file photo by Boyd Loving
AARON BANDLER
The Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shootings have caused an uproar among leftists because they fuel their narrative that racist white police officers are hunting down innocent black men. But the statistics – brought to light by the superb work of Heather MacDonald – tell a different story.
Here are five key statistics you need to know about cops killing blacks.
1. Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or “were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force,” according to MacDonald in a speech at Hillsdale College.https://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler
2. More whites and Hispanics die from police homicides than blacks. According to MacDonald, 12 percent of white and Hispanic homicide deaths were due to police officers, while only four percent of black homicide deaths were the result of police officers.https://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler
3. The Post’s data does show that unarmed black men are more likely to die by the gun of a cop than an unarmed white man…but this does not tell the whole story. In August 2015, the ratio was seven-to-one of unarmed black men dying from police gunshots compared to unarmed white men; the ratio was six-to-one by the end of 2015. But MacDonald points out in The Marshall Project that looking at the details of the actual incidents that occurred paints a different picture:https://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler
4. Black and Hispanic police officers are more likely to fire a gun at blacks than white officers. This is according to a Department of Justice report in 2015 about the Philadelphia Police Department, and is further confirmed that by a study conducted University of Pennsylvania criminologist Gary Ridgeway in 2015 that determined black cops were 3.3 times more likely to fire a gun than other cops at a crime scene.https://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler
5. Blacks are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops. This is according to FBI data, which also found that 40 percent of cop killers are black. According to MacDonald, the police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than a cop killing an unarmed black person. https://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler
#FactsDontMatter
These are absolutely ridiculous statistics – a perfect example of telling half the story, or put another way, putting together a story, then finding half-truths to support that story. .
In #1 you say cops killed twice as many whites as black. That’s because whites are a higher % of the population. According to US Census stats from 2014, whites are 62% of the population, blacks are 12%.
So using relative %’s there should be 5 times as many whites killed by cops – but it’s only 2 times as many, meaning that as a % of their respective populations, a higher % of blacks are killed by cops than whites. This also applies to #s 2 & 3.
One death is too many, especially one so obviously unneccessary as the Sterling execution