Police kill more whites than blacks, but minority deaths generate more outrage
Analysis contradicts widespread views about racial targets
By Valerie Richardson
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
The Washington Times
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison says she wants to see an officer shoot an unarmed white teenager in the back before agreeing that the "conversation about race" is over, but she almost certainly already has received her wish.
An analysis released last week shows that more white people died at the hands of law enforcement than those of any other race in the last two years, even as the Justice Department, social-justice groups and media coverage focus on black victims of police force.
"People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race,'" Ms. Morrison told the (U.K.) Telegraph in an April 19 interview.
"This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back," said Ms. Morrison, who also has won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, which includes the bestsellers "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon." "And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, 'Is it over?', I will say yes."
[No, she won’t. She’s just posturing. But she’s given herself away.]
Her comments reflect a widespread view [by whom?] that blacks are routinely targeted by law enforcement while whites shot by police are a rarity. Outrage has surged in recent weeks over the high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of police, notably 50-year-old Walter Scott of South Carolina, who was shot in the back and killed April 4 as he tried to run away from an officer after a traffic stop.
The officer who shot him, Michael Slager, has been charged with murder, and the Justice Department is investigating the case for civil rights violations. Department officials announced Tuesday that they have opened a federal probe into the death of Freddie Gray, 25, who died Sunday from injuries sustained while in Baltimore police custody.
Meanwhile, the deaths of whites at the hands of law enforcement typically receive less attention, even when the case is shrouded in controversy. For example, Gilbert Collar, an 18-year-old white student at the University of South Alabama, was shot and killed while naked, unarmed and under the influence of drugs by a black police officer.
The officer, Trevis Austin, was cleared of wrongdoing in 2013 by a Mobile County grand jury in a case that received little media coverage outside Alabama. Mr. Collar's parents filed a federal lawsuit last year against the officer.
As researchers are quick to point out, FBI data on police shootings by race is notoriously incomplete, which may explain why Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, decided to use figures from the website Killed by Police.
Based on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races.
His results, posted last week on his blog Cop in the Hood, arrived with several caveats, notably that 25 percent of the website's data, which is drawn largely from news reports, failed to show the race of the person killed.
Killed by Police lists every death, justified or not, including those in which the officer had been wounded or acted in self-defense.
"The data doesn't indicate which shootings are justified (the vast majority) and which are cold-blooded murder (not many, but some). And maybe that would vary by race. I don't know, but I doubt it," Mr. Moskos said on his blog.
Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.
"If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks," said Mr. Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and author of the book "Cop in the Hood."
"Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police," he said. "Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police."
Mr. Moskos listed two possible reasons for the racial disparity. The first is that police assigned to largely black neighborhoods face "more political fallout when they shoot, and thus receive better training and are less inclined to shoot."
The second is that police assigned to black communities with high crime rates are more accustomed to dangerous situations and thus are more likely to be able to resolve them without resort to lethal force.
Figures on police shootings by race are thin on the ground, but Mr. Moskos's results have some support: The investigative journalism website ProPublica came up with a similar percentage in an Oct. 10 article, reporting that 44 percent of all those killed by police were white, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012.
The fact-checking website PolitiFact concluded in August 2014 that police kill more whites than blacks after the claim was made by conservative commentator Michael Medved. PolitiFact cited data from the Centers for Disease Control on fatal injuries by "legal intervention" from 1999 to 2011.
"Over the span of more than a decade, 2,151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks. In that respect, Medved is correct," said PolitiFact.
But PolitiFact gave his assertion a "half true" rating because whites make up 63 percent of the population, while blacks make up just 12 percent.
"Yes, more whites than blacks die as a result of an encounter with police, but whites also represent a much bigger chunk of the total population," PolitiFact said in its Aug. 21 post.
But PolitiFact did not take into account the percentage of those by race involved in violent crime or shootings of police, as Mr. Moskos did.
Despite the recent flood of media coverage involving police shootings, Mr. Moskos advised his readers to "keep all this morbidity in perspective," reminding them that very few people, white or black, will ever be shot or killed by police.
"The odds that any given black man will shoot and kill a police officer in any given year is slim to none, about one in a million. The odds for any given white man? One in four million," he said. "The odds that a black man will be shot and killed by a police officer is about 1 in 60,000. For a white man those odds are 1 in 200,000."
Each day the hyper-violence and violent rhetoric from negroes increases. Where is it going? Will all the nation's non-negroes just quietly wait for their beatings and dispossession? We find ourselves back in the 1960's, only after having spent 11 trillion dollars "helping" negroes for the past 50 years. It's all quite nightmarish, a country's future squandered on people who should be far away, struggling with hyenas on a plain in Africa.
ReplyDeleteBlacks want top have a conversation about race.Whites just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace.
ReplyDeleteNew York Times attempts to whip up frenzy over police shootings by pretending black men are going extinct. How true is this exactly? This article is vague in spots that need more detail. For instance this:
ReplyDelete“The gender gap does not exist in childhood: There are roughly as many African-American boys as girls. But an imbalance begins to appear among teenagers, continues to widen through the 20s and peaks in the 30s. It persists through adulthood.”
First off, there is already a built in gender gap, which it mentions if you follow the methodology link, but it’s disingenuous in it’s wording, as these type of articles always are. Nature (or God, whatever you happen to believe) already produces a higher percentage of male children, around 6% more boys are born than girls. However, women do live longer than men so aggregate population numbers will have more females than males. Those “extra” females are all in the geriatric category. In the young reproductive age group there is a significantly more males than females. The article mentions immigration briefly and claims it plays a “minor role”, though does not elaborate. I’ll help with that, immigration, especially from Africa, is primarily young males and adds many young black men to U.S. population. However, since the purpose of this article is to whip up hysteria it is dismissive about the subject of immigration. I would be suspicious of any official stats re immigration and you have to account for illegal immigrants also. Many black illegals come from the Caribbean and it would be impossible calculate those.
To put things more in perspective the natural gender imbalance gives us, roughly, 14 million more males under the age of 35 in the US. In black America there would be roughly, 2.3 million “extra” single males under 35.
According to this article black women are suffering from some horrible shortage of men and having to raise children alone because of it. I call bull on that, while yes, many black women do raise children alone but I think the majority of the time black men simply do not choose to be fathers (I claim no statistical info on that, it’s just IMHO from anecdotal experience).
The number stated in this article is that there are 1.5 million “missing” black men. Most being murdered or incarcerated. Even if this is true, which I don’t believe it is, that still gives us 800,000 more single males under the age of 35 than females. So there is still not a shortage of “young” men, there is in fact a surplus, just not as much of a surplus as there should be.
Prison is also cited as a “reason” for a shortage. The article does not delineate between hard time lifers and short termers. Most men in prison, black and white, are not in for life, in fact they just go in for short periods and then are out again, it’s a revolving door and many men maintain relationships with women in prison. So these men aren’t “off the market” permanently, just for certain periods. There’s much more I could add about this but I’m running up against the character limit. Go here to see the article. Jerry PDX:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0
White men in the category as hardly defined might mean a light skinned Puerto Rican or Dominican. NOT a white man as the term and word is generally, ordinarily, and commonly understood.
ReplyDeleteBlacks for whatever combination of reasons just commit a lot more crimes of all types period. So the chances and instances of "run in" with police is just that much greater. Blacks too when confronted by the police have that attitude that causes a further problem.
ReplyDelete"According to this article black women are suffering from some horrible shortage of men and having to raise children alone because of it. I call bull on that,"
ReplyDeleteBull is what it is. Anonymous is correct. AFDC for fifty years allows support to be given to women with kids but with the stipulation that no adult male can be living in the house. So the men disappear and are no where to be found.
Entire generations of young negro children have grown up without a father because of AFDC.
White man convicted of raping a black woman.
ReplyDeleteIt almost never happens.
Almost a zero absolutely in crime statistics.
Too dangerous for whitey men to enter into negro neighborhoods. They will be almost instantly spotted and set upon by young thugs.
That naked young white man shot and killed by the colored cop is an instance of the cop exercising his discretion. The young white man was unarmed but also on drugs and acting erratic in the extreme. He did pose a danger to others. It can be reasonably inferred.
ReplyDelete