Steve, thanks for responding with 100% accurate statistics. I can’t tell you how rare that is, even when reading the comments in the original Washington Post piece — racists far-too-often inflate stats, and head-in-sand liberals will call them meaningless or outright lies propagated by White Supremacy.
How did you get the breakout for race AND males from the Washington Post police shooting totals? (I can imagine you did some back-of-the-napkin math, and broke out down.) I can’t tell you how long it took me to figure out specific demographic breakdowns in the morass of government statistics, which often include “Hispanics” with the “white” group, and other statistics such as The Guardian or The Washington Post.
I also “don’t get” either why the media doesn’t report criminal context and rush out to inflame readers by saying how 13% of the black population (or 6% that is black and male) is dying at the hands of police nearly 25% of the time.
Click below to learn about how 90% of Hispanic crime is included in the “white” column for FBI statistics, and a few key facts:
- For every 1 black person killed by police, there are another 31 blacks killed by a black person.
- For every 1 white person killed by police, there are another 7 whites killed by a white person.
The real answer as to why media doesn’t report this is a form of political correctness, there’s really no way around it. I call it “The New Correctness” when it gets extreme, but when Trump is elected and more than 3000 additional people are killed over a two year period (my analysis, supported by verified stats), I think this mindset is outright detrimental to the nation. Please feel free to check out my write-up here, too.
You’ll hear the updated homicide totals one of these months, and go, “But no one warned us it was getting this bad.” Trump did, even when getting it wrong and saying it is the worst period for homicides in 47 years. No, it’s just the largest one-year spike in homicides in 45 years, which Trump was correct in saying. But no one wants to discuss it because then we would have to talk about black-on-black violence and pockets of criminality, likely emboldened in today’s anti-cop environment, and that’s not politically correct.
Or check out my analysis of lethal use of force by police and the Roland Fryer study.
Large excerpt, but pertains to the last paragraph of my original post:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown a dramatic downward trend from 1968–1969 to 2010–2011 for African Americans, but not for the category “All Other Races.”
I have yet to discover other news or academic articles compare these data sets.
Black conservative Larry Elder makes this powerful point, and citing CDC data, one of the more trusted U.S agencies, he asks, “So what’s driving this notion that there is now an ‘epidemic’ of white cops shooting blacks when in the last several decades the numbers of blacks killed by cops are down nearly 75 percent?” Good question. According to the CDC data, the rate for all other racial groups have remained the same, or even went up slightly. Indeed, it’s noteworthy that the liberal anti-incarceration group Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) refers to the same CDC data and chart (see above) showing the rate of black people killed by law enforcement is more than three times less than 40–50 years ago. (Nov 2017 Update: It’s quite possible the reputable Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice were the ones who first compiled the data and made the chart “Rate of Police Killings, African Americans vs. All Other Ages/Races” in 2014, after an image search for “compressed mortality file 1968–2011 CDC” and many other fact-finding attempts yielded no CDC report — though there are CDC tools to generate them for recent years. However, Larry Elder refers directly to CDC reports, ignoring the CJCJ. Regardless, my point is simple: Left-leaning and right-leaning sources are trumpeting the same data and chart without dispute.)
Yet facts like these are largely ignored and almost never mentioned in mainstream news reports. In the age of “viral videos,” the “isolated instance” of police violence gets twisted into an epidemic — and nearly exclusively happening to people of color. That’s not true. Especially knowing that two out of four people killed by police are white, and less than 10% of all people killed were unarmed — and some of those police-fighting “unarmed” assailants were still lethally dangerous. (Why? Because fighting a police officer who has a gun can turn mortally dangerous under specific circumstances, like when knocking unconscious an armed police officer in a fight. Last one to get the gun is a rotten egg, and likely dead.)
When cries of racism pop up, maybe it can be be pointed out that nearly 80% of the people black officers kill are black when blacks comprise 25% overall deaths by all officers. Indeed, black cops shoot their guns 3.3 times more often than their counterparts according to a 2015 University of Pennsylvania Department of Criminology statistical study — again, a reflection of the dangerous areas they serve more than any other factor. This indisputably counters the narrative that it’s white police officers using lethal force against black and brown people disproportionately compared to their peers. In fact, the University of Pennsylvania study by criminologist Greg Ridgeway says point-blank that while diversifying police ranks adds legitimacy, “Recent research suggests diversity does not make officers safer and this research does not suggest diversity will reduce the risk of police shootings.”