Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police? Yes, but no.

[IronLionZion]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.da319056935a


Dylan Noble died on the last Saturday of June.

Police in Fresno, Calif., received a report of a man walking a downtown street with a rifle, but when they arrived, they instead found Noble speeding by in his pickup truck.

When they tried to pull him over, the 19-year-old led police to a nearby gas station and then exited his car.

“The driver then turned towards officers with one hand concealed behind his back, and told officers he hated his life,” the Fresno police department said in a statement. “As he continued to advance towards officers, an officer-involved shooting occurred.”

The department framed it as a “suicide by cop.” His family insisted that could not be the case, urged federal officials to investigate and demanded that video from the body cameras worn by both officers involved be released.

“I am outraged that the police would shoot my son and say that it is his fault,” Veronica Nelson, Noble’s mother, told reporters at a news conference not long after the shooting. “So please join me as I’m demanding justice for Dylan.”

Noble’s friends and family gathered for days at the gas station parking lot where he was killed — some waving Confederate flags and others chanting, “White lives matter.”

And soon, they were angry at their inability to garner more attention. At a time when dozens of police killings have prompted outrage, why hadn’t this one? Was it because Noble was white?

It can happen to you too. White skin isn't bulletproof.

The money shot:

Once again, while in raw number there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population.

For lurking freepers:

According to FBI numbers from 2014, about 90 percent of black homicide victims were killed by other black people. The “white-on-white” murder rate that same year — homicides in which a white person was killed by another white person — was 82 percent of all murders of white people.

[angstlessk]

1. RE: "for lurking freepers"...

90% to 82%...that means white people kill more people of color than black people kill white people...by 8%...not sure how population is configured in that number?

[TeddyR]

8. I think that's right

But the math is probably beyond me. According to the story, blacks are responsible for about 57% of murders, but 90% of those are "black on black" murders. At the same time, 82% of murders in which a white person was killed involved a white murderer, but whites committed fewer murders overall (I didn't see anything in the story that identified the percentage of murders committed by whites). But basically people largely tend to kill people of their own race.

[Kang Colby]

11. Not exactly.

Your conclusion is reversed.

90% of black folks are killed by other black folks - leaving 10% of black victims killed by other races.

82% of white folks are killed by other white folks - leaving 18% of white victims killed by other races.

18% > 10%, thus as a percentage whites are more often killed by other races than are black folks.

However, the original point is still valid. The overwhelming majority of murders are intra-racial.

[nolabels]

2. Sounds like a how often do you beat your wife question

Any comment about even one word of the question is controversial and puts one at a disadvantage in any conversation.

It's really only a question of who is hunting who and for what purpose. And brains are wired both ways for being adversarial or contributing in any process. If we would just stop trying get a leg up on everybody else (maybe just sometimes even) we would find life a lot more sweet and easy to get along with.

Yea, we should be outraged but we should have been outraged for the rest of the last five hundred years also.

Now we can see it and share it with others because we have pictures and text that doesn't need paper or film. Adjusting to our new technology takes time but i also hope it gets to slay such dragons too.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. The Counted- Guradian UK

What is The Counted?

The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015 and 2016, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

So very much information. Raw numbers, proportionate to population stats, State by State, and a list of everyone killed by police....ultra useful site.

[malthaussen]

4. Somehow lost in all the discussion of body counts...

... is the concept that maybe the police should just stop killing people.

-- Mal

[IronLionZion]

5. oversimplifying the issue

I want the killing of good people to stop too. But bad people exist.

[TeddyR]

9. Yep

People sometimes argue that the fact that the police killed almost 1,000 people last year is inherently bad, but the WaPo did a study that showed the vast majority of those shooting incidents involved situations where the shooting victim was actively trying to harm the police or someone else. The challenge is eliminating the instances when the police wrongly shoot someone.

[grossproffit]

10. Thanks for the dose of reality. This was extremely painful to watch.

[Hoyt]

12. Rather sobering. We have to find a better way to handle these situations to protect everyone.

[snooper2]

13. bomb wielding robots...

Send robot to car with 360 degree cameras...

Drop your weapons and get on the ground or We will detonate together!

[uponit7771]

7. Or ... or people are ignoring the proportionality issues just to be assholes? tia

[Igel]

17. But there's the "money shot" from the OP.

Minus all the bad guys who are shot and there's still more blacks killed by cops than you'd expect given the rate for whites killed.

But that's a small number. If you're body-typical, you could probably count the unarmed excess black deaths on your appendages.

It's larger including the "excess" armed black death toll at the hands of the police. But dwarfed by the otherwise "good people" we must ignore who are intraracially murdered.

They are different problems. But the disproportionality is similar for the dead-by-cop and dead-by-civilian groups, and that's distressing. It's almost like the entire society has decided to devalue black lives, both white and black and police populations. That's a conclusion that's not easy to substantiate, though, whatever the surface numbers might be.

It completely squashes the "we have to have just black police in black neighborhoods" kind of argument, though. That's just separatists being separatists.

[uponit7771]

6. That's the faux news meme they keep repeating to obscure the context of proportionality in the

... shooting numbers.

Black are 3 time more likely to be shot...

[heaven05]

14. the distraction, diminishment

and just plain obfuscation has always been the go to of the "see, black people are worse than white people" group. Black lives don't matter to that group. No numbers will ever stop their bullshit. America has always been racist with a few years of respite, 64-68 for me, and then it was back to business as usual. Nixon-Atwater 'Southern Stategy' that has spawned Donald and his chumps. America, to me, will remain hopelessly racist and violent till the end of time. All I can do is speak up as an individual when white racism rears it's ugly head, every time.

[Albertoo]

15. Proportionality cuts both ways

See comment #6: " According to the story, blacks are responsible for about 57% of murders"

So everything can't just be boiling down to racism.

[uponit7771]

18. And blacks are 70% of the exonerations, white supremacist use any kind of data and techinically

... the 3 time a likely is compared against white so it CAN NOT cut both ways.

I don't know where people are getting their information from but FAUX news is NOT a credible source, that's the only place I hear this shit touted.

[Albertoo]

20. I don't know: I will have to try watching Fox News one day?

[Igel]

16. That's misquoted.

Yes, for a specific age group police kill about 3x as many blacks as they do whites.

For that age group. I think it was 15-19. That group is more black than the overall population because white fertility was lower than black fertility for those years.

It ignores that criminal behavior is likely to be different for that group--higher, across the board. But that's where drugs and gangs tend to concentrate their effort. Yes, there are gangs and drugs in other groups. The goal is understanding, not disrespecting.

It ignores interaction frequency and style. Heck, even in my school district the average black will run into school cops more often than the average white. Why? Because the mostly black school has a lot more assaults, weapons reported by teachers, etc., etc., than the mostly white school. Blame it on income, blame it on culture, blame it on racism, blame it on parents demanding that their kids be kept safe, that's just how it goes. The mostly-black-school students go through metal detectors in the morning and that school has more cops on duty than the mostly white school. At the mostly white school, a hefty percentage of the kids think the cops are great and they had a small going-away party when one, who was openly gay, by the way, transferred to a different school; at the mostly black school they treat the cops like enemies.

Stats make horrible defensive tactics. The first thing you need to do is understand what goes into them, what the assumptions are, what the problems are with them. You have to look at the actual numbers behind the stats, when the actual numbers also have problems and things to understand. We quote them like they're magic talismans to ward off the evil eye.

[uponit7771]

19. That's not misquoted, there a many stats that show that relative to our population young black

... men are 21 more times more likely to be shot by cops... and Latinos 18 more times more likely.

Even black cops are extolling their fear of being black while in America, I don't know why the picking of nits when it comes to these stats.