WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL: …The Washington Post has been gathering data on fatal police shootings over the past year and a half to correct acknowledged deficiencies in federal tallies. The emerging data should open many eyes.
For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.
The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers… (more)
The WSJ is inaccessible to me behind its paywall, so I’m not sure what BLM myths this editorial aims to dispel. But this excerpt is telling enough.
BLM argues that police kill African-Americans at a disproportionately high rate. The WSJ responds that the proportion of black homicide victims killed by police is lower than the proportion of white and Latino homicide victims killed by police.
But as the WSJ surely knows, this is comparing apples and oranges. The relevant question is: are blacks more likely to die at the hands of police, in proportion to their numbers in the overall population? The answer upon which BLM stakes its moral outrage is: unequivocally yes–and in 2015, it was not even close.
As sociologist Todd Beer, who analyzes the numbers here , explains:
“Whites make up a disproportionally smaller portion of those killed by law enforcement compared to their portion of the general population – 11.3% less. Blacks on the other hand make up a disproportionally larger portion of those killed (26.5%) compared to the general population (13.2%) – 13.3% more, or double.”
Beers’ analysis is drawn from empirical data compiled by the Guardian newspaper (apparently more exhaustive the WaPost’s data, though not very different in the trends it shows).
Note that police in the U.S. have for decades resisted calls for self-reporting these numbers–hence the reliance on media organizations for data. Note also that WSJ’s clumsy attempt at misdirection allows its editors to spotlight a perennial obsession of conservatives, “black-on-black” violence, itself part of a long bipartisan tradition of pathologizing minorities.