Some Facts on Police Killings |
Created Date: 18-Jun-2016 |
Last updated: 23-Jun-2016 |
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The Point of this information:
Bethania Palma, Sep 22, 2016
The article copied here in case the original is deleted or taken offline. One extra highlighting done. BUT READ MORE AFTER ON PREDICTING KILL RATES.
CLAIM: Police shootings kill more white Americans than black Americans.
True: MIXTURE
WHAT'S TRUE: In absolute numbers, more whites than blacks are killed in police
shootings (because whites outnumber blacks in America).
WHAT'S FALSE: Overall, black Americans are several times more likely to be
killed in police shootings than white Americans are.
ORIGIN: In September 2016, the ongoing issue of police shootings and race came to
a head after a white police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shot and killed Terence
Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old African-American man.
Similar shootings throughout the U.S. have been caught on camera and widely
shared via social media, prompting the development of the Black Lives Matter
movement to address a seemingly constant stream of American police officers
killing unarmed black people. The issue has also inspired some critics to
disingenuously counter that white people are the ones who are killed most
frequently by police officers, as expressed in a 21 April 2015 Washington
Times article:
An analysis shows that more white people died at the hands of law enforcement
than those of any other race in the last two years, even as the Justice
Department, social-justice groups and media coverage focus on black victims of
police force.
Any "analysis" of police killings will of course show that in absolute numbers,
more white people are killed in police shootings than black people, because
(non-Hispanic) whites comprise a roughly five times greater share of the U.S.
population (62% vs. 13%). So any "analysis" that is based on nothing more than
absolute numbers and does not take demographics into account is inaccurate and
misleading
Because the federal government doesn't keep an accurate log of police shootings,
news outlets such as the Washington Post and journalists such as D. Brian
Burghart have begun tracking such data independently. The Post described the
statistical breakdown of fatal police shootings in 2015 thusly:
According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more
white people in America than there are black people. White people make up
roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who
are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24
percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13
percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis, that means
black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed
by police officers.
According to Fatal Encounters, the database created by former Reno News &
Review editor and journalism instructor Burghart (which tracks all deaths
resulting from interactions with police), a total of 1,388 people were killed by
police in 2015, 318 (23%) of them black, and 560 (40%) of them white. So roughly
23 percent of those killed by any police interaction in 2015 were black and just
over 40 percent were white. According to those statistics (adjusted for racial
demographics), blacks had a 2.7 higher likelihood of being killed by police than
whites.
The grim trend has carried over into 2016. Of the 1,034 people killed and
tracked by Burghart's Fatal Encounters database so far this year, 215 were black
while 338 were white, so thus far in 2016 black Americans have been three times
more likely than whites to die in interactions with police. That statistic holds
for figures sent to us by Burghart compiled between Jan. 1, 2013 to Sept. 21,
2016, with suicides-by-cop removed. Burghart told us:
I think it's pretty obvious that black people are killed at much higher rates
than white people. I'm not going to say that white people are underrepresented
in these numbers, since I think all people are overrepresented in this data, but
it's clear that black people are highly overrepresented.
Other factors that are also prevalent in analyses of deadly use of force by
police officers include age, gender, mental illness, and the circumstances of
the deaths. In 250 of the fatal shootings recorded by the Post in 2015, the
victims showed signs of mental illness. Men were far more often killed than
women. In 782 instances, the person killed was armed with some type of "deadly
weapon." In 28 instances, there was no record of the victim's race.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 22 September 2016
__________________________________________
5 Statistics about Cops killing Blacks Excerpts from the article, but
click on the link and read the whole thing.
A copy is here this
website.
In #1:
Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau
of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of
robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest
counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the
population in these counties.
"Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that
officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting
suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal
force," writes MacDonald.
MacDonald also pointed out in her Hillsdale speech that blacks "commit 75
percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all
violent crime" in New York City, even though they consist of 23 percent of the
city's population.
"The black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than 26 percent
of police victims would be black," MacDonald said. "Officer use of force will
occur where the police interact most often with violent criminals, armed
suspects, and those resisting arrest, and that is in black neighborhoods."
#2 More whites and Hispanics die from homicides than blacks
#3 ...unarmed black men are more likely to die by gun of a cop than an unarmed
white man...
#4 Black and Hispanic police officers are more likely to fire at blacks than
white officers
#5 Blacks are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops. This is
according to FBI data, which also found that 40 percent of cop killers are
black.