The data on police-involved shootings are notoriously bad (that’s a link to Jon Stewart worth clicking on!). And yet, at least we kind of know which data are missing. That makes the data not as bad as you might think. At least when it comes to police-involved justifiable homicides (for shootings, we don’t know. But if you multiply homicides by…
Dillon Taylor was another unarmed white boy shot and killed by police. In (mostly) conservative circles, Dillon Taylor was compared to Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri. In some liberal circles, people believe police only shoot and kill black people. But Taylor, who is white, got almost no press (and I think the officer who shot him was hispanic). Michael Brown…
There’s still the strange belief among some people that police only do bad things to black folk. When I was on Chris Hayes the other night, some commentators thought the initial stop was racially biased. Chris himself questioned whether a white person would have been stopped for a seat-belt violation. I find that crazy talk. There was so much bad…
One of the things that keeps coming out of the Ferguson shooting is that Michael Brown was “unarmed.” As if “unarmed” people cannot be a threat to cop. That’s bullshit. Now I’m not talking about whether Michael Brown was or was not a threat. I do not know. But the fact that he was “unarmed” does not mean he wasn’t…
Fact 7: What about hispanics? Hard to tell because many police departments don’t keep track. Half of all homicides (justifiable police homicides) have no “ethic origin” listed. When it is listed, 1/3 of those killed are hispanic, which strikes me as very high. Overall, including all the missing data, hispanics come out at 16 percent. So the real number of…
Fact 6: Black police officers do kill white people. This really isn’t surprising, but I mention it because I’ve seen a few people on twitter doubt this fact. Black officers (about 1 in 7 of all police) kill about 27 blacks and 9.4 whites per year. White police (of whom there are many more) kill an average of 81 blacks…
Fact 5: Black officers are disproportionately more likely than white police to kill black people. But this should come as little surprise since black officers are much more likely to work in black areas and in cities where there are more blacks. Again, given the bad data, take all this with a huge grain of salt, but according to the…
Fact 4: Police-involved killings are going up. This one surprised me. Because police-involved shootings are generally correlated with overall homicides. But homicides are more or less steady right now, and down 10,000 since 1998 (14,000 in 1998, 13,000 in 2012). The trend is about five more killings a year, for the past 15 years. Keep in mind this is based…
[Update: Using better data, the number is more like three a day.] Fact 3: UCR data on justified police-homicides are notorious incomplete. These numbers are an undercount. But given the data we have, as reported (or not) to the DOJ by local police departments, police kill at least one person a day (426 in 2012, to be exact, 30 percent…
Fact 2: Blacks are more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, but probably less so than you’d suspect. 34 percent of those killed by police are African American. But put another way, 62 percent of those killed by police are white. (Actual numbers provided in next post.) What you want to make of these data probably…