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  • Police-involved shootings and hispanics

    I asked Jim, my Dominican-born Austin-raised San Francisco-living white friend, why he thought so many Californian cities were high on my PIHN list. He thought for a very few short seconds and answered, “because hispanics aren’t violent but police think they are.”

    I love over-generalizations and stereotypes that could very well be true.

    So I got black and hispanic percentages for my 40 cities and ran correlations to see if there was anything related with race, hispanic, the city’s homicide rate, the police-involved homicide rate, and PIHN.

    More blacks in a city correlates with a higher homicide rate but not significantly with the rate of police-involved homicides. That last part is surprising.

    A higher hispanic percentage in a city correlates with a lower homicide rate (which shouldn’t be surprisingly, unless you only listen to Fox News) and is also not related to the rate of police-involved shootings. OK.

    Of course a high homicide rate correlates very much more police-involved shootings (that I knew, and is the whole reason behind this PIHN idea).

    And black and hispanic percentages in cities both correlate with PIHN, and in opposite directions. More hispanics mean a higher PIHN. More blacks a lower PIHN. Another way to look at this is to say that hispanics live in less violent cities, but those cities do not see the expected correlated decrease in police-involved shootings.

    Now this might be counterintuitive to some, but it makes sense if once thinks of all the flack police can get when they shoot a black person (even an armed person who shot at police). For better and for worse, perhaps cities with more blacks are better organized to complain about police-involved shootings. Sure, these protests piss off police, but they could also lead to better training, fewer police-involved shootings, and police less likely to pull the trigger.

    How often do whites or hispanics complain after a questionable shooting? Not so much.

    So could police be disproportionately killing hispanics? Seems possible… but turns out not really.

    In trigger-happy Riverside, which is 52 percent hispanic and 6 percent black — if the data is accurate — hispanics are not overrepresented in police-involved shootings (68 over 15 years). Other than the massive number of police-involved homicides, nothing jumps out at me. When hispanic-or-not is listed (80 percent of the time), 36 percent of those killed by police are listed as hispanic. 13 of the 68 were black (disproportionately but not unexpectedly high).

    In Mesa, which is 28 percent hispanic and has only 3 blacks (just kidding, Mesa is 3 percent black), police killed 40 people over 15 years. Only one of the 40 was black. When ethnicity was listed, about one-third of those killed were hispanic.

    I also looked at San Diego and Dallas, and could find nothing that stood out. So this seems to be a bit of a dead end. It’s also entirely possible that hispanics are listed as non-hispanic for whatever reason. I don’t know.

    Basically, if there’s any conclusion to be reached, it seems that in cities with a lot of Mexicans, whites are more likely to get shot and killed by police. This isn’t what I really expected. Though it’s not hard to imagine a lot of poor messed-up whites living in trailer parks in the desert, maybe I watched too much Breaking Bad.

    Any ideas? (Especially ones that aren’t particularly statistically advanced.)

  • Utah shooting of unarmed man justified

    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 was black (and shot by a white officer). There were protests about both shootings (no looting in Utah), but unless you make an effort to follow these things, you’ve probably never heard of Taylor.

    Comparing Taylor and Brown, one person wrote:

    But they are alike in this important way: Neither young man deserved to die that day. Neither Michael Brown nor Dillon Taylor was convicted of a crime related to their activities on their last days, and even if they were, it wouldn’t be a capital crime. And this doesn’t appear to be an uncommon mistake.

    Well leaving aside what “common” means, a police officer does not shoot you because of the crime you did or did not commit. You are justifiably shot because a reasonable police officer believes you to be an imminent and potentially lethal threat

    To be clear, Taylor was not armed (nor was Brown). But Taylor sure doesn’t act like like he’s no threat. Taylor was — and acted like — an armed criminal. Still, knowing only that Taylor did not have a gun when he was shot, anti-police folk went out and filled in their ignorance with their ideology. The inevitable conclusion: police are to blame.

    But comparing the homicide of Taylor and Brown, there is one important difference: the officer who shot Taylor was wearing a body camera! As is usually the case, the video shows exactly what police claimed to have happened. We’ll never for sure what happened in the moments before Brown was shot: Here’s the Taylor shooting:

    The shooting was declared justified. This is maybe not the best shooting, as Taylor was eventually raising his shirt, presumably to show he wasn’t armed. I also can’t see Taylor’s right hand, which could change things. But at some point it seems to me that Taylor is doing the old “life your shirt to show you’re not armed” thing. So it does seem unfortunate to shoot a guy when he finally does comply with “getting his hands out.” But there was a period of non-compliance. And then there sure was a quick move from a concealing waistband. And had Taylor been armed, and I think a reasonable officer had good reason to believe Taylor was armed, then yes, this is a justified shooting.

    There are certain things you have to take on the job: dumb people; dirty people; violent people. But a depressed criminal idiot (perhaps with a death wish), playing “I might have a gun on me” is not one of them. Still, though I’m willing to give the officer on scene the benefit of the doubt, well, like I said, it’s not the best shooting. But yes, I think it is justified.

    Many people don’t realize how many idiots police deal with. As a police officer, more than once I was approached by a kid (always on a bike) who would quickly reach into his waistband and act like he was pulling a gun to shoot me. Honestly, driving toward them, I never had time to react. Also, they were young teenagers. And unarmed. Still, it’s the kind of dumb move that can get you killed.

    And yet when I’ve told seemingly smart people (who are far removed from ghetto policing) that this happened a few times, they stare at me in disbelief. They simply can’t believe that anybody, much less a unarmed young black male, would do something so potentially lethally stupid as pretend to pull a gun out and shoot a cop. And yet that attitude was routine enough that I didn’t even deem it worth mentioning it in my book. It was just some real life FATS training, I suppose.

    It was more common, it might be worth pointing out in this post, for young men to routinely (and without any prompting from me) raise their t-shirts to show they were not armed. That move would baffle ride-alongs.

    [For what it’s worth, I strongly suspect that police who work in violent areas — and though those officers will be involved in more shootings overall — those same officers will shoot fewer unarmed people because those officers are acculturated to a certain level of danger. Those cops who work the tough beat have more experience and less fear. I have no idea how to test this killer hypothesis.]

  • When police-involved shootings aren’t about race

    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 going on in that shooting that to be distracted by the initial stop seems to miss the greater point. I know the vast majority of cops don’t give a damn about your race. And the idea that white people don’t get stopped for seat-belt violations is also demonstrably false. (If you want to download and read a large and rather academic pdf report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the matter, knock yourself out.)

    Bad things do not only happen to black people. Most bad shootings don’t become issues till there’s unrest and/or Al Sharpton raises a fuss. And sometimes, a fuss should be raised. (And the last time the Rev tried to help some poor white guy who claimed he was brutalized by police, well, Sharpton sure picked the wrong white guy.)

    I’ve written a few times times about police killing white people, first on this blog in 2008. And then in 2009 there was the horrible police f*ck-up that resulted in police shooting and killing Rev. Jonathan Ayers. This was never big news. (In fact, to my dismay, my limited account of Ayer’s death seems to be the most extensive on record.)

    I’m not saying race never matters, but cops are not shooting black people because they’re black. Cops are not stopping black drivers for seat-belt violations because they’re black (though police may be searching your car for drugsafter that stop because you’re black). To believe that race is the issue in policing ignores and won’t solve the problem of people of all races who are wrongfully shot (or tased, or maced) by police. The issues have less to with race than with bad training and police officers making bad split-second decisions.

    So here’s a black cop shooting Bobby Dean Canipe, an unarmed white person (and a 70-year-old disabled vet at that).

    Clearly in hindsight this is not a good shooting. It’s a traffic stop and an old guy with a cane. And yet when Canipe gets out of his pick-up truck, on the highway, and I see a long hard object turn toward my face — and keep in mind I’m watching a youtube video and I *know* it’s not going to be a gun — I felt my ass pucker.

    Would a reasonable officer have feared for his or life in that situation? Yeah, potentially, probably, I think so.

    Sure it would have been great if the cop had known it was a cane. It also would have been great if the guy hadn’t gotten out of his truck and reached for his cane.

    A mistake. But I think a reasonable one. I’d let the cop off.

    [Hat tip to a commenter for bring this shooting to my attention.)

  • Race and justifiable police homicides (VII): hispanics

    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 hispanics killed is somewhere between 16 and 33 percent. The census lists 17 percent of Americans as hispanic (which includes all races).

    That’s all I got for now. If you can think of any other question I can answer with the data I have, leave a comment, and I’ll do my best.

  • Race and justifiable police homicides (VI): black police shoot white people, too

    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 and 200 whites each year (both for the past 15 years).

    Like the previous fact, this doesn’t mean much without greater context. But it’s worth pointing out that there aren’t too many black officers working in high-crime white neighborhoods.

    The next and last fact concerns hispanics. Spoiler: the data isn’t good enough.

  • Race and justifiable police homicides (V): black police

    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 data we do have (UCR justified police-involved homicides 1998-2012), 73 percent of those killed by black police are black (which is kind of amazing). For white police officers, 28 percent of those killed are black.

    Put a different way, if you are black and shot by police, the odds are about 1 in 5 you’ll be shot by a black cop. If you’re white and shot by police, there’s less than a 1 in 20 chance your police-officer shooter will be black.

    In these 15 years, 547 black police officers killed 402 blacks and 141 whites. 4,388 white police killed 1,213 blacks and 2,998 whites.

    Also, the officer’s race is “unknown” 10 percent of the time. (n = 535)

    Next question: Do black police shoot and kill white people?

    Update: Additional data were added to this post in January, 2015.

  • Race and justifiable police homicides (IV): On the increase

    Race and justifiable police homicides (IV): On the increase

    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 on flawed data. So it could be indicative or something, or maybe it’s not.

    Meanwhile the trend is for fewer officers to get shot and killed. (If you go back further, like to the 1970s when more than 100 officers were shot and killed each year, the trend is way down.)

    So cops may just be quicker on the draw. Or perhaps too quick on the draw. Or some combination of the two.

    The next post examines if black police are more or less likely to kill people. What do you think?

    As a side note, justifiable killings by civilians have been increasing at an even greater rate over the past 15 years. From 191 in 1998 to 309 in 2012. I would assume (but do not know) that “stand your ground” laws have something to do with this. Also, (surprising to me) the race relationship of those killings have become even more intra-racial (and the greatest increase is seen in justified killings by black).

    [Data on police fatal shootings comes from the Officer Down Memorial Page.]

  • Race and justifiable police homicides (III): one a day

    [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 were black, 63 percent were white). Again, how you want to use or misuse that statistic is up to you. And you need to take it with a large grain of salt. Either at least one person a day needs to be shot to protect somebody from getting killed or seriously hurt. Well, either that or police are cold blooded murderers who fill a one-body-a-day quota in the murder department. I’m more partial to the former explanation…

    But it might be worth mentioning that the combined total for deaths from police shootings in Japan and Britain was… zero. Germany had eight.

    Now ask yourself this: are police-involved killings in the US going up or down. That’s tomorrow’s fact.

    And now, for the nerdy set, some numbers:

    In 2012, police killed a total of 426 people. Of those:

    white men: 267

    black men: 128

    white women: 6

    black women: 4

    “Asian or Pacific Islanders”: 9

    “American Indian or Alaskan Native”: 5

    The rates of justifiable police homicide, are roughly (per 100,000):

    black: 0.33

    Indian/Native American: 0.17

    white: 0.12

    Asian: 0.06

    To put these numbers in some perspective, there were 13,063 total homicides in 2012.

    white men: 4,332

    black men: 5,745

    white women: 1,651

    black women: 858

    Asian men: 160

    Asian women: 82

    Native/Indian men: 72

    Native/Indian women: 22

    The 2012 US homicide rates (per 100,000, and again, roughly):

    black: 16.5

    white: 2.7

    Asian: 1.6

    Indian/Native: 3.2

    One other interesting tidbit, if you’re still with me, is if one looks only at murders in which the killer is known to be a “stranger” (which is just 15 percent of all homicides… and this does not include the larger category of “relationship not determined”). Then the numbers plummet:

    white men: 912

    black men: 812

    white women: 112

    black women: 90

    Asian men: 45

    Asian women: 9

    Native/Indian men: 15

    Native/Indian women: 1

    I mention this because fear and public policy is built so much around the concept of people (I’ll say it: white women) being killed at home or in a robbery by some stranger (I’ll say it again: a black man). And yet there were just 32 such victims in 2012. And 2012 was a high year. 2011 saw just 25 white women killed by black strangers.

    The odds of being killed by a stranger, especially if you’re a woman, are almost infinitesimally small. Though to be fair, they’re still greater than the chance of being killed by lighting or attacked by a shark.

    [Rates are based on these population numbers (which are not cut and dried): white 224 million; black 40 million; Asian 15 million; Native/Indian 3 million. Homicides from the 2012 UCR homicide supplement.]

  • Race and justifiable police homicides (II): white and black

    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 depends on your ideological persuasion. While the percentage of blacks killed by police (1/3) is disproportionately high compared to the percentage of Americans who are black (about 13%), one-third is low compared to other indicators of violence, such as the percentage of homicide victims and offenders who are African American (about 50 percent, give or take).

    Since police-involved shootings correlate with gun violence in the population — and many black communities receive a disproportionate amount of police attention — one might expect the percentage of those killed by police to be closer to (or more than) 50 percent.

    Based on the data, it does not seem that police are particularly trigger-happy around blacks compared to whites. (Though once could still argue that police are too trigger-happy overall.)

    And keep in mind I make mistakes. If something seems fishy about my facts, let me know and I can double check.

    Question for tomorrow’s fact (#3): how many people (per year or per day) do police kill in the US?

    [The source for all police-involved homicides is self-compiled UCR homicide supplements from 1998 to 2012. I’ve selected the value of 81 (“felon killed by police”) for V29 (“Offender 1: circumstance”). I know that not all police departments report to the UCR, so the real numbers may be a bit more. But most police departments — certainly all the big ones — do report to the UCR. And the UCR covers “93.4 percent of the total population as established by the Bureau of Census.” The coverage for justifiable homicides, however, is less complete.]

  • Race and justifiable police homicides (I): Over time

    Back in 2008 I posted about what I called the “Al Sharpton effect”: cops shooting white people doesn’t generally make the news. That post has gotten a lot of hits recently (roughly 2,000 page views a day, when normally my whole blog gets about 700).

    So I’ve re-crunched these numbers, both to make them more current and to look at the past 15 years, from 1998 to 2012. This is fact 1 of 7 (give or take).

    Fact 1: The racial percentage of those killed by police hasn’t changed. In other words, police are not more (or less) likely to shoot and kill blacks than they were 15 years ago. (In more academic terms, there is no correlation between year and race, from 1998 to 2012, selecting for whites and blacks).

    Before I post the next fact, ask yourself this: what percentage of those killed by police do you think are black?

    I ask because because it’s good to know if your “facts” are actually based on reality And if the actual facts don’t coincide with what you think is true, then you need to reconsider your opinions based on lies. Too many people don’t do that.