Cops vs. Blacks ??

When calculated as a percentage of the population in the places where the shootings occurred, blacks were three times as likely to be killed by police than whites.

  Denver Post

The question of whether our police forces are prone to mete "justice" along race lines is a very important one. My "sense" has been that it's way off balance and that people of color are overwhelmingly treated with deadly force (not to mention racial profiling harassment and non-lethal, but excessive force).

A recent spate of news articles about white men being arrested, rather than killed, after killing cops made me more curious about my assumption, which was this: if it had been a black man, he'd have probably been killed instead of arrested.

So I've just spent a few hours compiling a spreadsheet of officers killed (other than by accident) in 2016 and whether the suspect was arrested or killed and whether black or white.  (By the way, all suspects were male, one officer was female.)

I got the information on the incidents and the outcomes from  CNN (52 Fallen Officers in 2016 - I left out Rod Lucas, because it wasn't clear whether the killing was accidental, and it was committed by a detective at work) and cross-checked at Officer Down.  I had to then search the internet news sources for the race of the perpetrators.  What I found made me question my assumptions.

Out of 51 incidents in 2016 where an officer was killed in an altercation, arrests were made 30 times, with 15 of the perpetrators being white, and 15 black and 0 Latino.  Perpetrators were killed 18 times, with 11 of them being white, 3 black and 4 Latino.  (There were two claimed white suicides and one black.)

So, for 26 whites involved in a cop killing,  approximately 40% were killed.  For 18 blacks, approximately 20% were  killed.  By this year's numbers, it looks like your chances of being killed in a fatal cop shooting if you are Latino are 100%.

Maybe my analysis of the data is flawed.  If so, I hope someone will point it out to me. One thing that comes to mind is that I used straight percentage.  It doesn't tell me whether, had the same number of blacks been involved in officer killings as whites, the percentage killed would have increased, decreased or remained the same.  All I can say is that with current data, and a simple statistical analysis, it appears whites involved in a cop killing in 2016 were twice as likely to be killed as blacks.

I don't know how to look at this in light of the Denver Post finding (above), or vice versa. My data analysis doesn't answer the question of how many suspects were killed versus arrested in incidents where an officer did not die, which would have been taken into account in the Post finding.  Nor does it address whether this year is an anomaly or is representative.  (It would be interesting to know how that compares to years before Black Lives Matter and increased public scrutiny.)

But it does challenge my assumptions.


P.S.  Arizona and Texas had two incidents each, and the suspects were killed in all incidents.  California had five, all were arrested; Georgia had four, all arrested; Kansas, Ohio and Missouri had two each, all arrested.  Not enough incidents to make any statistical conclusion, especially since I didn't note the situations leading up to the resolutions, but it would be interesting to see how those stats look when added to arrests and killings in each state where an officer didn't die.  That's a job for someone else.