The Economist, which is certainly no friend of our point of view on criminal justice issues, has this article on a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
The researchers found that white police officers were no more likely to shoot minority citizens than non-white officers were. If anything, black police were more likely to kill black civilians, because police tend to be drawn from the communities they work in. The best predictor of the race of killed civilians, they found, was the rate of violent crime in the place they lived. In areas with high rates of violent crime by African-Americans, police were more likely to shoot dead a black person. In areas in which white people committed more crimes, police were more likely to shoot white people.
If you really want to reduce police shootings, and for that matter incarceration rates, address the cultural influences that lead too many young people to choose the path of crime.
Significant!
Thank you for posting.
Sarah MacDonald of City Journal (NYC) has for years and years been
citing statistics which support this conclusion.
The Harvard Study by an African-American professor concluded the same
a few years ago, i.e., there is no anti-minority or racist shooting bias by
police/LE.
I believe you mean Heather MacDonald. Yes, we cite her work often here.
I found this part of the article citing Roland Fryer's study to be most telling, "he (Fryer) found that police showed racial bias in all forms of force against African-Americans, except one: the use of guns. ...blacks were more likely to be tasered, hit with a baton and generally roughed up..."
Police shootings of unarmed African-Americans are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to abuse by law enforcement, they are just what makes national news. The statistical reality about police shootings really doesn't matter if the publicity about them brings to light the far more common abuse African-Americans suffer at the hands of the police. Sometimes the creation of a mythology is necessary to bring attention to an otherwise ignored reality.
Factual accuracy is important but focusing on one inaccurate claim misses the larger reality: There is in fact a problem with how the police deal with African-Americans.