Police Killings of Blacks: What the Data Says

This is something I have brought up before as there are numerous posters on this forum that have claimed racial bias in police officers is the reason more black people are killed by police and that anytime a black person is killed by police it's "because they were black." People could bring up a lot of stats about how black people are killed proportionally more than the general population, but that doesn't actually support the claim that this is because of any racial bias in police because blacks already have more encounters with police than the general pop.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ThunderChunky (Post 10797043) Blacks have more interactions with police regardless of being killed by them or not. The relevant stat, in my mind, is if you normalize the stats and can show that police kill blacks more often on a per encounter basis (and then you have to account or other factors such as were they armed/resisting/whatever or not).

Finally, an economist (harvard professor, genius grant winner, and very brown because we know that matters) addresses the question.

Quote:

Suppose each arrest creates an equal risk of shooting for both African-Americans and whites. In that case, with the current arrest rate, 28.9 percent of all those killed by police officers would still be African-American. This is only slightly smaller than the 31.8 percent of killings we actually see, and it is much greater than the 13.2 percent level of African-Americans in the overall population.

It's amazing how much he has to couch his language just to make this relatively simple point though.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1OLwcAX