Fake news: Blacks are killed by police in US

“Young black men are 3X more likely to be shot by trained shooters than their white peers,” americanmilitarynews.com reported. A No More Black Targets campaign was even launched to stop the targets that are used at shooting ranges from being black silhouettes, saying that it increases trigger bias.

Data shows that 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. At that rate they certainly qualify as “trained shooters”, having trained on live targets. The left’s rebuttal is that that 84 percent of white homicide victims are killed by other whites, but The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley pointed out that the white crime rate was “much lower than the black rate”.

When “officer involved” shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana led not merely to “unrest” but to a massacre of cops in Dallas, African Americans, the Chicago Tribune also claimed, are two and a half times more likely than Caucasian Americans to be killed by police.

A study posted by a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice however shows that more whites are killed by police than blacks or Hispanics.

The false narrative from Black Lives Matter, maintains that mostly blacks are victims of police violence. Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, decided to use figures from the website Killed by Police.

Based on that data, Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races.

His results, posted on his blog Cop in the Hood, arrived with several caveats, notably that 25 percent of the website’s data, which is drawn largely from news reports, failed to show the race of the person killed. Therefore, as researchers point out, not only FBI data on police shootings by race is notoriously incomplete.

It makes no sense to only look at rates of killings by the police of young black and white men anyway. It makes a lot of sense however when comparing racial groups to violent crime for all blacks and whites. Offender data and an assumption that 92 percent of murders are committed by males, show young black males were about 8 times more likely to commit murders than similarly aged white males. However, a lot of murders occur where the offender isn’t identified and this problem is greater for gang related murders which are mostly black.

“The data doesn’t indicate which shootings are justified (the vast majority) and which are cold-blooded murder (not many, but some). And maybe that would vary by race. I don’t know,” Moskos said on his blog.

Moskos, a former Baltimore cop, found more whites die at the hands of law enforcement. “Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police,” he said. “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”

Adjusting the data by the rate that blacks and whites kill members of their own and other races, young black males were 9 times more likely to commit murders than similarly aged white males.

The percentage of the population that is black in areas reporting justifiable police homicides were 50.3 percent more black (17.8/11.8) than those jurisdictions that didn’t report these homicides.

In the US a total of 509 citizens have been killed in 2016 by police. The body count for the previous year stands at a grand total of 990 people shot dead, according to the Washington Post. Most of those killed by police are male and white. Only 123 of those shot were Black Americans.

Black Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison has said she wants to see an officer shoot an unarmed white teenager in the back before agreeing that the “conversation about race” is over, but her wish has been granted.

A recent analysis shows that more white people died at the hands of law enforcement than those of any other race in the last two years, even as the former Justice Department, social-justice groups and media coverage focused on black victims of police force.

The investigative journalism website ProPublica came up with a similar percentage, reporting that 44 percent of all those killed by police were white, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact concluded in August 2014 that police kill more whites than blacks after the claim was made by conservative commentator Michael Medved. PolitiFact cited data from the Centers for Disease Control on fatal injuries by “legal intervention” from 1999 to 2011.

“Over the span of more than a decade, 2 151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1 130 blacks. In that respect, Medved is correct,” said PolitiFact.

But PolitiFact did not take into account the percentage of those by race involved in violent crime or shootings of police, as Moskos calculated.