This chart right here shows what Black Lives Matter is all about, because when it comes to the police, they clearly don't matter all that much.
We've seen in the shooting of Walter Scott in the back as he ran away; and of
Tamir Rice within just one second; and
of John Crawford within just two seconds; and of Darrien Hunt who was also
shot in the back while running away; and of Michael Brown, whose bullet wounds
indicate that he was indeed shot at while facing away and after lifting his hands up, that officers repeatedly argue they are afraid as they pull the trigger.
The total number of law enforcement deaths during 2015 so far is 85. Nineteen of those were auto accidents, 13 were heart attacks and 24 were from gunfire. Contrast that with officer suicides, which average between 120 and 140 per year.
On the other hand, police killed 1,106 citizens in 2014, which is up dramatically from 768 in 2013. So far, 820 citizens have been killed in 2015, as shown by independent analysis on KilledbyPolice.net.
The Guardian's "The Counted" project indicates that of the 806 cases they've documented this year— including 24 just this month—the subject killed was unarmed in 162 cases (20 percent). Black people accounted for 62 of those unarmed people (38 percent) while 68 were white (41 percent).
So should cops be afraid of black people, or should black people be afraid of cops? Keep reading as we ponder both sides.
Mother Jones analyzed data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In conjunction with data from the CDC and Census, the magazine produced the above chart indicating that black people are about four times as likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than white people. That's been true for a long time. In fact, it used to be much worse.
Between 1968 and 2011, black people were between two to eight times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than whites. Annually, over those 40 years, a black person was on average 4.2 times as likely to get shot and killed by a cop than a white person. The disparity dropped to 2-to-1 between 2003 and 2009, lower than the 4-to-1 disparity shown in the BJS data over those same years.
From all this data we can see that cops are a much greater clear and present danger to the life and health of black people. Cops are also a greater danger to themselves.
On the other hand, just giving a cursory look at the number of cops who've been killed this year, it's true that a larger proportion of the suspects in those killings have been black. This is my count:
-7 victims (29 percent): white Assailant(s)
-3 victims (12 percent): Latino Assailant(s)
-11 victims (41 percent): black Assailant(s)
-1 victim (2 percent): Native American Assailant(s)
-2 victims (4 percent): unknown
The numbers don't exactly match up because there are some cases with multiple assailants and victims. Some of the cops shot are black, and one was even shot by a white assailant. Then you have the case of Lt. Gliniewicz, where there are two white suspects and one black suspect, but nothing really definitive is known yet.
It's hard to know without further delving if this is a consistent trend or not. More of the suspected shooters do seem do be black, although we also know that police stop and encounter black persons at a rate that is two times higher than whites in general. So there's no reason to think that starting bias doesn't also impact the chances for an officer to be killed.
But it's difficult to factor that bias into an analysis of killed police officers, so that's probably not a carefully considered aspect of their tactics and responses.
In general, there are 765,000 sworn officers of the law in the U.S., so the odds of being one of the average 45 police killed in a given year is about 17,000 to 1.
The final question is the overall and bottom line issue: Are black people more likely to kill someone white than vice versa?
The FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports include multiple victim/offender murder cases, unlike the FBI Murder/Race Chart which is grossly incomplete. The Supplemental Report tells us this about 2013:
-Whites Killed by blacks: 868
-Blacks Killed by whites: 311
These results tend to be fairly consistent from year to year. From this, people like Bill O'Reilly would argue that since there are more whites killed by blacks than the reverse, then greater lethal force directed without hesitation against blacks is far more justified.
That's just what the "numbers" tell us, so there's no racism to it.
Except that there are, according to the 2010 Census, about 241 million white people, compared with 40 million black people in the country. Doing the same math from above shows the chance of being the white murder victim of a black assailant is 278,729 to 1. Meanwhile, the odds of being the black victim of a white assailant are 129,421 to 1. So the chance of being a white victim of interracial murder is more than twice as unlikely than being a black victim of the same.
So yes, police are at far higher risk of being killed than anyone in the general public. Even when they don't have one of the top ten most dangerous jobs, there's a clear risk to it. And even though many of them are, in most years, about as likely to die of heart disease or a car accident, far more than that will kill themselves rather than be killed by a black suspect.
Perhaps, maybe, they should chill out about it some.
And of course black people can also expect to have a higher chance of being killed by police by about 4 to 1, but that doesn't mean every cop is out to hurt them. A lot of them aren't.
All of this shows there's a whole lot of misdirected fear coming from the wrong direction in almost all cases. If we're going to move forward on race, the first thing we actually need to do is throw a lot of these numbers, these estimates, and guesses out the window.
Rather than be ruled by fear, we have to be open to finding out that our theories about the odds of this or that happening are often totally wrong.
If you constantly bet on the "sure thing," you'll never discover the surprising or the exceptional: The cop that isn't as mean or trigger-happy as we expect, or the suspect that is not an imminent threat. The average and the median may be true for many, but it certainly isn't true for all. We must remember that people aren't numbers, but individuals who don't all behave in predictable and uniform ways. When we learn to take each specific person and situation as they individually are, that's when most of these things will begin to break down.
I'm just not expecting that to happen any time soon.