[F]or 2015, the Post documented 987 victims of fatal police shootings, about twice the number historically recorded by federal agencies. Whites were 50 percent of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent.
That percentage of black victims is not helpful in proving that policing is racist. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population (and whites, 62 percent), blacks’ violent crime rates would predict that at least a quarter of the victims of police killings would be black. Police shootings will be correlated with the prevalence of armed suspects, violent crime, and suspect resistance in a population and area. Blacks were charged with 62 percent of all robberies, 57 percent of all murders, and 45 percent of all assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, while constituting roughly 15 percent of the population in those counties. From 2005 to 2014, 40 percent of cop-killers were black. Given the racially lopsided nature of gun violence, a 26 percent rate of black victimization by the police is not evidence of bias.
Moreover, the vast majority of the 258 black victims of police shootings in 2015 were armed, as were white and Hispanic victims. And 258 is a small fraction of the nearly 6,000 annual black victims of black committed homicide. Indeed, the percentage of black homicide deaths that result from police killings is far less than the percentage of white and Hispanic homicide deaths that result from police killings: 4 percent of black homicide victims are killed by the police, compared with 12 percent of white and Hispanic homicide victims. A “Lives Matter” antipolice movement, if there is to be one, would more appropriately be labeled “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.”
https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/11-critical-points-race-crime-america/
