I'm just leveling with y'all. Over the past few... Decades... We have seen a disproportionate number of Black people gunned down by police in the United States. I am so sorry to say to all those who are living under a rock - something that has been an exceedingly common theme in my blog posts - but the statistics simply do not lie. According to the German website Statista, which is rated "Least Biased" and "'High' for factual reporting" by Media Bias/Fact Check, up until September 2020, 287 white people and 142 Black people have been fatally shot by police officers. At first glance, one might assert that since the disparity between white and Black people is more than 100 points, then white people are obviously being killed more frequently! Except, they're not. Statista reports that, per every million people in a certain ethnic demographic, 32 Black people were killed between 2015 and September 2020; 24 Hispanic people; and 13 white people. This means in simple terms that if these specific ethnic groups were each comprised of a million people, Black and Hispanic individuals are far likelier to be killed by U.S. cops than white individuals. So, please, don't commit the error of mistaking pure numerical data for proportionate data. "But!" I hear you exclaim. "This must mean that Black communities merely commit more crime, right?"
Well, in 2019, the percentage of Black people who say they experienced a violent crime was 1.1%, only slightly higher than white people at 1.07%, again per Statista, so it's not as if Black people are running rampant through the streets as some would have you picture. Now, admittedly, the homicide rate on average within the Black demographic is higher than that of the white demographic, at 52.8% to 45.3% in 2008 (Worrall, 2014). However, while 90% of Black murder victims were indeed killed by other Black people, only 14.8% of white victims were killed by Black people; this leaves approximately 85% of white victims having been murdered by other white people (Lynn, 2020). Now, we must examine the deeper levels of this issue and why it is not as black-and-white as it seems, no pun intended. Part II to follow. Sources https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shootings-rate-ethnicity-us/ https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-black-crime-loaded-controversial-phrase-heard- amid/story?id=72051613 https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime
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AuthorMy name is Dani Slaughter. I am a university student from San Antonio, musing about what I see and how I see it. Archives
October 2020
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