On average, between 10 and 20 unarmed black people are killed by police each year since 2020. This accounts for less than 1% of all police shootings of black people.
Since so many people are replying to you with derision, I’ll link to the Washington Post database on police shootings which is considered to be pretty comprehensive and has a lot of work put into each case to determine the situation around it.
A lot of people are surprised to learn that the number of unarmed black men shot by police in recent years is often between 15-20 given the rhetoric around the issue.
The number is disproportionally higher than white men, but Roland Fryer’s research suggests that when taking into account context, such as crime rates, there is no statistical difference in police shootings based on race, though he did find a persistent difference in other types of police encounters.
Black Americans are disproportionately poor, disproportionately raised in single parent homes, disproportionately forced into poorly run schools, and disproportionately victimized by crime. Those issues are difficult to address and should all get a lot of attention because they are the context in which disproportionate encounters with police occur. While police reform is an important issue for everyone, the overheated rhetoric around racist cops is performative and distracting.
- 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 published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.
- U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times larger than the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.
- When considering shootings confined within a single race, a black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people.
- Police reform advocates and researchers as well at The Post’s own analysis has consistently concluded that there is no correlation between violent crime and who is killed by police officers.
- A 2015 study by a University of California at Davis researcher concluded there was “no relationship” between crime rates by race and racial bias in police killings. A report released last week by the Center for Policing Equity, which reviewed arrest and use-of-force data from 12 police departments, concluded that black residents were more often targeted for use of police force than white residents, even when adjusting for whether the person was a violent criminal.
- An independent analysis of The Post’s data conducted by a team of criminal-justice researchers concluded that, when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are no more likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police.
- “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal-justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors, said in April. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed. This just bolsters our confidence that there is some sort of implicit bias going on. Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.”
Blacks are shot and killed by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites.
Well, black people constitute ~13% of the population versus white people's 73%. So there should be almost 6x as many white people, or ~1,500, killed by police as black people.
Police brutality is a leading cause of deaths among young men, but especially so for young black men:
> Among men of all races, ages 25 to 29, police killings are the sixth-leading cause of death, according to a study led by Frank Edwards of Rutgers University, with a total annual mortality risk of 1.8 deaths per 100,000 people. Accidental death, a category that includes automotive accidents and drug overdoses, was the biggest cause at 76.6 deaths per 100,000, and followed by suicide (26.7), other homicides (22.0), heart disease (7.0), and cancer (6.3).
> [...]
> For a black man, the risk of being killed by a police officer is about 2.5 times higher than that of a white man. “Our models predict that about 1 in 1,000 black men and boys will be killed by police over the life course,” the authors write.
There are plenty of statistics if you look for them. Which is why, in my mind, the onus is on skeptics to prove that police brutality does not especially affect the black population.
Police brutality is a real issue. It's less clear that racial bias in policing is a statistically significant issue, however, when accounting for obvious things. If someone has numbers that tell a different story I am all ears. Here are mine when I attempted to find it for myself:
black arrests (all crimes) a year: 2.2 million
white arrests (all crimes) a year: 5.6 million
USA black population: 13%
USA white population: 75%
Given a black committing an average black crime, and a white committing an avg white crime, the black person is 16% more likely to die in a police altercation. Whether or not this is statistical error or a real difference is harder to tell, but this difference is not nearly as large as most media outlets lead people to believe.
Again, If someone has numbers that tell a different story I am all ears
That brutality disproportionately affects African Americans. Police brutality and racism are both huge problems, combined they are worse than the sum of said parts.
Half of people killed by police are white. Blacks are 25%.
Blacks are also disproportionally represented amongst violent offenders.
One more interesting trivia - black and hispanic cops are more likely to shoot a black suspect than white cops.
Black people are 13% of US population, yet black men (6% of US population) commit 50% of homicides in the US.
Thus your assumptions are incorrect and thus your conclusions may also be incorrect. It appears that white people are more afraid of being called racist than being assaulted by a person of color.
Police violence is a universal problem. A Harvard study has shown that white people in the US are statistically more likely encounter lethal force from police than people of color [1].
I think alienating two-thirds of the population and focusing on only a subset of the problem is generally counterproductive. I can support the gp with another anecdote of growing up in an overwhelmingly white small town watching cops harass, beat up, (and much worse that I'm not even going to mention) plenty of poor white folks. Race is just a proxy for a power imbalance that cops seek out and abuse, and focusing on race will guarantee the actual problem is never addressed.
I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers, but as far as murders by police, the numbers are generally 50% white, 25% black, 15% hispanic, and 10% other ([1] shows one year). The U.S. population is 60-75% white (depending how it is measured), 12% black, 12-25% hispanic (depending how it is measured).
So, these numbers seem to show that if you are black, you are 2x the average, white you are roughly 0.8x the average, hispanic right about 1x the average as far as likelihood of being killed by a cop. That puts black at about 2.5 as likely as white.
Point is, if you are black, you are absolutely more likely to have these problems than if you are white. This distracts from the actual problem though. The actual problem is the power imbalance that is being exploited by the cops in these situations, and race is just being used as a shortcut by the cop's brain to identify a power imbalance that can be exploited.
Again, focusing on race will guarantee the actual problem never gets addressed (even if it might make you feel like a really great person).
Black people encountering police at a much higher rate than white people could be taken itself as evidence of systemic bias in policing.
A study found that white police are no more likely to shoot minorities than non-white police, but that is dismissed as flawed reasoning. [1]
Another study examining lethal and non-lethal interactions with police;
> In the raw data, blacks are 21.3 percent more likely to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn than whites and the difference is statistically significant. Adding our full set of controls reduces the racial difference to 19.4 percent.
> In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, we find no racial differences in officer-involved shootings on either the extensive or intensive margins. Using data from Houston, Texas – where
we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified – we find, in the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites. [2]
I think at this point the statistics can be used to argue both ways.
I think what’s left behind is the undeniable fact that certain inner cities are more like war zones than civilian population centers with the number of daily shooting and killings. Chicago just saw 18 murders in 24 hours, or nearly ~4,500 shootings per year. [3]
According to the Washington Post last year there were 9 fatal shootings of unarmed black people by police (19 of white people). Fatal police shootings in total were about 1,000 and ~25% were black, a number that under-represents black people relative to the rate of violent crime.
Compare to what the Atlantic describes as the “homicide plague afflicting black America“ of black on black civilian violence, which claims nearly 100,000 lives per decade. This is not whataboutism, this is flip sides of the same coin, because while “defunding” police can reduce the total number of armed and unarmed black people killed by police a maximum of ~2,500 per decade, what will it do to the 100,000 killed per decade in inner city gang wars?
In my estimation, the vilification of police as racist, declarations of “ACAB” and “Fuck 12”, and calling to abolish or defund the police is more likely to result in significantly more dangerous environments where the majority of black homicides are occurring.
Has any rigorous study shown that blacks are more likely to die in police encounters after adjusting for income level and crime rate of where the encounter takes place?
If so please provide a cite or link.
Although out of thousands of cops in the USA I am sure there are some genuine racists the notion that in 2020 cops would be killing blacks intentionally at a higher rate seems ridiculous. 99.999% of cops want to have an easy shift, get a donut or two, write a couple tickets, watch the years go by, retire early and collect a pension. Plenty of poor and middle class whites have been killed by abusive individual cops over the years and yet the reaction is not tribalism, rioting or generalising the actions of few bad cops to the police force as a whole. I agree America has massive problem with overly militarised police but this is not a racial issue. It stems from the drug war and the ease with which criminals can get high powered weapons in America. See North Hollywood Shootout.
> Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 371 civilians having been shot, 71 of whom were Black, in the first five months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1,021 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 there were 999 fatal shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 36 fatal shootings per million of the population as of May 2021.
The fact is that police shootings of unarmed African-Americans are still only 0.1% of all African-Americans killed. There are studies that find that no racial differences in lethal uses of force: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf
The media doesn't ever report the numbers on police violence. They report the emotion.
Including both armed and unarmed people, just over 1000 people were killed by US police in 2019.
What percentage of those were black?
Approximately 24 percent. Did you know that? Did it surprise you? I assumed it was 75 percent. 24 percent is very bad, since black Americans are 13 percent of the population. However, it also indicates that race is one of, not the only, independent variable driving this. The media is deliberately not reporting these numbers. Simultaneously, they trot out chart after chart of covid19 infection statistics.
When I saw the data, I was very angry that my own perception was so skewed due to biased, incomplete reporting in the media.
"It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
Not sure what "preferred narrative" you are referring too, but most black people think America has a "police problem". Define that however you like. Bunch of other polls from the same organization for those curious enough to dig deeper. Seek Higher Things friend.
If police seek out and engage black people violently at higher rates than they do people of other races, then it's natural that their deaths at the hands of black folks will be higher.
Here's a publication [1] which indicates your belief that whites suffer higher rates of death by police action is incorrect. The probability of a black being killed by police is ~ 3.5x the probability for whites.
This is useful because it highlights how black people are not the only, or even primary victims of police violence.
I think it's a real shame that what should be racially blind protest about police brutality that affects all communities has turned racial when the statistics for doing so really don't make much sense. Especially considering how many police forces in the US are headed by minorities and how much of the police force consists of minorities.
https://apnews.com/article/us-news-ap-top-news-racial-injust...
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