Although braying politicians and dishonest media narratives have convinced millions that systemic racism in policing that has led to an epidemic of deadly officer-involved shootings in recent years, the actual evidence just doesn’t support this.

The Washington Post has created a database of every known deadly police shooting in America since 2015.  As of this writing, 6,211 people have been shot and killed by law enforcement officers.  46% of them—2,883 to be exact—were white, while 24% (1,496 total) were black.

View Comments (1)

Just 6% were unarmed.

One of the most pernicious myths about police shootings is that officers shoot unarmed black men at an alarming rate, when in fact just 2% of the people who were killed by an officer were unarmed and black.  Since the beginning of 2015, law enforcement officers across the country have actually killed 33 more unarmed white people than unarmed black people.

Nearly every single person police officers have shot and killed since The Washington Post started its comprehensive database has been armed, yet the popular misconception persists that law enforcement is killing unarmed black men at a staggering rate.

While it is true that since whites comprise 76.3% of the US population and blacks comprise just 13%, black people are statistically more likely to be shot and killed by law enforcement officers; multiple scientific studies have proven that racial animus is not a factor in this disparity.

The most recent, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, found “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” and instead determined that “race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot.”

In other words, it is the violent crime rate of a given race—not race itself—that determines the likelihood a member of that race will be shot and killed by a law enforcement officer. . . .

In Milwaukee, for instance, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s homicide tracker has recorded 890 total murders in the city since the beginning of 2015.  A staggering 79% of the victims are black.  In 2021, that percentage has jumped to 91%, as 31 of the 34 people killed in Milwaukee as of this writing were black.

The unfortunate reality is that just as blacks are statistically far more likely to be the victims of homicide or other violent crimes, they are also statistically more likely to commit violent crimes that would bring them into conflict with a law enforcement officer with his or her gun drawn.

0.0016% of all people who encountered a law enforcement officer in 2019 were killed by one.

This, not racism, is the reason for the disparity in police shootings.  How else could one explain this statistical anomaly: Since 2015, law enforcement officers have shot and killed 168 unarmed white people, 135 unarmed black people, and…just 74 unarmed Hispanic people. . . .

Harvard University economist Roland G. Fryer, meanwhile, “didn’t find racial differences in officer-involved shootings” when he studied 1,399 of them in California, Texas, Florida, Colorado, and Washington from 2000 to 2015. . . .

“No matter how we analyzed the data, we found no racial differences in shootings overall, in any city in particular, or in any subset of the data.” . . .

To get a fuller picture of just how rare officer-involved shootings are, it is helpful to remember how much more frequently they used to occur.  In New York City in the early 1970s, police officers killed an average of 72 people per year (including a whopping 93 in 1971 alone).  In 2020, just 19 people were shot and killed by law enforcement officers in all of New York State, and every single one of them was armed.

94% of the 6,211 people who have been killed by police officers in America since the beginning of 2015 were armed in some way.  58% of them were armed with a gun.  75% were armed with a gun or knife.  87% were armed with a gun, knife, some other weapon, or were using a vehicle they were driving as a weapon.

Nearly every single person police officers have shot and killed since The Washington Post started its comprehensive database has been armed, yet the popular misconception persists that law enforcement is killing unarmed black men at a staggering rate.

Only 2% of the total victims of deadly police shootings over the past six years were unarmed black men.  91% of the black men killed by police officers since 2015 were armed.  62% were armed with a gun.  75% were armed with a gun or knife.  86% were armed with a gun, knife, some other weapon, or were using a vehicle they were driving as a weapon.

The evidence could not possibly be clearer: Policing in America is not systemically racist and police officers do not because of personal racial bias shoot and kill black men.  Nearly every single one of the more than 6,000 people (of all races) killed by law enforcement officers in recent years was armed.

The evidence could not possibly be clearer: Policing in America is not systemically racist and police officers do not, because of personal racial bias, shoot and kill black men.  Nearly every single one of the more than 6,000 people (of all races) killed by law enforcement officers in recent years was armed.  Far fewer than a hundredth of a percent of the tens of millions of people who have an encounter with a police officer each year will be killed by one.

(Excerpt from McIver Institute.)