State Violence: The Sickening Numbers Behind Police Killings
By: Dr. Michael Wood Jr.
Tags: Black, Police, Ten8, Killings, Violence

State Violence: The Sickening Numbers Behind Police Killings

What if I told you that everything you think you know about police killings of Americans is entirely incorrect? As the retired Baltimore Police that VIBE Magazine called the example of how to be a good cop; as the activist who stood on the front lines of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015–2016; as an original member of the #Resist campaign; as the public educator in hundreds of media appearances explaining the institutional and systemic racism in the criminal justice system, as the post-doctoral scholar who has dedicated their work to creating the science of police management and improving these issues as mentioned earlier, I recently dove into the raw data behind the use of state violence that resulted in death, these numbers are shocking.

Where The Data Comes From

Indeed, it is a strange aspect of our system, but police killings have not been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for tracking. Because of this reality, and instituted because of public outrage, it took the media to figure out the numbers behind police killings. Keep in mind that this information collection’s goal was for anti-police clickbait, so these numbers are biased towards the narrative of bad and racist cops. I have no reason to believe these numbers are significantly off, just know that it is highly likely that close calls are slighted against the police. That is normal with these types of data collection. When you look for something, guess what? You tend to find it.

I still find it mind-blowing that we did not have any of this data until 2015. We did not know how many people our public servants killed until recently. It cannot be just me that finds this unimaginable. The first source we are looking at is The Counted, a project by The Guardian to crowdsource and scour the news and direct reporting to collect the data behind who the police are killing. The Guardian only used their methodology for 2015 and 2016. I suppose it was not as profitable as they hoped.

The second source we are using is The Washington Post who used a different methodology than The Guardian but has kept data from 2015 to current 2020. The Washington Post methods result in lower numbers than The Guardian, though in 2015, the percentages are identical regarding disproportionality and race, which is our topic here. I do not think the differences are critical, but I still wanted to include them for clarity. It appears The Washington Post is only counting shootings, and The Guardian measured any method of homicide.

The third source we are looking at is the commonly referenced FBI statistics that review the year in crime. The FBI data is delayed, so I estimated some 2020 data with the established trends. Police report information to the FBI on Uniform Crime Reports. It is not the best method by any means, but since it is such a large data pool, the good and the bad will balance out. It is important to note that I am only using homicide by the police and the citizens because of the most profoundly obvious revelation that took me ten years to see. Crime is not a measurement of citizen activity; it is a measure of police activity. What police choose to do, choose to report, and choose the narrative of. Homicide is where these problems are minimized the most. We have no idea how many actual shootings, assaults, rapes, et cetera there are; we only know what the people tell the police, then only what those individual police officials decide to report officially. When we have bodies, the margin of error is dramatically reduced, and the accuracy is relatively high.

Highlights in the Data

We will be discussing what the data mean in a minute but let us stick to looking at some stand-out data points.

Between 2015 and 2016, The Guardian and The Post reported a 46.8% and 50% reduction in the unarmed black victims of police killings. This shocked me a bit. I heard zero praise or comment on the rapid improvement, and I was reading everything I found. There are vastly more non-black victims of police killings, and we seldom hear about these cases or see videos of them. As a race, and I must note that race is not scientific, it does not exist outside of human imagination; still, as a race, blacks in America kill many more people than everyone else. I mean, a lot more. 12.7% of the population accounts for an average of 55% percent of murder. The percentage of killers being black is slowly but steadily increasing. The number of people killed by the police is trending downward rather consistently. Keep in mind that each year the American population grows by roughly 3 million people. Therefore, even static numbers are significant reductions.

Since BLM went mainstream, everything has gotten worse from the black community while police have steadily improved.

The Math

I know hate and ad hominin attacks will pour in, but I have nothing to do with this data. I am reporting the data to you. Already you may be confused about how this data is interacting with what you have previously heard. For one, you heard them from the media who could not be more ignorant on the subject. More importantly, you have been hearing the narrative of activists, not science. Campaign Zero, Deray McKesson, Shaun King, or whoever else’s narratives you have heard base their entire premise on a completely false belief. These people have all been claiming that the police respond to demographics. Police do not respond to demographics; police respond to violence. If police responded to demographics 51% of police killings should be females, 15% should be elderly, and 22% should be children. I hope you see that makes no sense whatsoever.

The systemic racism in policing is rooted in the truth that police respond to violence. Police are sent to the areas where 12.7% of the population is committing over 50% of the violence, over 90% of that violence on black victims. Black cities and black citizens pay for employees that respond to that violence. The problem is that police are tasked with finding crime and making arrests. They can only arrest on what they see, and they only see where we put them. We put them where the violence is incredibly disproportional.

I get a lot of nasty treatment for saying it, but we cannot be blaming racism for what takes place in black cities, with black cops, black politicians, black leaders, black councils, black mayors, and a complete black monopoly on policy.

Since police respond to violence and blacks in America commit over 4.3 times as many murders, we should be looking at data that blacks are 4.3 times more victims of police killings. We are not; we are looking at very much the opposite. We are looking at 26%, 24.3%, 22.7%, 23.1%, 24.9%, and 23.2%, we should be looking at 430%, 430%, 430%, 440%, 440%, and 460%.

On the surface, these numbers reflect that:

In 2015, blacks were 16.54 times less likely to be killed by the police than what is expected. In 2016, blacks were 17.7 times less likely to be killed by the police than what is expected. In 2017, blacks were 18.9 times less likely to be killed by the police than what is expected. In 2018, blacks were 19.04 times less likely to be killed by the police than what is expected. In 2019, blacks were 17.67 times less likely to be killed by the police than what is expected. In 2020, the estimate is that blacks are 19.83 times less likely to be killed by the police than what is expected.

Even using the more favorable methodology in the charts, the numbers stay roughly the same.

Conclusion

The narrative is a lie. Blacks in America are well over 16 times LESS likely to be killed by the police than anyone else. It is going to take a while for all of us to process that.