This comprehensive and peer-reviewed study shows that Blacks are not disproportionately shot by white officers. They are shot by police of their own race more often. Plus they are not shot disproportionately based on the crime rates in the areas in which they live. For example, in certain years Blacks make up more than half of all homicide victims, while making up just 15% of the population. And they are shot by Black suspects more than
90% of the time.
Still curious about this myth of "systemic racism". While we know Blacks live in higher crime areas and are much more likely victims of violent crimes, there is no such statistics, information, or studies showing where or how police forces devolve into systemic racism as a policing method.
There is widespread concern about racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings and that these disparities reflect discrimination by White officers. Existing databases of fatal shootings lack information about officers, and past analytic approaches have made it difficult to assess the...
www.pnas.org
We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime. While racial disparity did vary by type of shooting, no one type of shooting showed significant anti-Black or -Hispanic disparity. The uncertainty around these estimates highlights the need for more data before drawing conclusions about disparities in specific types of shootings.
A new study debunks a common myth.
www.nationalreview.com
A
new study published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.
The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.
Earlier studies have also disproven the idea that white officers are biased in shooting black citizens. The Black Lives Matter narrative has been impervious to the truth, however.