He definitely should not have brought up "black-on-black" crime. The statement he was trying to refute was that blacks are more likely to die from police than from random criminals.
To evaluate whether or not that is true, we just need two numbers: (1) how many black people a year are killed by the police, and (2) how many black people a year are killed by random criminals.
It's hard to think of a good reason one would narrow #2 to just "black-on-black" crime if the goal is to show that the original statement is wrong.
It's also kind of irrelevant in another sense. People have been working on stopping crime for millennia and are still nowhere near figuring it out.
Police killings are something we might actually be able to do something about, so it makes sense to concentrate on them even if they are not actually the biggest immediate danger to individuals.
Right, a more clear number would have been total murders.
The race of the murderer was irrelevant to my point, and the difference between police killing versus getting murdered would have been even more pronounced had I included all murders.
I'm a little confused about your point about stopping crime. Surely it can't be stopped completely, but just as surely, some policies are more effective than others. For instance, ending the war on drugs would likely dry up funding for gangs.
To evaluate whether or not that is true, we just need two numbers: (1) how many black people a year are killed by the police, and (2) how many black people a year are killed by random criminals.
It's hard to think of a good reason one would narrow #2 to just "black-on-black" crime if the goal is to show that the original statement is wrong.
It's also kind of irrelevant in another sense. People have been working on stopping crime for millennia and are still nowhere near figuring it out.
Police killings are something we might actually be able to do something about, so it makes sense to concentrate on them even if they are not actually the biggest immediate danger to individuals.