Of the 561 people who have been killed by American police so far in 2016, 136 were black

[YoungDemCA]

Since the 2014 death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, the media has reported extensively that police arrest and kill black men at far higher rates than other groups. Six out of 10 black men claim they have been treated unfairly by police because of their race, according to a 2015 study.

Based on The Counted’s data, black males between the ages of 15 and 34 were nine times more likely to be killed by police officers than any other demographic. This group also accounted for 15 percent of all 2015 deaths from law enforcement encounters, despite making up just 2 percent of the U.S. population.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-people-killed-by-police-america_us_577da633e4b0c590f7e7fb17

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

- Martin Luther King, Jr., from "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution", sermon at the National Cathedral, 31 March 1968.

[tonyt53]

1. I would also be interested in the financial demographics of those killed.

[villager]

2. There's also no question about that: Cops shake down poor people for municipal revenue as do courts,

etc.

And of course, this is another tragic intersection where long festering American issues of race and economy cross and overlap...

[tonyt53]

3. They shoot them too, regardless of race.

[villager]

4. yes they do. nt

[whatthehey]

5. I would have guessed higher

There's all kinds of ancillary data needed to really parse this but I wonder if anybody's seen decent data on police contact/interactions by race. Since we can safely assume that profiling official or unofficial exists, and since for both valid and invalid reasons cops spend more of their time in poorer neighborhoods where minority residence is higher than elsewhere, I think I'm safe in the inference that blacks make up more than their demographic 13% of police "touches", but I can't offhand find if it's more or less than the 24.2% of fatalities. My musing then is whether the cops kill black folk they come into contact with more than others, or simply stop/pull over them more than others and kill people at a reasonably constant rate. Neither is exculpatory, but it would help direct any remedial efforts to the right root cause. If they are interested in remedial efforts that is.

[CrispyQ]

6. The Guardian link is interesting. -nt