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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Content: 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. As The Post noted in a new analysis, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. According to Fatal Encounters, the database created by former Reno News & Review editor and journalism instructor Burghart (which tracks all deaths resulting from interactions with police), a total of 1,388 people were killed by police in 2015, 318 (23%) of them black, and 560 (40%) of them white. So roughly 23 percent of those killed by any police interaction in 2015 were black and just over 40 percent were white. According to those statistics (adjusted for racial demographics), black people had a 2.7 higher likelihood of being killed by police than whites. The grim trend has carried over into 2016.