Title: Do Police Kill More White People Than Black People? | Snopes.com
Headings: Do Police Kill More White People Than Black People?
Do Police Kill More White People Than Black People?
More white people are killed in police shootings than Black Americans, but overall white people are statistically less likely to be killed by police than Black people.
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In September 2016, the ongoing issue of police shootings and race came to a head after a white police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shot and killed Terence Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old African-American man. Similar shootings throughout the U.S. have been caught on camera and widely shared via social media, prompting the development of the Black Lives Matter movement to address a seemingly constant stream of American police officers killing unarmed black people. The issue has also inspired some critics to disingenuously counter that white people are the ones who are killed most frequently by police officers, as expressed in a 21 April 2015 Washington Times article: An 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 Justice Department, social-justice groups and media coverage focus on black victims of police force. Any “analysis” of police killings will of course show that in absolute numbers, more white people are killed in police shootings than black people, because (non-Hispanic) whites comprise a roughly five times greater share of the U.S. population (62% vs. 13%). So any “analysis” that is based on nothing more than absolute numbers and does not take demographics into account is inaccurate and misleading
Because the federal government doesn’t keep an accurate log of police shootings, news outlets such as the Washington Post and journalists such as D. Brian Burghart have begun tracking such data independently. The Post described the statistical breakdown of fatal police shootings in 2015 thusly: According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population.