Black men face a 1 in 1,000 lifetime risk of being killed by police

Evidence

Moving from the mundane to the more extreme, there is evidence of racial disparities in police use of force. A lack of available and complete data on the frequency and nature of use of force incidents makes it hard to draw definitive conclusions. In response, news outlets and community groups, such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, and the research collaborative Mapping Police Violence, have begun to collect information on police use of force and assemble their own databases. “The Counted,” The Guardian’s database, contains information about 1,146 people in 2015 and 1,093 people in 2016 who were killed during a police encounter, the vast majority of whom were fatally shot. Of these 2,239 people, 573 (25.6 percent) were Black and 1,158 (51.7 percent) were White. Taking into account representation in the general population, the odds—in 2015 and 2016, respectively—were 2.6 and 2.3 times higher for Blacks to be fatally shot by police compared to Whites. Dying from police use of force is a leading cause of death for young men of color (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019). Researchers estimated that the lifetime risk of mortality associated with police use of force is approximately 1 in 2,000 for men and 1 in 33,000 for women. Among all groups, Black males are at the greatest risk and, over the course of a lifetime, 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys will be killed by police. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 372

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading purpose on measured racial disparities; the 2.6x odds ratio and 1-in-1000 lifetime figure for Black men are canonical numbers worth anchoring a bias-in-criminal-justice writing project.
• SEED: Angle: these figures on police-caused death as a leading cause of death for young men of color — roughly matching heart disease/stroke rates — could anchor a piece reframing police violence through public-health rather than criminal-justice metrics.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 372