Is there a police war on black Americans? See the data
By TATIANA PROPHET
Most people don’t know this fact: In raw numbers, more unarmed white Americans are killed by police nearly every year (see charts below). On the other hand, most people do know this fact: black men, particularly young black men, are more likely to be killed by police than any other group. In fact, some people might even think that an unarmed white person being killed by police is extremely rare.
Click on each photo to read the stories of the following people who should still be alive today (note: if you can’t access the descriptions, read about these individuals here.)
How can both be true, that police kill more unarmed whites yet if you are a black man, you are statistically more likely to be killed, unarmed, in a police confrontation? Think of it this way: Since white people make up more than 60 percent of the U.S. population, the number of white people who never experience harassment or bodily harm from police eclipses the amount of black people who escape such unfortunate encounters — whether through their own choices or simply, luck. That’s because black Americans make up a mere 13 percent of the U.S. population.
As to whether there is deliberate targeting and/or racism, circumstances are important. There’s plenty of senselessness in retrospect, from the recent shocking killing of George Floyd over the incredibly minor “crime” of passing a counterfeit bill to buy a pack of cigarettes, to being in the wrong place at the wrong time or keeping bad company.
The totals fluctuate every year, but the circumstances and senselessness are all too familiar.
Traffic stops, warrant searches, pot dealing, meth dealing, mushroom dealing, being in a drug house, being a passenger during a traffic stop, have all resulted in sudden death for men, women and even children of every background. This type of tragedy appears to befall black Americans of lower and middle income; but in the case of white Americans, it appears that most of the victims are lower income. A common theme is those Americans who have warrants or are on probation, and want to take their chances fleeing or even running toward police, as an alternative to going back to jail.
The next fact we need to see: A similar portion of black Americans are arrested for crimes, convicted of crimes, and incarcerated for crimes relative to their total population as those killed by police while unarmed. So while the U.S. population is more than 60 percent white, a roughly equal amount of whites and blacks are on death row. And in contrast to black Americans being 13 percent of the population, 37 percent of the prison population is black.
There is no question that in general, it is tougher to be black than it is to be white in the United States — tougher to get a good education, tougher to get a decent job, tougher to earn enough to feed a family. But that is a generalization, and one that has just started to change recently with a resurgence of the American economy and the lowest black unemployment ever recorded.
But why does the criminal justice system have so much interaction with black Americans? Racists say it’s because they commit more crimes. There is no way to verify that, since we are talking about reported crimes, and then more narrowly, prosecuted crimes. (No one knows how many crimes aren’t discovered let alone reported.)
Some data suggests that crime rate has no correlation with the number of arrests (see chart). Such data would indicate that police are more inclined to pull over, detain and otherwise question what black Americans are doing (and many of us have witnessed white Americans calling police on people they are stereotyping, or in the case of Ahmaud Arbery, shooting because of suspicion that a crime is being committed.)
Still, according to the graphic by Arrest Records dot com, the numbers have been going down in recent years. There are fewer African Americans, both men and women, as a percentage of the prison population in recent years.
And as can be seen in the charts above, total incidents of killing by police have declined in recent years, prompting a full article in the Washington Post, “Fatal police shootings of unarmed people have significantly declilned, experts say.”
However, and this is why we sometimes feel that we get conflicting information: The number of people shot by police overall, armed or unarmed, has stayed the same every year, says the Post. “Four years in a row, police nationwide fatally shoot nearly 1,000 people.” I don’t know about you, but that kind of headline packs a punch. It’s still not OK to end the life of an armed suspect in my opinion, but it’s a lot harder to avoid.
Knowing what we know now, what are we going to do?
