John Hinderaker at Power Line provocatively argued on Saturday that the Black Lives Matter is “founded on a lie.” Listening to liberals, “many take it for granted that a vastly disproportionate number of blacks are involved in police shootings–in fact, if you didn’t know better, you might think that only blacks are ever shot by policemen.”
Hinderaker sorted through The Washington Post’s effort to accumulate and analyze data on citizens killed by law-enforcement officers in 2015. The media love to focus on the idea that police shoot the unarmed. But the Post found that “28 percent of those who died were shooting at officers or someone else. Sixteen percent were attacking with other weapons or physical force, and 31 percent were pointing a gun.”
The Post found that 990 people, almost all of them men, were shot and killed by law enforcement last year. Before you start calling them victims, however, note that the Post also found that in three-quarters of these incidents, police were defending either themselves or someone else who was, at that moment, under attack. That leaves around 250 cases that were not obvious self-defense or defense of a third person. That doesn’t mean, of course, that those shootings were unjustified.
What was the racial breakdown of those who were shot by police in 2015? The largest number, 494, almost exactly half, were white. 258 were black, 172 were Hispanic, and the remaining 66 were either “other” or unknown. (Interestingly, Asians are rarely shot by police officers.)
The 258 blacks represent 26% of the total. That is about double the percentage of blacks in the American population. Is that prima facie evidence of racism on the part of law enforcement? Of course not. It is common knowledge that blacks have an unusually high rate of contact with the police, both as victims and as perpetrators. In 2012-2013, the Department of Justice found that blacks were the perpetrators of 24% of all violent crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known (in 7.8% of violent crimes, it was unknown).
So the percentage of blacks fatally shot by police officers (26%) is almost exactly equal to the percentage of blacks committing violent crimes (24%). Indeed, given that the black homicide rate is around eight times the white rate, it is surprising that the portion of blacks fatally shot by policemen is not higher.
But the Post laser-focused on the small fraction of deaths in an “unarmed” confrontation, as in the “infamous” death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri – who was unarmed, but was punching a policeman inside his car and reaching for the policeman’s gun. "The Post found that 9 percent of shootings involved an unarmed victim. The unarmed victims were disproportionately black. In a Post analysis looking at population-adjusted rates, unarmed black men were seven times as likely as unarmed whites to die from police gunfire."
But they also noted “the vast majority of victims of all races were armed. However, black men accounted for 40 percent of the 60 unarmed deaths, even though they make up just 6 percent of the U.S. population....The disproportionate number of unarmed black men in the body count helps explain why outrage continues to simmer a year after Ferguson — and why shootings that might have been ignored in the past are now coming under fresh public and legal scrutiny.”
Hinderaker also argued that the Post only compared blacks to whites...and not to other minorities:
Liberals might argue that blacks are disproportionately the victims of unjustified shootings by law enforcement, but I have not seen anyone try seriously to make that case. The Post took a pass at supporting the liberal narrative by arguing that “unarmed” blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites. But the Post failed to note that, according to its own data, blacks are much more likely to attack police officers while unarmed. I don’t know why this is, but in general, I think that unarmed people who assault police officers are likely to be high on drugs...
According to the Post’s numbers–and you should bear in mind that a subjective process of classification lies behind each instance–80% of whites who were fatally shot by police officers in 2015 were in the midst of an attack on the policeman or someone else. According to the Post, 71% of blacks were shot while attacking someone, while 66% of “others” and 62% of Hispanics were shot while attacking the policeman or someone else. If you take these differences seriously, which you probably shouldn’t since re-classifying a small number of instances would dramatically change the results, they might be an argument for discrimination against Hispanics and Asians. Blacks turn out to be a relatively favored group, by this measure.
In short, the data on police shootings show that blacks are involved in such incidents just about exactly as often as one would expect, given their violent crime rate.
