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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. So goes a phrase popularized by famed author Mark Twain that follows in the vein of Numbers dont lie. Liars use numbers.

Numbers can help us understand the world. They are concrete, and they dont lie. But they can mislead, and thats why numbers should be used sparingly. Of course, Ill be tossing that out the window as we look into the current back-and-forth between our guest commentators Jerry Dudley, Gary OConnor and Bill Collins.

The discussion stems from OConnors Aug. 23 commentary in which he wrote about the disproportionate killing of Black people by police: For every one Anglo man killed by police, three Black people are killed. Dudley and Collins took issue with that statistic, and they offered their own set of numbers from Statista.com that shows 399 Anglo people and 209 Black people were shot to death by police in 2018, and there were 370 Anglo people and 235 Black people shot to death by police in 2019 hardly the 1-to-3 ratio offered by OConnor.

Well, both sides are because what theyre discussing are different but related sets of data.

The Statista.com numbers are very specific in that they are the number of people by race shot to death by police. There are other forms of lethal force, and that distinction matters. Atatiana Jefferson, a Black woman, was shot to death in 2019 by a Fort Worth officer whereas Elijah McClain, a Black man in Aurora, Colorado, was taken off life support and died six days after police put him in a chokehold and paramedics injected him with the sedative ketamine. Jefferson is one of the 235 Black people in Statista.coms 2019 statistic. McClain is not.

OConnors ratio likely originates from a November 2016 report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, written by two Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctors and a John Jay College researcher. The report found that in all fatalities resulting from the use of lethal force by on-duty law enforcement officers between 2009 and 2012 in 17 states, victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. (Side note: It also found (f)atality rates among military veterans/active duty service members were 1.4 times greater than among their civilian counterparts.)

Context also is important for numbers. When we take the statistics offered by Dudley and Collins and put them in context to population size, they support the 2016 reports conclusion that victims were majority white but disproportionately black. Lets look at 2019s numbers: The U.S. Census Bureau reported an Anglo population of 250.2 million that year and a Black population of 44.08 million. The 235 Black people shot to death by police were 0.00000533% of the Black population, whereas the 370 Anglo people shot to death by police were 0.00000148% of the Anglo population.

While the percentages alone show a clear disproportionality, lets look at what they mean. For the Anglo population to experience the same percentage of lives lost as the Black population, police would have shot to death 1,326 Anglo people nearly 1,000 more than actual. And lets reverse it. If the Black population experienced the same percentage loss as the Anglo population, police would have shot to death 65 Black people just more than 3.5 times fewer than actual.

And while were on the topic of context, lets keep in mind that U.S. law enforcement agencies answer tens of millions of service calls and conduct millions of traffic stops each year that do not end with someone losing their life. A fraction of those police-public contacts end in tragedy, with Statista.com reporting 1,000 total people shot to death by police each year. Its possible reforms can help reduce that number, which would save lives and livelihoods. Looking at it this way, we can simultaneously back the blue and recognize a need for change.

Remember, the world isnt just black-and-white, and neither are numbers. Often, the truth is found somewhere in between.

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COMMENTARY: The thing about numbers | Opinion - Paris News