The recent protests have brought again to light the topic of racism, which does exist. But sadly a lot of that hate is misplaced on law enforcement. Cops don’t shoot people at random, (if they’re following the law), they fire only when they reasonably believe a violent criminal poses an immediate threat to life, so racial differences in crime rates are unfortunately important to consider here.
So let's go over some data.
In 2018 there were 995 people were shot and killed by police, the lowest number since 2015. Of the 995 people shot and killed by the police, 403 were white, 210 were black, 148 were Hispanic, 38 were classified as other, and 199 were classified as unknown.
Out of that 995, 47 were unarmed — 23 were white, 17 were black, 5 were Hispanic, and 2 were unknown.
Out of the 30-50 million interactions that the police had with the American public last year, 10 million people were arrested, and less than 0.01 percent were shot and killed by the police. Out of those 10 million people arrested, 47 of those shot and killed were unarmed, which equates to 0.00047 percent, 17 of which were black.
SourceAn independent study by National Academy of Sciences found that “the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot," Prof. Joseph Cesario said. "If anything, black citizens are more likely to have been shot by black officers, but this is because black officers are drawn from the same population that they police. So, the more black citizens there are in a community, the more black police officers there are.”
SourceData shows that 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. Blacks committed 52 percent of homicides between 1980 and 2008, despite composing just 13 percent of the population. Across the same timeframe, whites committed 45 percent of homicides while composing 77% of the population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There were almost 6,000 blacks killed by other blacks in 2015. By contrast, only 258 blacks were killed by police gunfire that year.
SourceThis study tried “benchmarking” blacks’ share of those killed by police against numerous measures of crime, and found no anti-black disparity in nearly all of these comparisons.
SourceThis study analyzed policing incidents in great detail, finding that, after accounting for how suspects behaved, there was no racial difference in lethal force (though blacks and Hispanics were more likely to suffer non-lethal force). However, much of this analysis relied on data from a single city, Houston
Source.
This is older data, but still very interesting if you want to see the motives and how certain races choose to commit violence against others. It has nothing to do with police, but about race and crime. White's commit the most crimes, but they are also the largest population group. But when you look at specific crime categories, difference races prefer different crimes. Each race tends to commit crimes against it's own race at a higher rate with some exceptions.
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Now it is harder to find data on non-shooting deaths, but we can use this data to get a better picture of the whole story. One thing for certain is that the recent push by the left to "Defund Police Agencies" is ridiculous and won't solve anything. Cities who give in will soon realize that they are being asked to do something even more radical and it will spiral out of control.
There is engrained racism in various functions in every single country. One doesn't understand the racism a black man faces, or a Hispanic family, or what have you. This post isn't questioning that. It is specifically that police target blacks or other races. It can happen in places, yes. But statistically when it comes to deaths, that isn't the case. And if anything, the data shows us that specific groups tend to cause more crimes for whatever the reasons may be.
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