An article in the Washington Post strongly suggests that there has been a spike in police shootings of black men across the country, even though there are no data to support this notion.
The Tuesday profile of a controversial activist by Post reporter Wesley Lowery, who has a history of making racially charged accusations against his media peers, starts out by depicting a growing trend of police killings of African-Americans.
“Shaun King was furious,” the article said. “The author and life coach turned activist has been one of the most prominent online voices in recent months, as protests of police impunity that began in Ferguson, Mo., spawned demonstrations in cities across the country. For those following the ever-growing roster of names of black men and boys killed by police, he has been one of the essential follows.”
The assertion in a news story that there is an “ever-growing roster” of black males killed by police suggests to readers that this is a burgeoning phenomenon or that perhaps there has been a recent spike in black homicide at the hands of police. There is no statistical proof to support either notion.
There are no comprehensive statistics on police killings of suspects — a problem Lowery himself wrote about in a 2014 Post article. However, another Post reporter in 2014 cited FBI statistics on justifiable homicides — in which a police officer kills a suspect — that indicated such deaths reached their highest point in 1994 and have been generally declining since that time. Many experts cast doubt on these figures, however, and these are figures for all races and both genders, not just black males.
It is true that since the 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, the national media have given an increasing amount of coverage to separate incidents that result in a black male being killed by a police officer.
As the New York Times reported last year,however, “there remains no comprehensive survey of police homicides,” including on the racial breakdown of such events. “Not only do we not know the racial breakdown of police homicides, we don’t know with any precision how many homicides occur, period,” the Times reported.
A report by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that “the rate of police killings of African-Americans has fallen by 70 percent over the last 40-50 years.” (The Center did note that blacks are at a higher risk than are whites, Latinos and Asians.)
David Klinger, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told the Washington Examiner media desk that to note an “ever-growing roster” of black men killed by police is a fact with only superficial meaning. He said it would be like stating there’s an “ever-growing roster” of 75-year-old women who die of heart attacks. “It’s just stating a fact that means nothing,” he said.
“There are statistics on police shootings but they’re not very good,” Klinger said. “I don’t know why [Lowery] used that wording. If he could demonstrate bad police shootings or disproportionate police shootings, that would be something worth talking about.”
John Lott, president of the Crime and Prevention Research Center, made the same observation. “Over time, more cases [of deaths by police] occur,” he said. “But is it occurring at any increasing rate over the years? Police are going to have to fire their guns and there will be many times where it’s justified, so by definition, you’ll have more people killed by police as each year goes by. Just saying that more people are dying isn’t much use.”
Asked on Tuesday about his choice of wording, Lowery defended it using the same logic Lott and Klinger critiqued. “Every time a black man is killed, the roster is one name longer than it was previously,” he said, referring to an unofficial roster that doesn’t exist. “That’s how ‘growth’ works.”
