How The Washington Post & Media Again Perpetuate the Lie About Racial Bias in Police Shootings in Spite of Their Own Data
The Washington Post’s own research indicates MORE than 4 out of 10 cops killed in the line of duty are by black perpetrators and LESS than 4 out of 10 people killed by police while unarmed are black (27.5% so far in 2019). So why doesn’t mainstream media point that out? Why not mention that “unarmed” killings of citizens of any race are anomalies in policing? SHORT ANSWER: Political correctness doesn’t allow for empirical truth.
“Innocent African American civilians are gunned down by white police so frequently that it would be willful blindness to deny a pattern. The circumstances vary, but the fact remains.”
— from The Washington Post’s Unsigned Editorial, October 14, 2019 (“A Senseless Police Shooting in Fort Worth”)
This Washington Post line upset me. It’s so senselessly wrong.
No, Washington Post Editorial Board, it’s not “willful blindness” for those of us who research this topic and find no racial bias in policing outcomes.
Instead, it’s the vast majority in establishment media and The Washington Post that are willfully blind. They wish to play up racism when none exists. And it hasn’t largely existed for years when one simply benchmarks outcomes with police by the behaviors of citizens. When that happens, outcomes — from arrests to use of force to incarceration — maps almost perfectly with actual criminal activity.
So egregious was this latest fatal encounter outcome in Texas that it’s trending #1 on Google and within 48 hours murder charges were directed to the officer involved. Everyone agrees that “wellness checks should not result in death certificates,” as the New York Times quoted a Fort Worth activist saying. But just as upsetting is the continual lie in America that this isn’t anything other than a complete 1 in 5 million aberration. Washington Post data on police shootings so far this year show under 10 unarmed black people killed police (and almost twice as many unarmed white people), and U.S. government records indicate around 50 million Americans interact with police annually.
Yet the drumbeat from CNN to Twitter pounds repeatedly that this is a normal feature of the Black American experience.
Yes, it’s more upsetting to hear about the death of a human by law enforcement who absolutely did nothing to put herself in a situation to be killed. Atatiana Jefferson of Fort Worth, Texas, should be alive today. Soon, millions will know her name, just like dozens of other names of African Americans after a controversial police killing.
But do you ever wonder, as I do, why we hardly ever hear in the news the names of the two-thirds of unarmed persons killed by police that aren’t black. Why haven’t we heard the names of Zachary Hammond, Jeremy Mardis (age 6!), Dillon Taylor, Dylan Noble, or Gilbert Collar? They were all unarmed white teens or children killed by police in recent years, and they’re far from the only ones. Then ask why you instantly know the names of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Philando Castille, Stephon Clark, and Botham Jean (or his infamous, much-loathed shooter, former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger given a 10-year sentence just last week).
All the latter names I typed from memory. That’s how deeply they’ve cut a groove into our recent cultural, social, and political history.
The former names I save on a Google doc to remember, and the “two-thirds” unarmed non-black figure I ran the Washington Post data myself. When I did so, I discovered just around 36% of unarmed people killed 2015–2017 were indeed black. For fatal encounters with police it’s broken down as follows for this three-year span:
- 77 were black and unarmed (36% of the total)
- 211 overall were unarmed (64% are non-black)
- 2913 total were killed (7% unarmed)
I shouldn’t have to do that. That actually should be the job of major media that I’m subscribing to like The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, or The Washington Post to highlight with clarity. And while news of shootings doesn’t have to be 36% — or even 72% — focused on black victims of fatal police encounters, does it really have to be 90–99% of coverage? (I don’t know the exact figures, but I would hazard a guess that for viral news stories about police use of force, that’s close to the social and mainstream media output.)
Many skeptics like myself have long thought: There’s something fishy in how the only outrage tends to come from stories of black victims and white cops. Frustrating also is how statistics, peer-reviewed research, and empirical evidence that subvert the “institutional racism” narrative are sidelined or dismissed every time they’re brought up — and even charges of racism if you’re not fully onboard the Black Lives Matter/The Root/ACLU/NAACP train.
Because when it comes to issues of social justice, political correctness kicks in and certain empirical evidence indicating police may have an anti-white bias in shootings simply cannot be accepted, even if the highly regarded academic who crunched the data happens to be black, such as the infamous case of Dr. Roland Fryer. In academia, the incentives to reactionarily and sensationally refute inconvenient conclusions are pervasive, even with no solid evidence. And so is the blatant careerism, like when Fryer’s critic Phillip Atiba Goff received $5 million in social justice money from Google despite the fact his widely praised (and under-scrutinized) data in 2016 actually does not show systemic racism. When the NAACP is on one side, and Trump and conservatives defending policing is on the other, and social and mainstream media constantly feeds images of black people gunned down by police, which side do you think elites in major cities are going to join?
When one story keeps being said, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, media churns out stories like this October 14 WaPo opinion piece by longtime columnist Eugene Robinson:
“This is a serious question: What can a black person do to keep from getting killed by police in this country?
Driving-while-black has long been potentially a capital offense, as witnessed by the case of Philando Castile, who was shot to death. Driving-while-black got Walter Scott Tasered, but it was running-away-while-black that got him fatally shot in the back. Walking-while-black is what attracted attention to Michael Brown, who was also shot to death. Standing-while-black was enough to get Eric Garner choked to death.
Now it appears that staying-home-while-black is also such a threatening activity that might kill you for it.”
My reaction when reading stories like this is a swift smack to my forehead.
I’d like to think that if an opinion writer is smart enough to work for The Washington Post for three decades that they also could have the intelligence to search his paper’s own database to consider any one of those roughly 200 unarmed non-black persons killed by police since January 2015 are worthy of a mention. Or contextualized, as Glen Loury has done about this unhelpful game of identity politics in the age of Black Lives Matter.
Admittedly, if such intellectual honesty were at play that would end such “outrage articles” immediately. They would either have to write an #AllLivesMatter story rather than a #BlackLivesMatter piece, or they’d have to simply acknowledge 50 or so “bad shootings” out of more than 50 million people interacting with police annually in a country of 320 million — and with just as many guns — is the cost of modern American policing.
The latter is the position I strongly take, understanding that humans are fallible and make mistakes. I’ve seen comments in the past day of friends of friends saying this officer in Texas should receive the death penalty — that’s how deep the hatred for police is today. I have no doubt a large number of cops are thinking, “Yes, this guy fucked up; but I could see myself making a mistake in that 1 in a 1000 times I don’t make the right split-second decision.”
I’ve personally been told by police: They would never sign up for this job again, and they don’t want their children to follow in their footsteps. This was echoed in The Washington Post, as they reported that applications for law enforcement jobs are down across the nation, and morale is a major factor.
Could we be experiencing a brainwashing in America that leads to major problems down the line? If the amount of anti-police sentiment I’ve seen online is any indication, it’s occurring. Major-league columnists are regularly writing “grievance” drivel, ignoring the fact that their own paper’s data on fatal police encounters shows:
- 1 out of 3 “unarmed” deaths are black
- 1 out of 4 “overall” deaths are black
- Way more than 1 out of 3 police killed are at the hands of someone black
- 1 in 2 homicides overall in society are black, and those homicides occur more than 400 times more often than “unarmed” killings by police
The reason that people like me are taking the time to make these charts and come up with accurate figures is two-fold:
- So people can stop freaking the hell out (lower stress, less articles)
- So we may be able to restore trust in our institutions (police and criminal justice) being torn down by the good intentions — I hope they’re good intentions — of the American Left (we sure hate it when Trump does it coming from the American Right)
Sensationalist, Flawed Sociology Studies the Media Loves
Instead, we get legendary newspapers like the Los Angeles Times in recent months running the following click-bait headline promoting a sensationalist sociology study: “Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America.” Apparently, the editors and study author neglected to catch the CDC data that’s made the rounds indicating a three-fold decrease in the rate of police killings of African Americans since the 1970s. They also omit overall crime rates that throw a monkey wrench into the narrative. Neither the Los Angeles Times nor the paper mention that being killed by police is a distant #7 on the list of death outcomes, which is the farthest thing from a “leading cause of death for young black men.”
That article refers to this August 2019 study by Rutgers sociologist Frank Edwards that says the following: “Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.”
What they don’t say is that for black young men age 15–34, being murdered is the #1 cause of death. They don’t rank causes of deaths for whites and compare to the causes of deaths for blacks. If they did, they would have to publish the inconvenient fact that for young white men homicide is the #3 cause of death, after suicide and unintentional injuries. They don’t mention there are 40 black homicides at the hands of citizens for for every 1 black homicide by law enforcement. Comparatively for whites, that ratio is 12:1. That discovery prompted me to make a colorful graphic. Isn’t that vastly more relevant than spouting this simplistic factoid, “1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police”?
In short, they point out a manipulative “truth,” that may not be very important at all. In fact, young black men are just about as likely to die from HIV (accounting for 1–3% of deaths in that age group) than by police.
At best (or worst), “death-by-cop” is a distant #7 cause of death for young black men. This is yet another essential fact I had to find out on my own because it was omitted from the academic and media record.
Clues of Possible Media and Government Anti-White Bias?
I have a simple idea. Maybe major media can make a complete list of police charged with crimes for their use of force, similar to the partial list the Associated Press ran last July and updated after the Forth Worth shooting, which once I dug down I noticed it mostly focuses on police being charged in the fatal shootings of black people. This indicates that what’s needed to honestly assess the problem is an all-encompassing database or list, similar to what Mother Jones did with mass shootings. In the end, there are three essential categories to filter:
- The race of the person killed by the charged officer
- The race of the officer facing criminal charges
- Whether the person shot was “unarmed” and “not aggressing”
I have a strong hunch that the total share of police charged is closer to two-thirds connected to a black person shot or severely injured, even though black Americans are only one-third of persons killed while unarmed. This I will call “The Squeaky Wheel Hypothesis,” as it may be true black families are getting the justice grease by being the loudest. I also would guess that if media uncovers results that indicate an anti-white “justice” bias, they won’t run the story or will spin it in some other way. Because the narrative has already been set: It’s blacks not receiving justice, and it’s an “epidemic” of unarmed blacks being killed by police, not whites. (The “Intellectual Dark Web” outlet Quillette appears brave enough to stand up to this madness and say, “Don’t Blame Police Racism for America’s Violence Epidemic.”)
I ran a quick analysis of that Associated Press list, and these are the results:
- The Associated Press lists 16 cases of ONLY black victims
- 13 of the 16 were killed by white police officers (81%)
These are so obviously hand-picked to create a narrative, especially as shown earlier 36% of unarmed people killed 2015–2017 were black. It’s likely that political correctness is playing a part of increasing the likelihood of charges being brought if the victim is black, too. The shootings of Daniel Shaver of Arizona and Justine Damond of Australia (visiting Minnesota and engaged to an American) are arguably the only police killings of white persons that garnered a significant national profile the last five years. If activists and Democrats are calling out for “justice,” where’s the “justice” for a large chunk of those non-black unarmed fatalities — which number about 200 over a three-year period — at the hands of police?
Also, if I was editor at one of these papers, I would do the same deep-dive on payouts from use-of-force and see if it’s more likely if black victims or white victims get more money. I’d spend time finding out if larger cities or smaller cities pay out higher amounts of settlement cash. If one city is paying five times more per capita than another city, but has no rate difference in use of force, then corruption is likely occurring.
The one time I tried to bring this to the attention of a Chicago Tribune journalist, Dan Hinkle, when he wrote about costly police misconduct settlements he immediately blocked me on Twitter. I actually didn’t think I was very prickly; I was simply asking some hard questions as a fellow Chicagoan and subscriber. I could sense the anti-police bias in his work, if not something more sinister — the unwillingness to even answer for or look at the obvious. I frankly wondered and asked how the city is paying even greater sums, especially when police shootings and arrests have dropped in half in recent years. I want to ask: Is former Chicago police commander Jon Burge — who has a terrible history of torture and abuse — the Golden Goose that keeps on giving in the Wrongful Convictions Sweepstakes and why?
That’s what news outlets are supposed to do: Research, investigate, and print the relevant facts. Listen to their audience. But they don’t do that anymore. It’s simply becoming by all appearances a social justice dance.
What they do instead is cherry-pick their narratives by looking only at cases of black people where no convictions took place, like the New York Times did in 2018 with this headline: “15 Black Lives Ended in Confrontations With Police. 3 Officers Convicted.”
What they should have done is look at 15 cases of white victims of police violence and compare. If they can find them. The fraught question is: Are there even 15 of such cases?
The point is simple: If there’s more unarmed killings of whites every year since 2015 compared to blacks, there has to be at least as many troubling cases out there of white people being killed, right? Is it because those non-Hispanic white communities don’t spark the same outrage?
These are all things legacy media could do, but they don’t. They simply follow Twitter and Facebook.
“We’re beyond anger. It’s trauma now. It’s unaddressed, toxic stress.” — quote in The New York Times
A Third Washington Post Opinion Piece — Just In Case You Missed The Point
What is also never said in the media whenever a black person is killed by a police officer, even by like The Washington Post who have the stats and figures within their own website archives, is that killings of innocent unarmed Americans — black or white — are a complete anomaly in law enforcement. What we hear instead is a random accounting of shootings by police with no context or statistical breakdowns — city-to-city or year-to-year comparisons, for instance— and quotes in The New York Times by black activists saying, “We’re beyond anger. It’s trauma now. It’s unaddressed, toxic stress.”
We even get Washington Post’s own executive assistant to the editorial board tasked to push feeling over fact on October 14:
“I do not need to see another young, innocent black person being murdered for no reason other than they are black. I don’t need to see the video to know that the color of their skin automatically labeled them a threat — as someone or something to be feared. As I discussed following the Guyger verdict, we have seen this before. Though the circumstances have shifted slightly, they do not change the fact that a black person was killed in their own home by a police officer.
My colleague Jonathan Capehart had a similar reaction to a police-involved shooting that happened in his neighborhood in 2016. Unlike Jonathan, it’s not numbness that I feel. My avoidance of the video is deliberate. It is a small bit of self-care that I need to go on living and interacting with the world around me: as a mother, wife, sister, aunt, friend, colleague and black woman in America. This is self-preservation.
Studies have shown that police killings have adverse effects on the mental health of black Americans. It goes to a total loss of security that most people take for granted…
Stop. Just stop.
If you’re going to tell us that the mental health of black Americans is strained due perceptions or realities of violence by police, what could possibly be an answer? Perhaps presenting statistical proof that police aren’t systemically biased in killing them in the first place might alleviate the “toxic stress.”
What is likely occurring, and a few studies do indicate this counterintuitive phenomenon, is there are many unknown times police show significant restraint against black suspects — more often than they do against white suspects in the same scenarios.
Yes, there’s likely an anti-white bias in police shootings.
Of course, one doesn’t need a PhD to see the obvious from easily found data.
The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote that this “is an all-too familiar equation” of having a victim that is black and an officer that is white.
Actually, the equation says otherwise.
Peer-reviewed science says there’s no “pattern” of anti-black racial bias in fatal shootings, and a negligible difference in other uses of force.
Indeed, several studies do explicitly say there may be an anti-white bias at play as we average all police shootings rather than fixate on selective outrage and interpret law enforcement motives in the least favorable light. One recent peer-reviewed study in the Social Psychological and Personality Science found “a consistent anti-White pattern exists when benchmarking on weapons violation data.” Authors Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and William Terrill discovered after rigorous analysis: “Overall, the data provide little evidence of systematic anti-Black disparity in officers’ decisions to shoot unarmed, nonaggressing citizens. Officers either showed no meaningful disparity in either direction or, if anything, an overall pattern of anti-White disparity.”
Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s infamous study that’s still set to be published found that “Blacks are 27.4% less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics.”
Why Are Non-Black Bodies Erased from the Narrative?
If I go to Washington Post’s Fatal Force website for 2019 and I see the “unarmed” section, there are 13 white, 8 black, and 5 Hispanic (and 3 “other”) out of 29 instances where the race is known. That’s 27.5% black. Why are there no news stories on the other 72.5%? If you look at other years, it’s the same, too. Two-thirds of “unarmed” killings are non-black going back to at least 2015, and “unarmed” killings represent just more than 5% of the total.
Oh, but blacks are 13% of the population, right? OK, let’s go look at who kills cops, which can actually be found on The Washington Post’s own website. Yup, 43% of cop killers are black. Wait, but they’re not 13% of the population. That’s true. And thus, that’s why this article is all-but-forgotten in the context of fatal outcomes between police and citizenry. It completely upends the dominant narrative, which the Washington Post unequivocally supports editorially.
Additionally:
- 1 in 435 black homicides are by a cop when unarmed and not aggressing (23 out of 10,000)
- 1 in 175 white homicides are by a cop when unarmed and not aggressing (34 out of 6,000)
Let’s see that as a visual, so things are nice and sparkling clear:
Where those 23 and 34 unarmed deaths of blacks and whites, respectively, are shown:
The bigger picture is clear: Recent data on murderers in society: 53.1% of murder arrest in 2017 were black, and studies show blacks are LESS likely to be arrested for murder, robbery or assault compared to whites.
We are now living in a “feelings” world and not a “fact based” world. Are the feelings around these high profile killings erupting from anti-police animus?
It’s the same stupidity, for lack of a better word, when you have national articles like this USA Today piece about black Americans needing guns to protect themselves from “angry white mobs,” “oppressive police,” and “structural racism,” as well as threats from “white nationalism” and “domestic terrorism”:
NBC News pretty much said the same in May 2017, saying black people are buying guns to potentially defend against “emboldened white supremacists”:
When I read those stories, I just recall a simple homicide data table put out annually by the FBI and ignored by everyone but race realists and outright racists [no link to them, because they can kiss off]. It shows that twice as many whites are killed by blacks than vice versa, and it’s been like this every year since 1980 when the U.S. Justice Department last reported it, and likely long before.
Yet, if it were reported in the news, the racists would have no oxygen. There would be no forbidden knowledge to “red pill” people. People would just know it, accept it, and hopefully pull together as a country as a problem to fix the root causes of such awful disparities.
In Conclusion: “We Need the Sensible”
We are asking police to make split-second decisions, but there’s little understanding or empathy, ironically, that cops are humans and make mistakes. People often say, “These shootings should never happen,” and they’re right that they shouldn’t. But because law enforcement aren’t robots, and we have a country with a gun for every man, woman, and child, they will.
How we react is up to us.
What about the trends? Murder rose 20% from 2014 to 2016, resulting in approximately 3,000 more deaths annually using FBI figures (slightly more if using CDC numbers). Murders fell 6% in 2018. From 2015 to 2018, police killings have largely stayed the same, according to The Washington Post, despite a massive increase in police cameras and public scrutiny. That may change in 2019, as they’re on pace to be reduced 10% this year, resulting in around 90 fewer deaths. Fatal killings of police are also down. *
3,000 more killed (50% black) vs. 90 less killed (25% black). *
But what would we rather have?
And are they connected?
In the age of Black Lives Matter, where the entire focus resides on the handful of unarmed black people killed, with almost no attention paid to others killed on a national scale, these are fundamental questions. Myopia is not an option.
In states like California, bills are already being considered that may reduce police use of force incidents some. They’re also likely to put police officer’s lives in danger, as firearm assaults on law enforcement increased 25% in California from 2016 to 2017. FBI records show more than 2,400 firearm assaults against law enforcement annually: “57,180 officers were victims of line-of-duty assaults … firearms [are] 4.2 percent of incidents.” With a dangerous job being made more dangerous, with progressive gaslighting that claims it’s not, who’s going to want to join?
For us together as a society to turn the tables, journalists, thinkers and leaders have to truly reevaluate the question: “Is law enforcement over-policing? Are they racially biased?” Not according to several studies that use survey data to compare and don’t hyper-focus on “drug arrest” stats, which are a small percentage of overall arrests anyway, yet are constantly brought up as a driver of “mass incarceration” and interactions with the criminal justice system.
We need something new. We need the sensible. And we need it now.
5 STUDIES SHOWING NO RACIAL BIAS IN SHOOTINGS (And there’s many more):
#1 — “We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers. Instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. This suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings.”
SOURCE: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/16/1903856116 (PNAS peer-reviewed study by David J. Johnson, Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario)
RELATED STORY: https://theconversation.com/our-database-of-police-officers-who-shoot-citizens-reveals-whos-most-likely-to-shoot-119623
REBUTTAL TO CRITICS, INC. PHILLIP ATIBA GOFF WHO GAVE FALSE TESTIMONY TO CONGRESS SEPTEMBER 19 (My draft article here):
https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias
AUTHORS DEFENSE TO CRITICS (say there’s no racial bias and the academy fights tooth and nail): https://psyarxiv.com/dmhpu
#2 — “We find little evidence within these data for systematic anti-Black disparity in fatal police deadly force decisions.” And also: “Overall, the data provide little evidence of systematic anti-Black disparity in officers’ decisions to shoot unarmed, nonaggressing citizens. Officers either showed no meaningful disparity in either direction or, if anything, an overall pattern of anti-White disparity.”
SOURCE: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108
(Social Psychological and Personality Science peer-reviewed study by Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and William Terrill)
FULL PAPER: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_a5fc6189326849fab031bc3fedae7c3d.pdf
ALSO: Author’s earlier analysis: https://www.cesariolab.com/race-bias-in-shooting
“Blacks are under-arrested given their rate of reported crime.”
SOURCE (Supplemental Material #2:): https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b44013_23920f7547cc4b019b3aa915cf7e18de.pdf
#3 — Economist professor Roland Fryer at Harvard: “Blacks are 27.4% less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics.”
SOURCE: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/fryer_police_aer.pdf
https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications (to be published in late 2019 or 2020, as I was told there’s a backlog at the Journal of Political Economy)
#5 — College of William and Mary Department of Economics and the Crime Prevention Research Center: “When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect … Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects found no differences with respect to the races of police officers.”
SOURCE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=287018 (SSRN Electronic Journal study by John R. Lott and Carlisle E. Moody)
#5— Research at Washington State University focused on how police reaction times in shootings may be disadvantageous to white people even if the officer have implicit bias against black people (“The Reverse Racism Effect”): “We found that, despite clear evidence of implicit bias against Black suspects, officers were slower to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White suspects, and they were less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects. These findings challenge the assumption that implicit racial bias affects police behavior in deadly encounters with Black suspects.”
SOURCE: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12187/abstract (Criminology & Public Policy peer-reviewed study by Lois James, Stephen M. James, and Bryan J. Vila)
SOURCES FOR ABOVE GRAPHIC:
2011–2015 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics show declining citizen interactions with police and whites were more likely to have police contact. Blacks are 27% of arrests (37.5% for violent crime) but around 25% of those fatally shot.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/tables/table-43 (53.1% of murder arrests are black)
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6406 (“Whites (23%) were more likely than blacks (20%) or Hispanics (17%) to have contact with police.”)
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/cpp15pr.cfm (“The number of residents who had experienced contact with police dropped by more than 9 million people, from 62.9 million to 53.5 million during the period.”)
23 blacks and 34 whites were killed by police gunfire and categorized as “unarmed and not aggressing” using The Guardian data in the June 2018 peer-reviewed study, “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016.”
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
ADDENDUM
The graphic meme that bookends this article specifically used the word “executing” before “black people” because the sentiment that police are cold-hearted killers is dominant on social media right now. But I wanted to find a mainstream news outlet. Guess where I found it within minutes? The Washington Post! I know I’ve written that WaPo hosts 1,200 stories, graphics, and videos per day, but this fourth (!!) Atatiana Jefferson op-ed from them I’m using here says it all:
Early Saturday in Fort Worth, a white police officer executed a young black woman, Atatiana Jefferson, in her own home.
And guess who said those words? Will Jawando, a Democrat and at-large member of the Montgomery County Council, who Tweets and writes about his fears of not protecting his daughters from police. Someone should tell him only six unarmed black women — and many more white women than that — have been killed by U.S. police in the past five years, Jefferson being the only one this year. And for the record: He can find that in The Washington Post.
I think he needs a polite graphic meme in his comments. Any takers?