Sometimes racial discrimination is occurring and should be pointed out, but sometimes false information is being used to unjustifiably inflame concerns. The claims being put forward by Slate and Pro Publica are simply very misleading. From Slate:
Could higher rates of crime commission by black teens relative to their white peers explain that difference? . . . The data suggest that the answer is no. . . . it looks like black Americans are between two and three times as likely to commit a violent crime as white Americans. But even assuming that black male teenagers are three times as likely as white teenagers to legitimately threaten the life of a police officer doesn’t explain why they’re twenty times more likely to be killed by police.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the material in the first quoted paragraph is correct. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to look at rates of killings by police of young black and white men but then compare it to violent crime for all blacks and whites. If you look at offender data and assume that 92 percent of murders are committed by males, you find that young black males were about 8 times more likely to commit murders than similarly aged white males. However, a lot of murders occur where the offender isn’t identified and that this problem is greater for gang related murders. To try to deal with this, we have made some calculations using victim data. Adjusting the data by the rate that blacks and whites kill members of their own and other races, young black males were 9 times more likely to commit murders than similarly aged white males. (Click on figures to enlarge the calculations made here.)
The Slate piece claims that after adjusting for violent crimes by race, police still kill young blacks at 7 to 10.5 times the rate they kill young whites. Making this one adjustment would still leave a difference, but it would imply that police are killing young blacks at 2.3 times the rate that they kill young whites — about one-fifth to one-third the difference being claimed.
Yet, apparently the reporters at Slate and Pro Publica don’t understand the data that they are using, and even this difference could very well be the result of biases in the data that they use.
— Pro Publica acknowledges that police-involved death data is not complete. But there is a systematic bias in what data is missing. Generally most of this data is collected from urban areas. Obviously most deaths occur there, but these areas also tend to be heavily black. The percent of the population that is black in areas reporting justifiable police homicides were 50.3 percent more black (17.8/11.8) than those jurisdictions that didn’t report these homicides.
— If black murders are more likely to involve gangs and gangs are more likely to get into shootout with police, young black males would be more than 9 times more likely to commit murders than similarly aged relevant white males.
UPDATE: Politicizing Ferguson police shooting?
Hi, Thanks for your writing on this, here and in NY Daily News. I don’t get your argument that the unrepresentative sample of police data, overrepresenting urban areas with a higher proportion of blacks, would overestimate shootings of blacks. The 21-times-greater estimate is based on a comparison of proportions: (police killings of blacks/total blacks)/ (police killings of whites/total whites). Right? If we are comparing these proportions, the racial makeup of the population shouldn’t matter, right? So whatever the demographics of the population, 10% or 90% black, “equitable” policing killings should produce a ratio of 1. Hopefully, I’m being clear enough. The only problem I see with the urban bias of the data is that it is a mistake to use it to generalize to the whole country, but this isn’t because of the proportions of the demographic makeup per se. It would be great if you could clarify this point for me.
I agree, the abuse of this statistic in the media has been very frustrating. Your other argument is just the one I wanted to make, but I did’t know the murder rates for young men. Thanks.
What he’s saying is, for an apples-to-apples comparison, the numbers that you’re coming up with have to match.
The 21x rate is based on 15-19 year old males who live in the selection of police jurisdictions that report data on officer- involved shootings. Those jurisdictions are also heavily biased toward urban areas, and not even proportionally-representative of the population, given that ~50% more blacks and 2x as many Hispanics live in those jurisdictions relative to other jurisdictions across the US.
So to make a useful comparison against violent crime rates, you’d need to calculate the violent crime ratio for 15-19 year old males who live in the urban areas that report police-involved shooting data for that part of the equation as well – not overall rates for the entire population.
Otherwise, you’re comparing apples-to-oranges, and the data is worthless for the purpose of drawing useful conclusions.
why are the police at the scene of the shooting. They don’t just roam the streets looking for a black to kill. They are at the scene to help someone protect themselves and their family from harm and a lot of that harm is the black who the police shot.
Look at the history of the police.
They walked the ‘beat’ looking for escaped slaves. Most of the early history was to keep African immigrants to the US under control.
Police culture in the US is still geared towards the Black Codes developed by the Southern States.
-Make sure blacks don’t congregate.
-Don’t allow blacks 2nd Amendment rights. Having a gun is automatic escalation.
-Respond with massive displays of force to stop blacks when they exercise free speech protests.
-Harass blacks that find themselves walking or driving into white flighted neighborhoods settled in the 1960′ to ’90s to avoid any black residents.
Just call bs and no one needs to apologize for calling bs.
Dear Rob:
The problem is that you have the ratio of blacks and white teenage males killed from just one percent of police departments and you are trying to infer what the national ratio is from that one percent of departments. If that one percent of departments isn’t representative of the rest of departments, there is no reason to believe that you can draw national implications from that number. For example, what if the department that you had data for served a virtually all black population? Would you be surprised that blacks were more likely to be killed than whites? Presumably not. That is the general point.
The shootings by police which receive the must media coverage tend to occur in areas
of the nation which have a disproportionately
higher number of Black citizens than the
other areas of the country, and thus a higher number of confrontations between police and Black males, and a higher number of crimes committed by Black males. Further, the bias of the media
reporters contribute to fanning the
hatred toward the police by not reporting
pertinent facts such as the Black man
who was shot is a convicted felon in
possession of an illegal firearm.
yep
Will someone please inform me of the number of unarmed Black people killed by police who had not committed a crime at the time of the deadly confrontation with police. It is not sufficient to simply roll out the statistical differences in crimes rates between white and black populations, at some point chewing gum or raising your voice may become justifiable for killing unarmed Americans!
I agree that the discussion here doesn’t really address the issue of a racial disparity in the use of force, since the comparison of crime rates and so forth doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not a police shooting was actually justified.
That statistics and data for this kind of thing are not even kept track of in most of the country should tell us a lot IMO.
Whether a police killing is “justifiable” basically hinges on whether or not it was *necessary* to protect the officer’s life or the lives of innocents…and the comparison of crime rates tells us nothing about this…
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?client=ms-android-verizon
Warren, The question is whether cops using lethal force are discriminating against blacks. We’d need data on both blacks and whites to make a comparison– your question only asks for data on blacks. ProPublica’s report was very misleading because of its omission of the discrepancies in crime rates between blacks and whites. I can’t even think of what the use of ProPublica’s 21-times statistic is. Taking into account how frequently members of each group are acting in ways that put them at risk of getting shot by police is necessary to come up with a meaningful statistic. Lott provided the most precise estimate to this question that I know of.
I think that taking into account the discrepancy in murder rates is sufficient for making an inference about whether cops are discriminating against blacks in their use of deadly force. But besides the problems with the police shootings data already mentioned by others, I could see two possible criticisms: (1) The data on murder rates is biased so that the gap between whites and blacks appears wider than it really is. (2) We are using murder rates as a proxy for risky behavior that causes the person to get shot by the police, perhaps murder rates are not a good proxy. Regarding (1), I think the US’s crime data is pretty solid. I’m not an expert but my understanding is that our two data sources (one from crime reports, one from victimization surveys) corroborate each other well. Regarding (2), I see no reason to think murder rates are not highly correlated with the type of behavior that gets one shot by the police.
Here’s a sociologist’s blog post that links to some studies that might interest you: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/12/26/chart-of-the-week-63-of-white-people-are-wrong-about-ferguson/. Her own argument is a muddle though. She seems to be conflating three question: (1) Are African American men more likely to engage in risky behavior generally (like robbery or murder) that increases their chances of getting shot by police? (2), Are African American men more likely to engage in risky behavior in their interactions with police? (3) Are police biased against blacks in their use of deadly force?
The relevant statistic is that while Black youths are about 20 times more likely than White youths to be killed by police, they are also about 20 times more likely to be killed by people other than police. So this statistic in fact argues that police are *not* discriminating against Blacks (in choosing who to kill) than society at large is.
Exactly. But it also seems to point to several other things such as training and evaluation for the police force leaves something to be desired. Or that Our monitoring of our Justice system is highly inadequate. Or the fact that “Blacks” are a minority and that they are just as likely to harm those of their own races as someone not of their own races. And the fact that crime rates are statistically higher in high black populations though they are a minority and also that due to this, white crimes it is more likely that their will be excessive police force used in theses situations. This date is clearly inconclusive but the current racial climate has created even more of a need to remain unbiased and look at what is really going on here because it is larger actually than race or even police-on-civilian crime. Frankly, why do we not have better systems in place to track what is really going on and needed to keep our communities growing and thriving without fear and misunderstanding? Shouldn’t the police be reporting all of their incidences in all places and not just where crime is high? Of course reported black shootings are higher because frankly, it is only the jursidictions in which the minority population is high that is reporting these statistics. We can only eradicate this problem if we have full and accurate information. If it really is a racial prejudice towards minorities then we need to figure out why we are employing people to protect people they are afraid of inherently. If it is not a racial prejudice and more of an issue of general fear and power from the line of work they do then we need more stringent evaluation of not just physical ability but emotional and mental fortitude and reasoning. You can not protect me if you are afraid. We need better information.
Nice try. Go eat a doughnut or something, you fat shits.
I am white and the odds of me being shot by the police are nearly zero.
I pay plenty of taxes for police protection but their is something lacking where I live….the police.
With no police officers near me, the chance of being pulled over is zero. No contact with the police and that makes it zero chance of being shot. Sound a little silly? It is, but it is true. Where are the cops? In high crime areas, I don’t know who told them to go there but it turns out, they spend all their time there doing something. I don’t try to spend too much time there but when I do, I know my chances of getting pulled over go up. Want to look like a statistical geneious? Tell the experts you did the math and if you never have a cop anywhere near you, your chances of getting pulled over are zero.
To be honest, I just had a cop show up the other day, I found a wallet on the street with hundreds of dollar and several credit cards, I.d. and being this is California, a medical marijuana card so I called the police to pick it up and they were at my house in 15 minutes.
You can play with stats all you want, like blacks are responsible for killing cops at around 40% and yet are only 13% of the population. But what does that really tell us? They have more contact or they commit more murders?
We could play the statistics game all day long and blame racism for everything. I like the California incarceration rates per 100,000 residents the most. I see it a lot and notice the media always has this fabulous stat that blacks are incarcerated at a rate of 4,367 per 100,000 and whites at 488.
Oh, those stats used by your college professor, media outlets, civil rights groups, anti this or pro that groups. They point to those stats as proving, without any idea on how it proves anything but proving racism in our justice system.
But at the bottom of their stats, not mentioned, just simply overlooked, hidden from public view by the likes of C.N.N. or your favorite professor teaching us about race is this little tiny stat.
Asians incarceration rate per 100,000 was 34. No, not 3,400 or even 340, just 34. A small fraction of the rate for whites.
So, if racism causes the difference between blacks and whites, are whites victims of racism by the justice system too?
Or, are we seeing something far more powerful at hand, something so simple, but a game changer for the racism excuse crowd. Is it, could it, are we just seeing less crime by one minority group? How can it be? The system was set up by racist whites to benefit themselves and harm blacks so what was so foolishly done by the whites they would harm themselves and make Asians look so much less likely to commit crimes?
Oh, they did the same for test scores too in school. They managed to somehow do the same for median household income. What the heck, unemployment is lower for Asians than whites? Brilliant, just brilliant these white folks are, they created a system where they come in second place.
I think too many people get away with too much b.s. when it comes to using stats. Just skip the stats and give us your biased view, I will respect you more for it.
While they are about it, the BLM activist and the college “oppression studies” professor could ponder the fact that while men form only 50% of the population, above 95% of the people shot by the police are men. So men are above 10x as likely to be shot by police as women. Why do the police hate men so much? Why have the men who control everything set up a system that oppresses men? The answer to this conundrum is obvious and doesn’t violate PC expectations of what it is allowed to say…. Men get into violent confrontations with police far more often than women. No-one sane would deny such an obvious conclusion. But try stating the obvious; that high crime areas in the USA are cities with a large black population (who murder each other at an enormous rate, dwarfing the efforts of the rest of the population including the police at red-handed murder), and in such areas the police are constantly likely to have a fraught encounter that may end in bloodshed… Of course the police stop and search black people a lot more than white people. When they go to an area with a high level of reported crime they see a lot of black men in the street. This isn’t rocket science and it isn’t the fault of police, but representative of a wider societal problem.
This entire website is clearly created to continue to help white people feel better about racism in America. When you throw in information about ‘blacks’ and ‘gangs’ without reference you confirm that leaning. Black people are victimized by police more than me or you. Get over it. Stop whining that people what equal rights to live their lives and help them!
Thank you Tonez.
I think what’s missing is WHY police are killing black me at the rate they are. A lot of these men do not pose a threat to police. Not until now, you don’t really hear of black men going around shooting police. We don’t come from that. Actually, the black on black crime rate shot up enormously in the early 90’s due to the heroin/crack eras that were put into our communities from the Nixon campaign to criminalize black people and make hippies look like drug heads. Please google Nixon official confesses….if you don’t believe me. We didn’t do heavy drugs nor did we sell them. Then the rap music because very violent when NWA came on the scene and that criminalized our men which was intentional by the private prison and music executives. You guys like #’s but you still don’t understand. Blacks want equality. Even with the affirmative action in place, which helps white women more than ANY minority, we still face institutionalize racism as well as being shut out of opportunities to help us become the productive citizens you claim we’re too lazy to be. Don’t’ forget Jim Crow laws that still have an affect on our people TODAY. While we’re on crime…think about all the white people that got a pass or slap on the wrist by white policeman who are family members or judges that allow white people to face lesser sentencing vs. blacks who are more liking to be to face a harsher sentence for “SAID” same crime.
early 80’s… not 90’s
Earl : Ok, If blacks are so downtrodden in this country, why aren’t black countries (Haiti, African nations) more affluent , higher educated, and less criminal than they are? It is not just an Amerian Black problem, it is a Black problem period. How many times has the white nan barely support ations pulled Haiti up from disaster only to have it fail again? Rhodesia was the highest economy in sub-Sahara Africa until the Black Africans toke over the government, now it can barely support itself. No the problem is the black mentality regardless of black nationality.
I don’t know about percentages or the stats but here is my opinion.There have been a lot of good points made here some i never thought of before and have changed my view but what i don’t understand is in a lot of these shootings it shows the suspect not obeying the officers commands i mean when the officers say get down on the ground and put your hand behind your back you don’t say fuck you and walk away.And when it’s a white officer who does the shooting it becomes a race thing what if it was a black officer shooting a black suspect or even a white suspect, that doesn’t even make the news.Racism and bigotry still exist in this country and others also, but you can’t keep blaming the white man for everything wrong that happens in your lives.You have to take some kind of responsibility for your actions.And rioting in the street and looting and burning businesses and throwing rocks and anything else you can get a hold of at the police, isn’t the best way to get your point across.It just makes you look more deserving of the treatment that your already getting. it seems to me that the african americans in this country have come along way in the last 200 years.They went from slaves to a free people.Then segregation ended then you were allowed to vote, that may or may not be in the right order but you get my point.You have greater opportunities now then ever before history.But when you have entire communities that live in poverty and where young black men grow up, many times with out their fathers, and their mothers having to work 2 and 3 jobs to support them.They grow up without the guidence their supposed to have.So their exposed to the violence and the criminal element that’s outside there doors.They grow up listening to music that glamorizes drugs,raping women, gang violence and worse of all killing cops and others.so that’s all they know but that doesn’t place you in an impossible situation.I agree the way police handle these types of situations needs to change.But change goes both ways the black community need to change it’s thinking about the police.But this change isn’t going to happen overnight or even in a month or a year it took over 200 years to get where we are right now,Both black and white .But society isn’t perfect and probably never will be.There will always be hatred and racism and unequality in one form or another in a nation of some many different races.It’s how we come together as a community both black and white to deal with these wrongs is what is truly going to set every body free.
Your statement about blacks not following rules is a false narrative… You must be a cop or a security guard. In every video that has been presented shows that your statement is false. Show me a video where this is the case – you cannot show me any because there are none that exist. With the raise in cell phone proves this case that cops in general are not doing their jobs. You should try reading Wesley Lowery book They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement. But I am sure you find a way not to read it… Interesting
In terms of fatherless homes and that in some way having a both parents in the home will make a better child. It is a blanket statement that has nothing to do with people getting shot, beaten, or choked to death by bullies with badges. Using your logic fathers that die on the street, in wars, at work, and etc (the father are no longer in the home) so the child is going to grow up in a fatherless or motherless home so he is going to be a bad person because of it. Of course not! Only fools think in that linear manner.
It has nothing to do with fatherless homes or the culture in black communities. If the cops are scare of the populous there are patrolling then you will have more shooting of that particular group. You could easily go on You Tube and watch the different reaction when black have guns compare to white having gun. It is plain as day. See what happen in Ferguson (Cop Statement of being scared of this big black kid) and Terence Crutcher (Helicopter person stated this is a scary guy – how is that possible to make that type of judgement from so far up). You have cowards black and white cops shooting unarmed people (black, white, latino, and etc). It is literally that simple…
you seem to be the most rational thinker on this thread i like your way of thinking
An emotional nonsense rant with NO FACTS. Blacks are many times over more likely to murder and rape than whites. Those are FACTS and TRUTH no matter how you try to whitewash with emotions.