First, I’d like to thank Pairagraph for their invitation and Coleman for participating in this discussion. Debates on race and policing often devolve into circular and abstruse fights about the research literature, so I appreciate that you’ve kicked things off by conceding one of the points on the data I probably would have made eventually. “Studies have found bias in other aspects of policing, such as a cop’s likelihood to put his hands on a suspect,” you wrote. “But not in shootings.” Well, George Floyd was not shot by the police. Freddie Gray was not shot by the police. Eric Garner was not shot by the police. The protests we are here to discuss, like some of the other waves of demonstrations against police violence we’ve seen, were spurred by a fatal instance of hands-on, physical abuse. If it’s true that there are racial disparities in the physicality of police interactions, it’s entirely reasonable for protesters to see Floyd’s death as an extreme signifier of broader tendencies in police behavior.