The BLM narrative on Police Shooting Unarmed Blacks is Patently False

Originally posted on Quora March 11, 2023

Out of all the institutional problems with police in the USSA and substantial grievances that can be levied against them such as qualified immunity taking precedence over civil rights, civil asset forfeiture, dragnet surveillance, targeted harassment and gang stalking, fishing expeditions, entrapment, often deadly no knock raids and welfare check killings, extrajudicial punishment, suppressing free speech and a complete lack of transparency the left has chosen to compartmentalize all policing problems into a race war specifically an epidemic of local beat cops shooting unarmed black males between 14-35 years of age, which oddly enough is the demographic that most culprits of violent crime fit.

A meta analysis using Washington compost data collected since 2015 finds that there are about 1,000 fatal police shootings of suspects annually, out of which 26% of fatalities are black, and an average of 67 fatal police shootings of unarmed suspects annually, out of which about 1/3 of fatalities are black or about 22 annually. Of course, leftoids think this is evidence of racism simple because blacks are overrepresented in police shootings compared to their 13% share of the general population. However, any normal thinking person realizes that this is the composition fallacy. Cops don’t get into violent confrontations with the general population but with criminals usually with prior convictions. Compared to this appropriate benchmark, blacks are not disproportionately shot by police because they account for 26% of all crime, including 33% of non-fatal violent crime and > 50% of homicide offenders. Most studies find no evidence of racial bias in use of lethal force when using the appropriate benchmarks. One study in particular compared 2 years worth of police shootings against 16 different crime rates finding “virtually no comparisons that could suggest anti-black disparities but some that suggested anti-white disparities.”

Yet the black share of police shootings is in line with, or even below, most measures of violent crime and criminal-justice-system involvement, including the most extreme measures: homicides and cop-killings. Indeed, a notable pattern is that the more severe measures tend to have higher black shares. The more selective that we imagine police are in whom they shoot, the higher the black share we should expect among those shot, if we are going by crime-rate benchmarks.

Perhaps most prominently, Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and William Terrill benchmarked two years’ worth of police shootings to 16 different crime rates. They found “no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings”; virtually none of the possible comparisons suggested antiblack disparities, and some suggested antiwhite ones.

Similarly, a 2017 study found no statistically significant differences between groups in the ratios of hospital admissions and fatalities due to legal police intervention per 10,000 stops/arrests. A study that used data on police shootings from 2015 to 2017 found that blacks only appear to be more likely to be shot by police if you use the general population, police - civilian interactions, or total arrests as the benchmark but were “less likely” to be fatally shot by police than whites if you use violent crimes and weapons offenses as the benchmark. Other studies have found probability varies by state such that blacks aren’t more likely to be shot by police than whites in Texas but are more likely to be shot by police in California.

Fatal police shootings of unarmed suspects are another grey area where the narrative falls apart. Unarmed =/= innocent and compliant. According to the coding of the WaPO data on fatal police shootings of unarmed and non-attacking suspects there are about 11 fatal shootings of black suspects annually. However, even this narrower category includes instances where the suspects held non-threatening weapons that could be misconstrued as a gun at night or reached into a vehicle when ordered to comply.

Of course, not all cops are white and thus not all fatal police shootings of armed or unarmed suspects are perpetrated by white cops. The demographics of law enforcement in the US generally break down along the same lines of the general population: 60% white, 18% hispanic 12% black and 10% other. While white cops do not show a statistically significant bias against unarmed black suspects in use of lethal force black cops actually demonstrate a racial bias against unarmed white suspects in use of lethal force.

For white officers, the probability that a white suspect who is involved in an officer involved shooting has a weapon is 84.1%. The equivalent probability for blacks is 80.7%: a difference of almost 4%, which is not statistically significant. For black officers, the probability that a white suspect who is involved in an officer-involved shooting has a weapon is surprisingly lower, 57.1%. The equivalent probability for black suspects is 73.0%. The only statistically significant differences by race demonstrate that black officers are more likely to shoot unarmed whites relative to white officers.

Geography is also destiny when it comes to police shooting deaths: whites in rural areas are more likely to be shot and killed by police while blacks in urban areas are more likely to be shot and killed by police.

David Hemenway and four coauthors found that whites were more likely to be shot and killed by police if they lived in rural areas, whereas blacks have higher rates of police-shooting deaths in urban areas. [109]

However, geographic analysis has not produced consistent results across the country with some studies finding slight racial bias and others finding none. When blacks are the majority of the population in a city and/or the majority of violent criminals, disproportionate police shooting fatality rate indicates that such individuals pose a higher risk to police and the general public.