I asked Jim, my Dominican-born Austin-raised San Francisco-living white friend, why he thought so many Californian cities were high on my PIHN list. He thought for a very few short seconds and answered, “because hispanics aren’t violent but police think they are.” I love over-generalizations and stereotypes that could very well be true. So I…
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Dillon Taylor was another unarmed white boy shot and killed by police. In (mostly) conservative circles, Dillon Taylor was compared to Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri. In some liberal circles, people believe police only shoot and kill black people. But Taylor, who is white, got almost no press (and I think the officer who shot…
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There’s still the strange belief among some people that police only do bad things to black folk. When I was on Chris Hayes the other night, some commentators thought the initial stop was racially biased. Chris himself questioned whether a white person would have been stopped for a seat-belt violation. I find that crazy talk.…
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Fact 7: What about hispanics? Hard to tell because many police departments don’t keep track. Half of all homicides (justifiable police homicides) have no “ethic origin” listed. When it is listed, 1/3 of those killed are hispanic, which strikes me as very high. Overall, including all the missing data, hispanics come out at 16 percent.…
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Fact 6: Black police officers do kill white people. This really isn’t surprising, but I mention it because I’ve seen a few people on twitter doubt this fact. Black officers (about 1 in 7 of all police) kill about 27 blacks and 9.4 whites per year. White police (of whom there are many more) kill…
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Fact 5: Black officers are disproportionately more likely than white police to kill black people. But this should come as little surprise since black officers are much more likely to work in black areas and in cities where there are more blacks. Again, given the bad data, take all this with a huge grain of…
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Fact 4: Police-involved killings are going up. This one surprised me. Because police-involved shootings are generally correlated with overall homicides. But homicides are more or less steady right now, and down 10,000 since 1998 (14,000 in 1998, 13,000 in 2012). The trend is about five more killings a year, for the past 15 years. Keep…
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[Update: Using better data, the number is more like three a day.] Fact 3: UCR data on justified police-homicides are notorious incomplete. These numbers are an undercount. But given the data we have, as reported (or not) to the DOJ by local police departments, police kill at least one person a day (426 in 2012,…
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Fact 2: Blacks are more likely than whites to be shot and killed by police, but probably less so than you’d suspect. 34 percent of those killed by police are African American. But put another way, 62 percent of those killed by police are white. (Actual numbers provided in next post.) What you want to…
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Back in 2008 I posted about what I called the “Al Sharpton effect”: cops shooting white people doesn’t generally make the news. That post has gotten a lot of hits recently (roughly 2,000 page views a day, when normally my whole blog gets about 700). So I’ve re-crunched these numbers, both to make them more…
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