So this might be spurious.
A lot of stats and facts pattern about the same. Reported crimes, convictions, demographics where police are concentrated. This makes causal sense, you put police where there are crime reports. Just look at arrests and police presence and it's a correlation that some like to flip--more are arrested because there are more police to do the arresting. Doesn't explain the crime reports, though, so causality can be established.
Shootings track about the same. And while I haven't seen any data (perhaps it doesn't exist) I suspect that if you look at a map of where police shootings occur they pattern fairly nicely with SES.
But it appears minorities get more violence from the police than whites do. Force applied by race as reported by police shows this. But it appears whites minimize their accounts of violence while minorities either remember well or elaborate--whites report virtually no force, whereas police report a reasonable among applied to whites; blacks and Latinos report more force than police report. (So ask youself--if police are lying about the force used on minorities, why are they lying about the force applied to whites? I have no answer. But if there are perceptual differences in how whites and minorities view police, could this influence later reporting in public surveys? Yes. Are there such perceptual differences? Yes.)
As for urban poverty, or rural poverty (notice we care about one, not so much the other) ... When we say "systemic causes" we always have to be careful not to blame the victim. In some cases, though, parents victimize their children and children victimize themselves. We have to explore systemic causes wherever that leads us. It can lead to looking at failing schools. It can lead noticing to failing parents. Or all kinds of other things. I have no problem when people blame "redneck culture" for why a group of whites I get in my classes every year struggle. They don't like school, don't see a reason for it; complying is seen as humiliating, when they've got their dignity and nobody's going to tell them what to do and control them. So they make sucky, dignity-based choices, and when they get to my classroom have gaps in what they should know that make my class tough. "Why should I go to college? My father worked at _________, my grandfather did, too. What's good enough for them is good enough for me." Or they were taught to work hard, manual labor, to do stuff--not sit and read and think.
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