RE: All Lives Matter
June 28, 2017 at 6:44 pm
(This post was last modified: June 28, 2017 at 6:47 pm by ManofYesterday.)
(June 28, 2017 at 6:31 pm)Tiberius Wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post...es-but-no/
"White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers."
First, the Washington Post is a bad source.
Second, it doesn't necessarily follow that because police officers disproportionately kill black people compared to let's say asian people, that there is a race element in the sense that there is systemic racism against black people. The reason more blacks are shot by police may be because black people disproportinately commit more crime; and if they commit more crime, then they have disproportinately more interactions with police officers. That in itself would increase the number of black deaths from police due to just accidents. However, not only are there disproportinately more interactions between blacks and police, these are negative interactions because they involve crime.
Third, there was an interesting study done by the Crime Prevention Research Center which demonstrated that black officers were more likely to shoot black suspects than white officers. How do you explain that?
Fourth, the question of whether or not these killings are justified or not also needs to be addressed. If a police officer kills a black person, it doesn't necessarily follow that the killing wasn't justified. The police officer might have been protecting him or herself or another person.