Contrary to the perception (almost entirely created by the media) that police are on a racist rampage gunning down black people, the truth is that almost all police interactions with black people are identical to children visiting an ice cream truck. But look at any set of data about police interactions or police shootings, slice and dice it whatever way you want, and the numbers simply don’t bear out the notion that black people should be quivering in fear of law enforcement.
Admittedly, data on the issue are a mess. The federal government’s data are counted differently than news organizations or nonprofit organizations, but they all more or less paint the same picture.
The Washington Post‘s database on deadly police shootings says there were 1,021 of them in the year 2020. Of that number, one-quarter were black. Twice as many were white.
In 2018, the latest year for which federal data is available, there were about 3.7 million police-initiated contacts between law enforcement and black people, wherein nonlethal force or the threat of force was used. That same year, according to the Washington Post, 232 black people were shot dead by police. That would mean .006% of police-initiated contacts between law enforcement and black people, wherein nonlethal and lethal force was used, resulted in the death of a black person.
Moreover, overwhelming majorities of black people give police high marks for their behavior when it comes to interacting with police. Looking at just traffic stops in 2015, the most recent year for which this type of data is available, 85% of black people said the police behaved properly when they received a ticket during a traffic stop. For black people who just got a warning, 92% said the police behaved properly. Amusingly, even when the stop resulted in a car search or an arrest, nearly 70% of black people said they thought police conducted themselves appropriately.
Does any of this comport with what they’re saying on cable news or in the papers? Of course not. The media would rather latch on to some random incident, obsess over it (usually lying about what happened), and insist that it’s proof police are hunting down and killing black people in cold blood.
It’s political for the media and for reasons that can be explained elsewhere. But it’s certainly not reality.
