Oh good, more Harris bashing without reason. How's that agenda coming along?
Firstly, he does a very long episode on this which you can listen for free here,
https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink/ where he goes into more depth about sources of stats and so forth.
For me, he's just going through logical steps:
1. These horrible videos have rightly caused huge backlash and ignited an entire movement, and becamse the biggest story in the US during a pandemic. It's a big deal.
2. The videos and movement suggest that this is a racially-motivated problem.
3. Do we have the greater statistics to investigate if this is true?
4. We do, okay let's look at them, what do they actually say?
5. If the statistics do not clearly show what the movement wants, what do we do then?
6. In this case, in his reading they do not show what the movement wants, so he says we should at least be allowed to mention that.
7. But he knows if he mentions that, certain people (ahem) are going to accuse him of being racist.
8. This is no way to better a society. If you're driven by media rather than stats and emotion rather than reason you get the wrong outcomes. It's fine to be angry, it's right ot be angry, but that's not when you should make policy.
Finally, he also goes into detail on the banning of the choke hold in NY and from his conversations with police it's only going to be a bad thing as an example.
I was pretty interested after listening to so I dug into the available stats via the NY Times database and other academic papers. What I took away (I think I cited some of these stats in the American cop thread) is that less than 50 unarmed people are killed by cops in the states each year. Yes, of cousre that's 50 too many, but it's hardly a meaningful number in a country of 350m. More people probably died of Covid in Florida while I've been typing this. The issue is the the 950 odd killed by cops who are armed.
There is no easy way to arrest someone who resists in a world where you have to assume they're armed. The arms are the problem. And training is inadequate and keeps having its budget reduced. These are the statistically driving issues behind police killings. It's not as easy a media narrative, but if people want to fix the problem, that's the areas to tackle. Not defund them, as catchy as that is.