Police shootings kill roughly 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys over a lifetime
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
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Concrete quantitative anchor for any piece on systemic racism in policing; connects to activism and journalism contexts around data gaps and Black Lives Matter.
Related
- Black men face a 1 in 1,000 lifetime risk of being killed by police (similarity 0.95)
- Nonlethal police force is used on Blacks far out of proportion to population (similarity 0.83)
- Fatal police shootings of unarmed Blacks measurably harm community mental health (similarity 0.81)
- Unarmed Black and Latino victims are vastly overrepresented among police killings. (similarity 0.79)