Today the Republican Presidential front runner was caught posting some bogus and racist crime stats on twitter that originated on a neo-Nazi website, which claimed among other things that “97% of Blacks are Killed by Blacks.”
Many News sources quickly caught this and pointed out that the FBI provides completely different numbers for this data, and that’s a good thing. Unfortunately almost none of those sources seem to be aware that the FBI chart they are using is also grossly incomplete.
Therefore I have created a corrected meme that uses the most complete data available. Lets talk about it.
The graphic used by Trump claimed the following:
Blacks Killed by Whites ~~ 2%
Blacks Killed by Police ~~ 1%
Whites Killed by Police ~~ 3%
Whites Killed by Whites ~~ 16%
Whites Killed by Blacks ~~ 81%
Blacks Killed by Blacks ~~ 97%
Even the huuugest simpleton in the world should be able to recognize that these numbers are absolutely bogus. It’s completely ridiculous, but unfortunately this is the world that Trump and his supporters are fully comfortable living in. One filled with a big heaping cup full of projection. One where the killing of Black people by police is not only exceedingly rare, it’s more than justified because: Black Crime.
A world where it’s completely justified for a Trump crowd to beat up a black lives matters supporter because one of the heads of his SuperPac stated “black people would beat him up too.”
“From my perspective, I’m sick and tire of the Black Lives Matter thing,” Kiger complained. “I think it’s a farce. I think they’re there to just disrupt. Look, if they really care about black lives, they need to pick up a banner and go to the South Side of Chicago, where black lives are being slaughtered on a daily basis. If they really care about the African-American community, get up there and do something about it.”
“So they don’t have the right to protest at a Trump rally?” Costello wondered.
“No, they don’t, really,” Kiger relied. “Look, I wouldn’t go into a black church and start screaming white lives matter.”
“Would you be afraid that they would beat you up?” Costello pressed.
“Yeah! I know I’d get beat up,” Kiger insisted, adding that he would be “at least roughed up” by black church members.
He just knows that black people in a house of worship, because I guess they don’t gather together anywhere else, would immediately resort to violence against any loud white guy who shows up? Just like what happened with Dylann Storm Roof? Yeah, projection deluxe.
Anyhow here is the source of the corrected numbers in my new meme.
WHITES KILLED BY POLICE ~~ 0.9* WHITES BEATEN BY POLICE ~ 1.4% BLACKS BEATEN BY POLICE ~ 3.4% BLACKS KILLED BY POLICE ~~ 3.6*
(Source: Census & Bureau of Justice Statistic 2003-2009 Use of Force & Arrest Related Death Reports * Per 1 Million Persons as documented by Mother Jones)
Mother Jones crunched the numbers based on data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Justice Statistic report on Arrest Related Deaths to came up with this.
Rate of people killed by police (2003-2009)
Since a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one month ago, reporters and researchers have scrambled to find detailed data on how often cops wound or kill civilians. What they've uncovered has been frustratingly incomplete: Perhaps not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies don't keep very good stats on incidents that turn deadly. In short, it's a mystery exactly how many Americans are shot by the police every year.
...
The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that's about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.
More recent data from the online database maintained by the Guardian called The Counted, which is far more complete even than the BJS info, seems to support those estimates.
As of this day in 2015 the rate of people killed by police so far this year breaks down like this.
Rate of persons killed by police by race per million
Killed: 1022
Asian: 1.01 per Million
White: 2.7 per Million
Hispanic: 2.96 per Million
Native American: 3.66 per Million
Black: 6.2 per Million
So although the average of those killed by police may slightly change from year to year it’s still around 3 or 4 times higher for Black people than for Whites.
The information on people being beaten, or to use the technical term those who experience “use of force” by police comes from a Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey (pdf) which covered 2002, 2005 & 2008.
Use of Force by Police
As you can see consistently from 2002 through 2008 Black citizens encountering police received threats of force, or use of force (3.4%) at nearly Three Times More Often than White citizens (1.2%).
The next set of numbers are a bit more complex, but all come from the Supplemental Homicide Report.
BLACKS KILLED BY WHITES ~~ 4.7% WHITES KILLED BY BLACKS ~~ 12% UNSOLVED WHITE MURDERS ~ 24%
UNSOLVED BLACK MURDERS ~ 40% BLACKS KILLED BY BLACKS ~~ 55% WHITES KILLED BY WHITES ~~ 62%
As I’ve stated many times, the FBI data on this only includes Single Victims and Single Offenders. This table here for example would give you the impression that there were 6,000 murders in 2012, when in fact there were over 12,000. The missing cases are those that involve either multiple victims (like Dylann Roof’s murders in Charleston) or multiple offenders (like Jared & Amanda Miller’s rampage through Las Vegas) or both.
The Supplemental Homicide Report includes all of these and you can do searches through their data base using the race of the oldest offender vs the race of the 1st victim.
Which I did, here.
Black Murder vicims by Race of Offender
As you can see that actual rate of Blacks killed by Blacks when all the cases are included isn't 92 percent—it's only about 55 percent. And the reason it's so low is first because the clearance (arrest) rate for murder is only 67 percent to start with. It can't get any higher than that! So 67 percent is all they actually catch.
And here.
White Murder Victims by Race of Offender
And here you see that actual rate of whites who kill whites is 62.2 percent, which is 7 percent higher than the figure for Blacks. When you compare the two charts you also can see something quite odd: the "unknown" figures are quite different. The unknown percentage for Black victims (40 percent) is nearly twice the unknown rate for white victims (24 percent), so nobody really knows who killed who in twice as many cases when the victim is Black.
When you look at the real data, or at least the best data currently available to the public the result you get isn’t that black people are far more violent and deadly than white people. In fact the rate of violent victimization for blacks and whites is nearly identical when you control for their relative levels of poverty.
For the period 2008–12— Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000).
Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8–2.5 per 1,000).
The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels.
So the general presumption that blacks are “more violent” simply falls apart when you look at all the data, however what you also see is a dramatic failure by police to solve the murders of black people regardless of who the perpetrators may or may not be by a rate that is nearly 2:1 compared to the murders of white people. That is clearly a problem that should be addressed, but with all of this bogus information flying back and forth, is being completely ignored. That is in addition to being assaulted by police 3 times more often and killed by police about 4 times more often.
Yes, the rate of blacks who killed whites is higher than the reverse, but it’s also fairly close to the roughly 4:1 ratio of black (13%) and white people (62%) that are in the country and may potentially reflect a higher rate of available victims rather than a greater tendency to kill one way or another, and there is also the fact that based on John Roman’s analysis a significant portion of killings by whites of blacks are often considered “justifiable homicide” rather than murder to the tune of a 2.5 to 1 ratio which may also tend to continue to be a contributory factor to this disparity.
Monday, Nov 23, 2015 · 5:45:26 PM PST · Frank Vyan Walton
One more issue that occurred to me concerning the FBI UCR report that is commonly used — even though it is only single victim/offender and only includes cases that have been “cleared” — as the primary source of the “92% of Black People Kill Black People” myth. It also claims that 83% of Whites kill whites, but for those people who still believe that those numbers are correct and would hold true if we actually knew who the actual perpetrator of absolutely every murder truly is — even though we don’t — there is the following to consider.
In point of fact, when you look at the closed cases for murders involving both single and multiple offenders and victims supplied by the Supplemental Homicide Report, it shows that [for all the cases with an identified suspect] 92 percent of white victims are murdered by white people, and 83 percent of black victims are murdered by black people, rather than the reverse as Giuliani claims.
So even that “92% Black Killers” figure, which is fairly often trotted out as a rebuttal to “Black Lives Matter”, doesn’t pan out correctly when you include all the murder cases instead of just half of them, it actually shows the reverse of what most people claim.
Monday, Oct 2, 2017 · 2:24:03 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
The chart has been updated using research on police killings in 2015 and 2016 done by the Guardian using open source news reports shows the chance of being killed by police per million citizens is 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.66 for African Americans, 3.23 for Latinos, 2.9 for Caucasians, and 1.17 for Asians. This means Native Americans are five times more likely to be killed by police, and African Americans more than twice as likely to be killed.