Glad to see so these anti-police movements have indoctrinated people with feelings of paranoia. Kudos, you've surely made society better.
I mean its an undeniable fact that youre at least an order of magnitude more likely to get shot if a police officer is in your presence, whether youre breaking the law or not - and ESPECIALLY if youre a minority.
The odds of being shot by a cop is something like 0.08%. The odds of being shot by a cop while black while holding a gun is only about 3%. The actual statistics don't match these beliefs.
You clearly didnt comprehend what I said. Just because your odds of getting shot are still pretty low around a cop doesnt mean that the increase from extremely unlikely to just unlikely isnt a significant one. Its entirely understandable if someone doesnt want to bear that risk unnecessarily.
No, I get what you're saying. It's also nonsense because an order of magnitude over effectively zero is still almost zero. You're either showing a fundamental lack of understanding of probability, or you assume that the odds of being shot in the first place are much higher than they actually are.
Edit: and to be clear, that point zero eight percent is the odds of being shot by a cop in an official police encounter. If you include every instance of a cop being in the same room, the number gets much much smaller.
When you have a number of risk factors for any dangerous thing, the odds go up by and incredibly significant amount. Your odds of dying in a car without a seat belt on are still very low, but much higher than without one. It's understable that if at all possible, you would choose not to be in that situation.
In your metaphor, the cop IS the seatbelt. What you're seeing are people complaining about the small number of times that someone has died because they had a seatbelt on, and completely ignoring the massive number of lives saved explicitly because of the seatbelt, and then arguing that people have a right to demand cars without seatbelts.
If you really want to play this probability game, you need to factor in both the risk of being shot by an officer, and the reduce the risk of being harmed in some other way due to the presence of the officer.
We don't know the individual's risk factors for being shot in a Starbucks (or at/around a business open to the public), but it's probably higher with five armed police than with none. I'd be interested to know the comparison there between demographics and neighborhoods.
I'd be pissed if I were asked to leave too under these circumstances but they're being lame about it. It's still possible that both the customer and the employee were being paranoid or assholes but it's one thing to be upset and another to act like they have no idea why this would happen and blame everyone else for their deservedly shit reputation. ---
