would be reasonable to assume that in places with lots of violent criminals there would be more interaction between violent criminals and police. That would lead to more police shootings. So the violent crime rate is a proxy for justified shootings.

You could go through the databases of cop shootings and categorize them into justified and unjustified. Then compare the unjustified rate with cop training. The problem with that is the low numbers would mean very noisy data.

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edvardsenrasmus t1_iwlhzgb wrote

I don't think this violent crime rate data goes well with fatal shootings by police, if we want to contrast it to hours spent in training.

Your latter suggestion sounds reasonable, however, albeit more tedious to get the data, as you said yourself.

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