How Many Unarmed Black People Are Killed By Police Each Year
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THE recent spate of police-involved deaths highlight a grim statistic: black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
More than 1,000 unarmed people were killed due to police harm between 2013-2019 and one third were black, according to Mapping Police Violence.
Here is more on the grim statistic and the police-related deaths of black people.
The Air We Breathe: Implicit Bias And Police Shootings
Nathaniel Pickett Sr., 65, said that Nate was the only child he had with Dominic Archibald, a two-time combat veteran and retired Army colonel. After their divorce in 1990 when Nate was not quite 5, the boy went to live with his mom. He became a Boy Scout and fancied Frank Sinatra music, art and sports except football because he didn’t like getting dirty. Archibald eventually enrolled him at the Fork Union Military Academy, an all-boys college preparatory boarding school in Virginia. She agreed to let him transfer in his senior year to Woodrow Wilson High School, a public school in Washington, D.C.
“We just wanted him to be happy,” Pickett said.
Less than three years after Pickett’s death, Woods was involved in a second on-duty shooting of another unarmed man.
Woods was not wearing a body camera. Martinez did not respond to a request through his mother for an interview.
“He was shot 3” times, his mother, Kathy Searcy, said in a Facebook message to NPR that included photos of his bullet wounds. “Plus, he was being tased at the same time.”
Michael Ramos, the San Bernardino County district attorney at the time of both shootings, declined to charge Woods, saying the deputy was justified in shooting both men. He said in a recent phone interview with NPR that he doesn’t remember the cases but said he always adhered to the law when deciding whether to charge an officer with killing someone.
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Woods, 28, could not be reached for comment.
Police Kill More Whites Than Blacks Is True And It Isnt
Men lie, women lie and they both use numbers when it favors them.
This rebuttal is used to downplay black Americas outrage and its sad to say, the stats are unfairly true whats more concerning is that its unfairly used. Whether the stats are true or not, its insensitive to use statistics to indirectly tell a parent that the unjustifiable acts by the police
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Where Do Most Fatal Police Killings Happen
A common assumption is that fatal police shootings most often occur in urban locations, because some of those areas are perceived to be plagued by high levels of community gun violence. But a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine in May 2020 found fatal police shooting rates were as high in rural areas as in urban areas. Suburban locations were found to have somewhat lower rates.
And a separate, 2019 study from Harvard suggests that different neighborhoods present disparate risks of police violence: Researchers found that the risk of Black people being killed by police was highest in predominantly white neighborhoods.
Memorials Protests And Other Reactions
The area near the location where Floyd was murdered became a makeshift memorial throughout May 26, with many placards paying tribute to him and referencing the Black Lives Matter movement. As the day progressed, more people came to demonstrate against Floyd’s murder. Hundreds of people, then marched to the 3rd Precinct of the Minneapolis Police. Participants used posters and slogans with phrases such as “Justice for George”, “I can’t breathe“, and “Black Lives Matter”. On September 18, the Minneapolis City Council approved designating the section of Chicago Avenue between 37th and 39th Streets as George Perry Floyd Jr. Place, with a marker at the intersection with 38th Street where the incident took place. The intersection has been closed and occupied by demonstrators who said they won’t leave until their demands regarding anti-racism and property tax are met.
While peaceful protests continued, others again became violent after sundown, with the pattern repeating for several days. As of June 9, the Star Tribune estimated 570 businesses in the MinneapolisSaint Paul area had been vandalized or destroyed, including 67 destroyed by fire.
Numerous statues and monuments honoring persons or events associated with slavery and racism were vandalized, removed, or destroyed during the protests in the U.S. and elsewhere.
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Police Violence And Gun Ownership
The role of gun prevalence in police violence is another area that has recently garnered attention. Some recent research has found a connection between the number of households who own guns in a state and the rate of police violence in those states. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Urban Health found that fatal police shootings were 40 percent more likely in states with higher rates of gun ownership.
Violence At Us Protests
The new data on fatalities and violence at American protests comes from a database created by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project , a non-profit, working in collaboration with a group of researchers at Princeton.
ACLED, a widely cited source for data on civilian casualties in Yemen, has been a non-partisan monitor of protests and violence in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Latin America, and launched its US Crisis Monitor in July, citing concerns over hate crimes and rising political violence.
ACLED found that the overwhelming majority of the more than 9.000 Black Lives Matter demonstrationsthat took place across the US after the killing of George Floyd have been peaceful. News reports at the height of demonstrations over Floyds killing cited dozens of deaths in connection with protests, butmany of those turned out to be examples of deadly crimes carried out in the vicinity of protests, rather than directly related to the demonstrations themselves, the researchers concluded. ACLEDs dataset only focuses on political violence.
Most of the protesters killed this year were shot to death, and many of the incidents involved confrontations at protests that escalated and turned deadly when at least one of the people involved had a gun.
Both Reinoehl and Perry have claimed they were acting in self-defense when they opened fire and that they felt their own lives were in danger.
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How Common Is Fatal Police Violence
According to the Washington Posts Pulitzer Prize-winning Fatal Force database, police kill about 1,000 people annually in the U.S., a figure that hasnt changed significantly over the past five years.
Until 2019, the federal government did not track the number of police killings of civilians in a centralized location. This led to an undercounting of these deaths because reporting these incidents was largely left to local law enforcement. As a result, some advocacy groups and journalists have stepped in to fill the void. These include , which was started by activist Samuel Sinyangwe , a catalog by journalist D. Brian Burghart and the Fatal Force database. In 2019, police killed between 999-1,795 people, according to these various tracking systems.
In January 2019, the FBI started collecting data on police killings for its Use of Force database. But so far, the agency hasnt released any data or findings from this project. An FBI spokesperson told Marketplace Morning Report in June 2020 that the first data release will occur sometime this summer.
Reginald Leon Boston Jr
Jacksonville, Florida
According to CBS affiliate WJAX, 20-year-old Reginald Leon Boston Jr. was fatally shot by Jacksonville police who said they had set up an undercover operation to find a man who robbed someone at gunpoint. Police had three suspects, including Boston.
Officers attempted to arrest Boston and two others when suspects allegedly displayed a gun that they would not put down, WJAX reported. Officers shot two suspects, including Boston. Boston was killed at the scene.
It is not clear if Boston was the person holding the gun.
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Police Use Of Deadly Force In The United States
In the United States, use of deadly force by police has been a high-profile and contentious issue. In 2019, 1,004 people were killed by police shootings according to The Washington Post and 1,098 people were killed by police in total according to the “Mapping Police Violence” project.
A lack of reliable data has made conclusions about race and policing difficult. Several non-government and crowdsourcing projects have been started to address this lack of reliable data. Research has provided mixed results on the extent of racial bias in the police use of deadly force, with some studies finding no racial bias, while other studies conclude there is racial bias in the use of deadly force.
A study by Esposito, Lee, Edwards estimated that 1 in 2,000 men and 1 in 33,000 women have a lifetime risk of dying as a result of police use of deadly force, with the highest risk for black men, at approximately 1 in 1,000. Black, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaskan individuals are disproportionately killed in police shootings compared to White or Asian individuals.
Who Is Most At Risk For Police Violence
This article is part of the Guns & America explainer series. You can read other entries here.
Over the past several years, the problem of police violence in the U.S. has garnered worldwide attention: the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and George Floyd in May 2020, among others.
Many of these cases highlight a particularly devastating problem: the impact of police violence on communities of color. While the raw total of white Americans killed by police is larger than other racial groups, statistics show people of color are killed by police at much higher rates.
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Black Americans Disproportionately Killed By Police
According to an analysis by Mapping Police Violence, despite only making up 13 percent of the US population, Black Americans are nearly three times as likely as white Americans to be killed by the police. The group also found that levels of violent crime in US cities do not determine rates of police violence.
A further analysis performed by policeviolencereport.org found that Black people were more likely to be killed by police , more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed .
List Of Killings By Law Enforcement Officers In The United States September 2020
This is a list of people reported killed by non-military law enforcement officers in the United Statesin September 2020, whether in the line of duty or not, and regardless of reason or method. The listing documents the occurrence of a death, making no implications regarding wrongdoing or justification on the part of the person killed or officer involved. Killings are arranged by date of the incident that caused death. Different death dates, if known, are noted in the description.
The table below lists 14 people.
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National Database On Police Killings Tracked 1127 Deaths Last Year
Most of them were shot.
Story at a glance
- The police killing of George Floyd brought renewed attention to police violence in the United States.
- Police brutality disproportionately affects Black Americans, who are more likely to be stopped by law enforcement.
- There is no federal database of information of police violence in the United States.
On the day George Floyd was killed last year, six other Americans were killed by police, according to a database by Campaign Zero. By that point in the year, police had already killed 474 people. By the end of the year, they would have killed more than 600 additional people.
The pandemic and the lockdown did not change this pattern of police violence: more people were killed by police in 2020 than in 2019 and only 16 of these cases resulted in officers being charged with a crime. The police know, and the data confirms, that they can kill people with impunity, said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and co-founder of Campaign Zero, in a release.
THE LATEST ON THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT
Of the 1,127 people killed by police in 2020, 96 percent were killed by police shootings and most others involved tasers, physical force and police vehicles, according to the report. Half of those were reportedly armed with a gun, but the report found that 1 in 6 people with a gun were not threatening anyone when they were killed and may have been de-escalated instead.
Police In The Us Killed 164 Black People In The First 8 Months Of 2020 These Are Their Names
On May 25, George Floyd died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes. The incident sparked international protests against racism and police brutality but in the wake of this mass call for change, police are still killing Black men and women at disproportionate rates.
Using databases from Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post, CBS News has compiled a list of 164 Black men and women who were killed by police from January 1 to August 31, 2020. Many of the cases remain under investigation.
This data is based on reported and verified cases, and does not necessarily account for all incidents in which a person was killed by police. But based on the known cases, police have killed at least one Black person every week since January 1, and only two states Rhode Island and Vermont have reported no killings by police this year.
Here are the known names and cases of the Black men and women who have been killed by police so far this year.
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Fact Check: False Data On Us Racial Murder Rates
4 Min Read
Users on social media are sharing an image that features misleading data on black and white murder rates. Based on existing U.S. government data, all the figures are false.
The image alleges, for example, that 81% of white murder victims are killed by Blacks. Data from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice show on the contrary that more than 80% of white murder victims are killed by whites.
Posts with the claim are visible here , here and here .
The image lists the following categories: whites killing blacks 2%, police killing whites 3%, whites killing whites 16%, blacks killing whites 81%, police killing blacks 1% and blacks killing blacks 97%. No dates are specified, and the data is attributed to stats from Wikipedia.
In the Homicide section of Wikipedias Race and Crime in the United States entry here , the site quotes a report by the U.S. Department of Justice visible here . The report, which analyzes Homicide Trends in the U.S. between 1980-2008, found that within that period most murders were intraracial, with 84% of white victims killed by whites and 93% of Black victims killed by Black perpetrators.
According to the FBIs Expanded Homicide data from 2018, the most recent report of this kind Reuters was able to find , 80.7% of the murders of white people were committed by white offenders while 15.5% of the murders of white people were committed by Black offenders .
Black People More Than Three Times As Likely As White People To Be Killed During A Police Encounter
Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers examined 5,494 police-related deaths in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017. Rates of deadly police encounters were higher in the West and South than in the Midwest and Northeast, according to the study. Racial disparities in killings by police varied widely across the country, with some metropolitan areas showing very high differences between treatment by race. Black Chicagoans, for example, were found to be over 650% more likely to be killed by police than white Chicagoans.
The wide variance in deaths by police shows how preventable these deaths are, study authors Jaquelyn Jahn and Gabriel Schwartz, recent graduates from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, told UPI in a June 24 article.
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Likely A Record Breaking Year For Deaths By Police In Canada
Each year approximately five million Canadians encounter some type of confrontation with police. The majority of these occurrences end without incident, however, roughly 30 civilians die each year following an encounter with the police in Canada. This year has been an especially violent one with 30 civilians killed after police used force during the first half of 2020.
There is no official agency in Canada collecting or tracking the details of these police vs. civilian incidents of death. CBC researchers, therefore, began tracking encounters between police and civilians that ended in death in an effort to build a national database and gain insight into the circumstances surrounding these fatal confrontations.
DEADLY FORCE DATABASE
CBC researchers examined thousands of independent investigator reports, coroner reports, court records, news reports and conducted family interviews to create the Deadly Force database, which is updated and maintained by CBCs own researchers. The database does not include those who suffered in-custody deaths, self-inflicted wounds as a result of suicide or attempts to evade the police, or accidental police-related deaths .
CBC researchers found more than 460 incidents between 2000 and 2017. Approximately 70% of the cases involved fatal police shootings.
CBC researchers also found that the number of cases of civilian death following police encounters has risen over the past 20 years.
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