The police department has tried to increase its diversity over the past decade, but still 7 in 10 officers are white, far more than the city’s population of 291,000, which is a little over half white, according to Census data.
I’m not a math or statistics person. On its face, I would think “7 in 10” would be close to “a little over half,” which would be 6 in 10 (to me). Can someone please ELI5 how this is “far more”?
Police initially said officers shot Handy, who was severely intoxicated, when he raised a long gun toward them in an apartment complex parking lot. But the shooting was the first since Anchorage police began wearing body cameras, and video taken by those cameras and by a neighbor’s security camera appeared to show Handy kept the gun down before police started shooting.
This is the primary issue, I think. If they only just got bodycams, they haven’t adjusted their behavior. I watch bodycam vids from YT because they’re like reality TV but real and not scripted. People often say they’re recording and the cops say, “I’m recording too,” very comfortable with the cams. I remember how much the cams were hated by cops a decade ago and now they seem fully-adopted. I think this dept hasn’t learned to live with them yet. The amount of abuse that still occurs with the cams makes me shudder to think about how police behaved before they were common.