November 26, 2014 / Uncategorized

Two Thoughts on Ferguson

I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading, and mostly trying to just listen. But there were two points I wanted to put out there in response to people complaining that all of the anger in Ferguson and throughout the country is somehow misplaced.

Statistics on “justifiable police homicides” in the U.S. (chart 1) are far from perfect. But when police are three times more likely to kill a black person than a white person, then we have a serious, widespread, and ongoing problem.

Of course, if you grew up black in this country, you probably knew that already…

—

Graph 1 Data:

Reported Number of Civilians Shot and Killed in 2011
	# Killed	Total Pop.	Percentage
USA	404	311,582,564	0.00013%
Australia	6	22,340,000	0.00003%
Germany	6	81,797,673	0.00001%
England & Wales	2	56,600,000	0.00000%
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-do-us-police-kill-so-many-people-2014-8
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop-estimate/population-estimates-for-uk–england-and-wales–scotland-and-northern-ireland/mid-2011-and-mid-2012/stb—mid-2011—mid-2012-uk-population-estimates.html

Graph 2 Data:

People Shot and Killed by Police in the US, from 1999-2011, by Race
	# Killed	Total #s from 2010 Census	Percentage
White	2,151	223,553,265	0.00096%
Black	1,130	38,929,319	0.00290%
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/aug/21/michael-medved/talk-show-host-police-kill-more-whites-blacks/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity

50 Comments

Kerrie Hughes
November 26, 2014 @ 11:32 am

While I’m not keen on charts with misspellings, 🙂 the data from the last two charts is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.
Jim C. Hines
November 26, 2014 @ 11:43 am

Dammit! Fixing that now…
LabRat001
November 26, 2014 @ 12:12 pm

Do you happen to know what the (*) is on the England and Wales stats on the first graph?
Jim C. Hines
November 26, 2014 @ 12:22 pm

That’s not supposed to be there. The first time I worked on this, I didn’t have the same accuracy for the England/Wales numbers, but I found a better source. Just forgot to remove that apostrophe. Stripping that out now, thank you.
LabRat001
November 26, 2014 @ 12:22 pm

I’m pretty sure those two would be Mark Duggan and Michael Fitzpatrick I’m just curious what data is missing or altered by the *
LabRat001
November 26, 2014 @ 12:23 pm

Oh sorry, thanks for the update.
Erin Danielle
November 26, 2014 @ 12:24 pm

The second graph becomes even worse when you consider that black people make up only about 13% of the populace.
Jim C. Hines
November 26, 2014 @ 12:27 pm

Erin – the second graph is a percentage based on the specific racial population, so it takes that into effect.
Jim C. Hines
November 26, 2014 @ 12:27 pm

No worries. Thanks for catching it.
MWT
November 26, 2014 @ 12:48 pm

I was having an argument with a random guy on Twitter yesterday about exactly these sorts of stats. His argument basically boiled down to, those stats are justified because blacks murder people more often than whites do. His numbers were 63% of all murders done by blacks, 16% done by whites, and he didn’t source them. Any idea what he was talking about or did he make that up?
Icedrake
November 26, 2014 @ 2:30 pm

Those figures may be true if you squint juuuust right. But according to the FBI (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded/expanded-homicide-data), in 2011 52.4% of perpetrators were black, 45.2% were white in cases where the race was known. If you take the total number of murders, then the percentages are: black 37.7% (5,486), white 32.5% (4,729), unknown 28% and other race 1.8%.

Expressed as percentage of population, though, 0.01409% of black people committed a homicide, but only 0.00212% of white people did. Black people were 6.67 times more likely to kill someone.

Someone check my arithmetic; I’m not exactly keen on this answer.
Holmelund
November 26, 2014 @ 2:57 pm

Does black people statisticly account for 75% of the crime that typical leads to firearm use by Police Officers?
Becca Stareyes
November 26, 2014 @ 4:15 pm

I’d have to do the math to see what effect unknowns have. If the unknowns skew differently than the knowns, they would alter the percents.

(The other thing is that technically these are ‘people convicted of murder’ not ‘murderers’. If the rate of false convictions was skewed by race*, the true percentages would be different from the ones you measure by looking at convictions.)

Neither changes the number, but any statistical analysis needs to consider its sources of error.

* Or factors correlated to race, like income.
Lizbeth
November 26, 2014 @ 4:39 pm

Extrapolating as a percentage of population is problematic because it misses that 28% whose race is unknown, if all of those missing were white, that 6.67 would become 3.58 times more likely to kill someone (than white people).

Using those simple numbers is also problematic because it ignores the socio-economic reality that, in general, white people live in safer, more affluent neighborhoods, have higher education rates, more easily get jobs, etc.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/28/these-seven-charts-show-the-black-white-economic-gap-hasnt-budged-in-50-years/

Using your same methods, I would say, whether you are white or black, the ones we have to fear are police officers as they have a 0.4206% murder rate. Police are 29.85 times more likely to kill someone than blacks are and 198 times more likely to kill someone than whites.
Icedrake
November 26, 2014 @ 4:52 pm

I’ve been trying to find statistics on murder rates corellated with income levels, but I’ve yet to come up with anything useful. Have you come across anything that fits the bill?

You and Becca are correct, of course, this was a gross oversimplification. I can do numbers, not statistics, it seems.
Icedrake
November 26, 2014 @ 5:34 pm

Some more thinking later, your example isn’t a great critique of the numbers. Becoming a police officer is a choice; being white or black is not. I’ll wager that soldiers have an even higher chance to kill someone.

And even if we assume that every last one of the unknowns was a white perpetrator, the figure of 3.58 times is still one hell of a gap.

I feel that the strongest arguments against the numbers are Becca’s about the distinction between killing and conviction, and yours about controlling for socio-economic factors.
lkeke35
November 26, 2014 @ 6:13 pm

As a WoC, I am intensely curious about the numbers of Whites killed by the Police. Who are these people and why do we never hear about them in the MRM? (Not trying to derail but I did try to Google this information earlier this year, it’s part of my job, but my Google-Fu was ineffective.)
Becca Stareyes
November 26, 2014 @ 6:39 pm

What does MRM stand for? (My brain fills in ‘Men’s Rights Movement’ which doesn’t seem right.)
--E
November 26, 2014 @ 6:57 pm

Are the murder rates drawn from convictions? Don’t forget that if a black person kills someone, they’re very like to get convicted, whereas if a white person kills someone, they’re only likely to get convicted if they’re lower on the socioeconomic scale than the victim. And if the victim is black, then the socioeconimic scale becomes less relevant.

That’s not even counting the remarkable number of black men later exonerated after being railroaded through a murder conviction. Who know what the race is of the actual perpetrator?
--E
November 26, 2014 @ 6:59 pm

(Correction: should be “color” in that last sentence, not “race.” I know better, and still stupid language memes live in the brain.)
SorchaRei
November 26, 2014 @ 8:00 pm

As a white person, I am always shocked when other white people are surprised by this kind of information.
lkeke35
November 26, 2014 @ 10:37 pm

Oh, my bad!
It’s MSM.
Short for Mainstream media, like Fox and CNN.
lkeke35
November 26, 2014 @ 10:41 pm

(No offense, but) As a Black person, I’m not shocked!
Erica Wagner
November 27, 2014 @ 1:17 am

A high percentage of people killed by police are mentally ill. This cuts across all races, I believe, and it’s becoming more of an issue, since there have been such drastic cuts in services for the mentally ill. Mentally ill people are not necessarily dangerous, but they do sometimes commit crimes or act erratically, and when the police are called, they don’t always follow instructions/orders or behave predictably. It seems like unpredictable behavior and a failure to follow orders are often cited as reasons for shootings.

It would be interesting to get some hard data here and break them down, but I suspect that a high percentage of the white people killed by police are mentally ill, and probably poor too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/us/police-shootings-of-mentally-ill-suspects-are-on-the-upswing.html

It would be interesting to see an exact breakdown of the numbers for the percentages of mentally ill police shooting victims by race, to see if there’s a statistically significant difference, but it’s getting late, and my googling is not coming up with much.
SorchaRei
November 27, 2014 @ 1:36 am

No offense taken, at all.

My shock at this widespread ignorance is as much a product of skin color privilege as the ignorance itself, and I know it. But the only hope for change starts with our not turning our heads, pretending we just don’t see. It’s the work white folks have to do, and we have to do it all the time, not just when we “remember” to do it.

I am frequently angry at men who look right through sexism, and exhausted with straight people who look right through homophobia, but I do it, too, when it comes to racism. I know that these statistics exist, and yet I look right through the racist ignorance around me, because it *can* be background noise for me, if I let it be. It’s on me not to let it be. Thank you for reminding me of that.
Cerberus
November 27, 2014 @ 2:27 am

The numbers are interesting, but lack context and don’t really prove wrongdoing. The fact that American police officers are more likely to use lethal violence for example most likely reflects the simple fact that American police officers live in a far more dangerous country, both for police officers and civilians than Germany, the UK or Australia.

I don’t have data from those countries, but for example the last time a Danish police officer was murdered in the line of duty was in 1988 (not counting a murder in 1999 for personal reasons or a fatality from a terrorist attack in Pakistan in 2008 or suicides and accidents).

While that doesn’t prove that US police are justified in their use of lethal violence, it does means you can’t conclude wrongdoing from the simple fact that the US police use more lethal violence than the police in less violent countries. Basically the numbers prove there’s a problem in the US, but they don’t prove the problem is with the police.
Cerberus
November 27, 2014 @ 2:32 am

Oops, missed a murder in 1995 of a Danish police officer during a bank robery, still the central point remains.
Martin
November 27, 2014 @ 7:49 am

Some other data: The high kill rate is also the result of the number of shots fired. The German police shoots in total 40-50 bullets per year on people (with 240000 cops). When i searched for US data, i found that NYC police alone shot 6 times as much on people, up to 72 per incident. Of course that will increase fatalities.

From data i would argue that there is a lack of fire discipline. The tragic case in Cleveland seems to be an example of that.

It seems that they US cops fire when in doubt while training here focuses on avoiding to shoot (it still fails often enough). That may partially explain the racial tilt as well. The police feels threatened quicker, when the opponent is of a different race. Shooting is then an emotional reaction, not a rational one. This too points toward lack or wrong training.
Rico
November 27, 2014 @ 9:02 am

I think people are fully justified in saying the anger in Ferguson was misplaced. While the rate of police killings in this country are deplorable, this does not appear to be one of the cases where homicide was unjustified based on the evidence. Even though there are typically several cases of unjustified police homicide each year, people never seem to latch onto those.
Amanda
November 27, 2014 @ 9:43 am

I’ve been nervously watching all of this unfold as a person who is 1) the wife of a white police officer and 2) a person who works with minority communities and is well aware of the history and not-so-history of tension between the police and minority communities.

There are DEFINITELY regional differences in police training and police transparency across this country. Poorly trained officers escalate situations because they get in over their heads and then panic, and their panic is legal justification for their escalation. Older officers train younger officers. The only long-term effective way to break that culture is to recruit and retain better officers with stricter mental health support structures and stricter officer conduct discipline, and weed out the older set.

Ways that they are trying to increase transparency locally: body cameras, collecting racial demographic data on tickets and crime reports (at the request of the community, to better track enforcement stats), hiring a psych clinician to ride in the field and accompany officers to mental health calls, etc. Does all this mean the department is now free of negative contact with the public? Hell no. But it’s improving.

I guess what I’m saying is… push for transparency. You should know how your department is trained, what stats they are or are not keeping, how they handle officers with behavioral problems, how they investigate complaints. Push for minority liaisons if you are in a particularly affected community. Push for cameras. Know your rights, but also know what you’re *not* entitled to. Know the legal bounds of protest, and for goodness sake don’t start throwing rocks!
| Kathy Kenzie
November 27, 2014 @ 2:23 pm

[…] Americans, and that’s a big societal problem that goes far deeper than any one case. (Here’s one look at the numbers, thanks to Jim C. Hines.) I sincerely hope the heightened awareness of the problems that has come […]
DawnD
November 27, 2014 @ 3:10 pm

Amanda – this was constructive. Thank you. I may share your suggestions in some other places.

I keep running across folks who say we can’t do these things due to the costs involved. I think we need to do them in order to make positive changes. Are you able to share anything about how these efforts were funded?
Lenora Rose
November 27, 2014 @ 3:20 pm

So the follow up, where people began a peaceful protest and the police immediately, and prior to any known looting/rioting, answered with tear gas and military equipment, that’s all okay and doesn’t suggest anything wrong?

I think that the people in Ferguson have been given plenty and plenty more to be angry about regardless of the exactly what happened in the last minute of Brown’s life. But people who want to say the anger is misplaced focus on that minute, not the days and weeks after of blatant police brutality.
Rico
November 27, 2014 @ 7:20 pm

I never said I agree with it. We have a bad governor that has made things worse every step of the way. Failed leadership poisons everything.

Also thank you for telling me how I think Lenora. I know the anger is misplaced because the St Louis area has some of the worst school districts in the nation. The inner city area there is full of some of the most uneducated people in this nation. Many there are basing their reaction off how they feel because they were never taught to think.

So yes, the anger was misplaced because police brutality, based on the evidence we have available did not happen this time.

It would be like assuming that because a store was frequently stolen from by Asians it was always an Asian that committed the theft. It is pure ignorange and should be shunned.
Cerberus
November 28, 2014 @ 6:12 am

Rialto California has run an test which resulted in a 60% drop in police use of force and an 88% drop in complaints about the police. The cost was 100.000$ or 1000 $ per camera, a price that will no doubt drop with time.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/04/california-police-body-cameras-cuts-violence-complaints-rialto
AMM
November 28, 2014 @ 9:37 am

The police feels threatened quicker, when the opponent is of a different race.

In the USA, at least, it’s not “a different race.” It’s when they’re black. Black officers are also more likely to shoot a black person than a white person. Blacks as well as whites absorb the prejudice that a black person is more criminal and more dangerous than a white person when doing exactly the same thing. (And the prejudice gets applied to very young children, e.g., 3-year-olds.)
roger tang
November 28, 2014 @ 9:59 pm

“So yes, the anger was misplaced because police brutality, based on the evidence we have available did not happen this time.”

Based on my reading of the evidence, I would not agree. I think the anger is PRECISELY placed because the question is very much undecided.

A trial would have helped with that.

And you ignore I think the funding mechanism of the police departments of the area, which rely more on fines of the local community. That was a trigger for the event. And that’s a surefire recipe for resentment of the police department.
Laura Resnick
November 29, 2014 @ 3:27 am

Amanda, I live in Cincinnati, where we had 8 days of riots in May 2001 after a white officer shot and killed an unarmed, non-violent young black man (who was being pursued on foot because he hadn’t made his court appearance for unpaid traffic tickets). These were (I have read) the second biggest riots in US history, and severely damaged the city. The Department of Justice intervened, since problems in the structure and training of our police force was seen as a central issue in the incident which sparked the rioting–in part because that incident was nearly as unusual or singular in law enforcement here as it should have been.

The longterm upshot is that, as a direct result of scrutiny and changes arising out fo the ashes of the riots, Cincinnati now has one of the best-trained and most transparent police forces in the US, and is in a very different situation than it was in the years before and after the riots. No police department is perfect, ours included, but the city has implemented or is implementing a number of the things you’ve mentioned above, and the new police chief (who I’ve met) is VERY big on transparency and on connecting citizens with the police force.

Change is possible, improvements can be concrete. 13 years after what happened here, I’ve no idea if Ferguson will get the post-riot attention and hard work that Cincinnati did–and it certainly took time (the city was very depressing in the post-riot years), but, yes, improvement is one of the options.
This is Me Not Being Silent | Ex Libris Bookewyrme
November 29, 2014 @ 10:14 am

[…] system is a travesty. But the thing is, this isn’t just about Brown. This is about the hundreds of black people killed needlessly by police in the past few years. Some victims have been portrayed […]
Amanda
November 29, 2014 @ 12:04 pm

They had to get an increase in their equipment budget, which meant getting the city on board to allocate funds to the department. Unfortunately budget increases only seem to happen when there is a major public relations crisis that the city can’t ignore. 🙁 In our case, it was a couple of officer misconduct cases involving women of the public (I’ll let you fill in the details– there is jail time being served). We’ve had years of budget cuts and decent officers fleeing to better paying departments, so you know it’s bad when the city government is willing to spend money (about $2 million, and they are rolling cameras and camera training out in batches).

It’s a recent roll-out, so they are still working out the kinks in application and not every officer has one yet. There are still some concerns about how/whether the public can request to see footage, or if it can only be produced in court or during investigation of a formal complaint. On the flip side the local ACLU chapter is raising concerns about violating the privacy of citizens by recording them and using/sharing that footage. So we’ll see where the policy shakes out between these issues.

I’m encouraged by Laura’s comment below–I’m hoping for similarly permanent improvements here.
lkeke35
November 29, 2014 @ 5:53 pm

I would like to point out their anger isn’t misplaced at all. They are angry at the SYSTEM of institutional violence that allows Black men to be by people who have sworn to uphold public safety. It’s not just one incident. It’s ALL of the incidents of police brutality, disrespect, and misconduct.
Mike brown was just the latest in a several decades long string of police misconduct. If you are White and male in St. Louis, this doesn’t affect you, you never see it, and I’m pretty sure you are ill-equipped to speak to the topic of something that they live with daily and you don’t. I’ve been seeing this exact same argument all over the internet and the posters always seem to miss the point. That this doesn’t begin or end with Mike Brown. He’s just the latest one.

I’d also like to point out that your argument is coming too close for my comfort, to telling these people how they should be reacting to systemic injustice, based on how you personally feel about it.

Please don’t derail this message board by arguing that those ignorant people need to start behaving the way you’d like them to.
lkeke35
November 29, 2014 @ 7:44 pm

Thank you Amanda. This was much more constructive than much of the commentary I’ve seen on this on the internet.
David Youngs
November 29, 2014 @ 11:47 pm

$100,000 doesn’t seem much if compared to the cost of a strip mall destroyed.
Jon Dough
December 2, 2014 @ 2:46 pm

Just curious with all of this debate on injustice and wonderful statistical analysis… How many people, regardless of race, were just innocently murdered by police? I mean, literately doing nothing to warrant police intrusion into their lives resulting in said “murder.” I will concede that lethal force is not a good thing as I cherish life in general and even more so that many crimes do not warrant a death sentence. However, why does everyone ignore that most of the police “murders” happen to people that get tangled with the law through suspected (or actual) criminal activity… a situation where things can go south really quick considering police generally operate as fearing for their safety at every given incident.
Kaz
December 2, 2014 @ 2:48 pm

I sadly can’t provide statistics either – stats about this seem hard to come by even without the racial aspect – but anecdotally, I am pretty sure that race plays a role and that the intersection of being black and mentally ill is seriously, seriously not pretty. Disability is one of the other big ones as far as police violence goes; I was semi-active in online disability rights a few years back and we heard sooooo many stories about disabled people (usually mentally ill but there’s a number of disabilities that make you vulnerable here such as being autistic, being d/Deaf, having epilepsy and the like) being killed by the police… and what certainly looked like a disproportionate number of them were black. 🙁

Three guesses why the MSM doesn’t talk about it. Or why the articles I *am* finding often focus on mentally ill people in crisis, armed, possibly threatening suicide or the like whereas the stories I remember seeing over and over and over and the ones I’m finding way too many of by Google search tend to involve disabled people minding their own business and then being killed for things like non-NT body language being read as threatening or failure to obey instructions. Examples: an epileptic man being tasered to death for seizing (this one is in the UK), a deaf man shot by the police, an article listing five different occasions police killed people with mental disabilities and Jesus Christ I am going to stop here because it is way too easy to find these stories and I’m getting seriously depressed. Further reading: s.e. smith, a disability rights activist, on police and disability.
Jim C. Hines
December 4, 2014 @ 10:23 am

Jon,

“However, why does everyone ignore that most of the police “murders” happen to people that get tangled with the law through suspected (or actual) criminal activity…”

In part, as I noted in the post, police in the U.S. seem significantly more likely to kill the people they tangle with than police in other nations, which is a problem all by itself.

And then there’s the fact that police seem to “suspect” black people of criminal activity much more frequently. Look at the Stop and Frisk research and fallout, for example.

It can be comforting to assume that people getting killed by the police must have done something to deserve it, but in many cases, what they did to “escalate” the situation or make the police fear for their safety was simply to be black.
Black Lives Matter
December 6, 2014 @ 11:37 am

[…] is a companion blog post to go with the charts I posted in Two Thoughts on Ferguson. That post showed the disproportionate number of police-inflicted deaths in the U.S. compared to […]
Jon Dough
December 9, 2014 @ 8:08 pm

Or to simply execute a strong armed robbery… or simply sell cigarettes illegally.

Although I could agree that these actions may not have deserved a death sentence I cannot entirely agree with “what they did to “escalate” the situation or make the police fear for their safety was simply to be black.” Especially in these cases where escalation was prompted by attack and resistance in each respective case…. definitely comforting and makes it easy to leave reasoning up to “simply…be[ing] black” and completely ignore all other circumstances however I would further disagree that it is not so simple!

I’m not even going to go into the “window in to the lives and attitudes” provided by Mr. Brown with the “burn this b**ch down” comments after the grand jury decision which likely furthers the argument that this was not “simply a black man” walking the street minding his own business beyond just performing a strong armed robbery for Cigarillos (wonder what those were being used for).

The narrative of “it’s because I’m/they were black” in XXXX situation is so unproductive to real overarching problems of the black community and to race relations in general as it continually puts a wedge between people and diverts personal responsibility.

So you really believe that there has been so little progress in our society as to simply write everything off always as “they were black.” How about diverting the focus from color to the person and maybe not care that he was black but rather maybe not such a good person (at this point in his life) who engaged in activity that put him in a situation that unfortunately ended his life. Maybe even more so it was an action of a young kid that was caught up in being the type of person that would find himself in this situation… and would have maybe grown out of that phase to become a respected and productive member of society… we will never know because of the choices HE (as a PERSON) made in being the PERSON he chose to be at this point in his life.
Jim C. Hines
December 9, 2014 @ 8:16 pm

Nobody’s simplifying everything down to just “they were black.” But how about you take another look at the fact that black people are three times as likely to be killed by the cops as white people. Or the research on disproportionate sentencing for the same crimes based on race. Or heck, just check out some of the black lives the police ended this year.

Where I see people searching for comfort is by looking for ways to blame victims for their own murders.

Go read the stories on that link, then come back here and tell me how a 12-year-old was maybe not such a good person and found himself in a situation where cops rolled up and shot him within two seconds of exiting the car, then stood around not bothering to administer first aid.
Jon Dough
December 10, 2014 @ 2:56 am

Why don’t we take another look at the fact that there is a disproportionate number of crimes perpetrated by the black community? Would this not lead to a disproportionate negative involvement with police that possibly could result in a death?

Why don’t we look at the disproportionate rate of violent crime among black men?

Why don’t we look at the disproportionate rate of black on black violence/crime? Did “Black Lives Matter” then?

Why don’t we look at some cases where black cops killed young white persons even unarmed ( http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/27/white-teen-gilbert-collar-killed-by-black-cop-trev/, http://www.youngcons.com/unarmed-white-man-was-killed-by-a-black-cop-look-how-the-media-responds/, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bristolpalin/2014/08/unarmed-white-kid-shot-and-killed-by-black-cop-in-salt-lake-city/)?… all doing something prompting police escalation after the encounter I might add.

“Blame victims for their own murders”… so if someone gets involved with police and gets killed by not complying and taking aggressive (or even perceived aggressive) action toward those we charge with protecting the community at large (and themselves while on the job) and have been given the authority to use lethal force… it is murder? Guess grand juries don’t see it that way?

I may not be able to tell you how a “12-year-old was not such a good person” but I could tell you how a 12-year-old probably did not understand the consequences of his actions (also extremely unfortunate)… Did you see that airsoft gun… it looked real and I am sure even more so from a distance… sure the dispatcher was told “it was probably (key word) fake” but it was being waived at people and are police to to go under the assumption “oh that gun isn’t real”… last time I checked just as deadly, if turns out it was real, in the hands of a 12-year-old as a 6 year-old or 60-year-old.

How about other children actually doing horrendous things they also probably didn’t completely understand … such as 8-year-old committing first degree murder in Arizona, 10-year-old homicide of 90-year-old woman, or 13-year-old raping 8-year-old in Delaware… are police to believe that the young are not capable of crimes that may result in them having to make hard choices on the scene in an effort of protecting everyone including themselves?

Not that even a single life does not matter. How about that there are about 400 fatal police killings a year in a nation of over 300 million and of over 2 million incarcerated (if we want to just use a number of those actually convicted of crimes… aka people who have entangled with police in a bad situation). 400 isn’t even a statistical error…. its like 2 ten-thousandths of a percent. If we start looking at these statistics we could say that overall there is an extremely low number of police shootings period.

I’d rather we just ignore all of the above as it was actually just an example of cherry picking things to fit my argument as I see in your arguments. Also, of course, there are outliers in every situation that can be presented too.

My point and the point I was trying to make earlier is these are PEOPLE that find themselves in these situations many times as a results of their own actions and unfortunately sometimes pay with their lives also many times through their own actions prompting escalation in a situation where it is time to take it very seriously WHO HAPPEN TO BE BLACK. The action and result is not from “simply being black” but rather from a PERSON engaging in or suspected of engaging in activity that entangles them with the law and results in the worst outcome. Of course, if this were not the case I guess that would mean that there would ONLY be police “murders” of black people and zero cases of police killings of persons of any other race. And, no killings of black people by black police either.

I am trying to say the focus on race rather than the person is an unproductive wedge and deflects personal responsibility… what is it “judge me by the content of my character not the color of my skin.” “Black Lives Matter” are just the type of racially charged slogans that perpetuate this narrative that will never lead to a unity or peace among all PEOPLE. Stop feeding the beast and start looking at PEOPLE as PEOPLE and judging them on their own merit. Address the real problems of communities leading to situations like these. This is the way to a united society. The problem is that PEOPLE can’t/won’t do it as it is impossible to get 100% agreement on anything in this world and there are those that wish this to never end. It is just too easy to just say “the other side isn’t doing it and I’m not going first.”