At the time of the passing of the late , much lamented George Floyd, I jotted down some notes from an article, in The Times,* I believe. The figures are for the US and are for 2018 as I recall.
Of all the people killed by the police 25% were black, 50% were white with the remainder latino, Asian etc.
Black people make up 13 % of the US population but commit 39% of the murders and 54% of the robberies.
In 2018 for every black person killed by a white person there were eleven black people killed by other black people.
Seems that some black people put themselves in harms way. I also do not accept that because you are poor it's okay to commit crime
* Figures probably still available on website if anyone wants to verify, probably behind paywall.
The Bureau of Justice Stastics’ ‘Race And Ethnicity Of Violent Crime Offenders And Arrestees, 2018’ is about as authoritative as you are going to get (see my caveats below) and I recommend this as a starting point in place of newspaper headlines. My apologies, i provided links but Arrse thinks they're spam so wont post them.
‘Contacts Between Police and the
Public, 2018 – Statistical Tables’
again by the BJS is illuminating:
Highlights
In the prior 12 months, as of 2018, among persons age 16 or older—
About 61.5 million residents had at least one contact with police.
Twenty-four percent of residents experienced contact with police, up from 21% in 2015.
Whites (26%) were more likely than blacks (21%), Hispanics (19%), or persons of other races (20%) to experience police contact.
Tere was no statistically signifcant diference in the percentage of whites (12%) and blacks (11%) who experienced police-initiated contact.
Persons ages 18 to 24 were most likely to have any contact with police (30%) and to experience police-initiated contact (19%).
A higher percentage of blacks (4%) and Hispanics (3%) than whites (2%) or other races (2%) experienced threats or use of force.
Males (3%) were more likely than females (1%) to experience threats or use of force.
Four percent of blacks and 4% of Hispanics reported being handcufed during their most recent contact with police, compared to 2% of whites and 2% of other races.”
If you want more detail then the FBI National Crime Stats are worth looking at. Here you can see for instance that 51.2% of murders and non negligent manslaughter, 36.4% of violent crime and 41.8% of weapons carrying/possession offences are attributed to Black or African Americans (using the nomenclature from the reports).
I did see a recent report that 70%??? of Black or African Americans were victims of same, but can’t find it again to add here. When you consider how many incidents are by family, lovers (or persons known to the victim, this is entirely plausible.
A caveat I would add to any crime data from America is that, there is no standardisation in definitions or reporting across the 14,000? Police forces and law enforcement agencies. This makes it very hard for even professional researchers and analysts to gain accurate insight on a national level. Just decoding local stats can be tricky and time consuming.
This is particularly the case when researching deaths in custody. How ‘custody’ is defined or interpreted varies dramatically from force to force, and we in the UK looking at it from the outside have to drop our own assumptions before jumping to conclusions on headline figures.
One of the things that occurs to me with a modicum of research is that overall, there does appear to potentially be a national problem with death occuring in ‘custody’, but its not necessarily a race issue. If framing it as a race issue adds impetus to having the level of deaths reviewed and improvements made, then that’s only for the good.
Failing unified national reporting standards, I’d like to see more police forces follow New York’s lead on levels of data reporting including info on all weapon discharges, combined with St Louis’ level of kerbside crime/incident data mapping.
As said elsewhere, it’s a more complicated subject than headline figures or even these more detailed ones let on.
