By race and ethnicity, there were 494 whites, 258 blacks, 172 Hispanics, 15 Asians, 14 American Indians or Alaskan natives, 9 “other” races, and 28 deaths with the race not specified. Which leads to the question … is there a racial imbalance? And in particular, are African-American people being killed at an excessive rate?
Now, many folks calculate the death rates of the groups by comparing the numbers killed, to the corresponding numbers of that group in the general population … but you can’t do that. It leads to wildly incorrect conclusions. Here is an example that shows why comparing numbers of police shootings to the corresponding number of individuals in the general population leads to big errors:
Men make up about 50% of the general population, but men comprise 96% of those killed by police. Does this huge number of “excess male deaths” prove that the police are being sexist and that they are biased against men? Does this imbalance in the number of men killed mean that we need a “Male Lives Matter Too” movement?
Of course not. Instead, it simply demonstrates that men both commit and are arrested for far more crimes of violence than women; that men are far more likely than women to both carry and use weapons; that men are far more likely to both threaten and commit serious violence against a police officer than are women; and most importantly, that men are far more likely than women to violently resist arrest.
Since the common thread in the killings is that the person was resisting arrest, we need to compare how often people of each race get killed by police, with how often people of the same race get arrested by police. But clearly, we’re not interested in arrests for jaywalking and the like. Since 97% of these deaths are occurring in the context of people violently resisting arrest, they are best compared to the corresponding number of arrests for violent crimes.
Here are the results of that comparison for 2015.
- For every 10,000 white people arrested for a violent crime, 38 white people were killed by police (± 2).
- For every 10,000 hispanic people arrested for a violent crime, 21 hispanic people were killed by police (± 3).
- For every 10,000 black people arrested for a violent crime, 21 black people were killed by police (± 2).
Go figure … I was as surprised as you, so I’ve triple checked the numbers, and it’s true—the odds of a given arrest going bad and ending up in a death are much greater for white men than for black or hispanic men.
Are there unjustified killings among the Washington Post data? You can be certain there are, it is a rare but real issue. Is there more work to be done? Assuredly. But the Post data doesn’t and can’t answer those questions
What the Washington Post data can and does show us is that death at the hands of police is a problem for people of all races and ethnicities. It’s not something happening preferentially to black people, quite the opposite. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen a lot, but whenever it happens, we need to make sure it was justified … and if not, we need to hold the responsible parties to account.
What we don’t need to do is to turn an issue of excessive use of police force into a racial issue.
3) If you don’t remember the death of the unarmed black man in the Pennsylvania restaurant who was shot and killed while lying face-down after being tasered, don’t feel bad, blame me … I fear I have engaged in a bit of constructive deception. I say that the reason you haven’t heard about his death is because contrary to what I stated above, he was actually an unarmed white man in a Pennsylvania restaurant who was shot and killed while lying face-down after being tasered … although as above, your explanation may vary.
8) After finishing writing up this analysis of the data, I came across a discussion today of the same question in The Economist. To my surprise, although they used totally different and much more complete data, they came to exactly the same conclusion—black people get killed less frequently by police, and white people get killed more frequently by police, than one would expect given the number of interactions they have with police. Doesn’t mean that racism is dead, the study in The Economist agrees with my saying above that there’s still lots of racist policing out there … and it also strongly supports my conclusions about the number of deaths.
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