Black or white: who is most often killed by US police

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Last Sunday in the United States three policemen were killed in the city of Baton Rouge. The attack in Louisiana happened 10 days after five cops were shot in Dallas, Texas.

Both tragic incidents were believed to be an act of revenge by the white police for the death of young black men, after which President Barack Obama appealed to the population several times and attended a memorial service for the policemen killed in Dallas.

“There is a widespread belief among Americans, and particularly among law enforcement officials, that police officers are having a harder time doing their job, are experiencing more violence and are more likely to die than in the past,” says Seph Stofton, a former police officer and now a university law professor. South Carolina. “Many people are sure of this, people believe it, but if you look at the numbers, they show something else.”

FBI data on police officers killed intentionally, that is, as a result of unlawful acts, shows that the number is declining. Over a 10-year period from 2006 to 2015, the number of police deaths was almost 50 per year, which Stofton points out is much lower than previously.

At the start of 80, each year, on average, 115 police died at the hands of killers. At the same time, the number of police officers in the United States has dramatically increased over the past period. Now, there are thousands more 250 people in the police ranks than they were 30 years ago. Therefore, if you count the number of dead policemen on 100 thousand people, this figure will be significantly lower than before. A more general trend indicates that the number of crimes committed, including murder, is steadily decreasing.

Police victims

Official statistics on the number of citizens killed by the police themselves are surprisingly inadequate and unreliable. The main source of this kind of information are the newspapers, not the law enforcement agencies themselves. Despite the fact that the FBI collects all information about police operations with a fatal outcome, the police are not obliged to provide them, and only some units do so.

“We can’t make reliable conclusions because we don’t have the data,” FBI Director James Comey said in an October 2015 speech to the US House of Representatives.

There are data on how many people went to the movies last weekend, or how many books were bought, or how many people went to the doctor with flu symptoms, but I can't tell you how many people were killed by police in the United States last month. last year, as did their demographics, and that’s too bad.”

These circumstances led the Washington Post to collect data on civilian deaths after a black man, Michael Brown, was shot dead by police in Ferguson in August 2014.

“We looked at the official FBI database, because it is a government source, and saw that over the last 10 years the average number of such cases [fatal police shootings] was 400. And by the end of last year, we ourselves counted almost 1 thousand cases of such killings "says Kimberly Kindey, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post.

According to Kindi, 2016 is not yet behind the last year in these statistics - there is even an increase of 6% when comparing the first half of the year. Every day, approximately 3 people die at the hands of police.

Race

Washington Post journalists also collected information about the race of people killed by police. According to Kimberly Kindey, half of those killed were white, the other half were representatives of national minorities. However, if you adjust for the percentage, it turns out that more representatives of the “non-white” part of the US population die.

This is particularly noticeable in the case of the black population. African Americans make up only 13% of the current US population, but they make up 26% of all those killed at the hands of the police.

“Black people are shot [by police] 2,5 times more often than white people,” Kindy said.

At the same time, almost 50% of court-sentenced killers in the US are African Americans. It turns out that African Americans are more likely to become involved in violent crimes as both victims and perpetrators.

The problem, however, is that raw statistics cannot tell whether African Americans are treated differently by police in the United States than whites. To do this, it is necessary to consider each individual incident and what exactly happened in it. It is one thing for someone to shoot at police, and another for someone to offer no resistance and not be armed.

Harvard University economist Roland Fryer is the first African American to receive the prestigious John Bates Clark Economics Award. In July, Fryer released preliminary data from a study showing that blacks and Latinos are significantly more likely to experience police violence—being held at gunpoint, handcuffed without being arrested, or pepper sprayed or batoned.

However, the scientist did not find any racial differences in cases where the police opened fire on someone to kill.