Title: Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men? – Mother Jones
Headings: Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?
Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?
The killing in Ferguson was one of many such cases. Here’s what the data reveals.
Jaeah Lee
“For whatever reason, juries are much less likely to convict” police who kill.
“You don’t have to be poor, you don’t have to be in your own community…and this can happen to you.”
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Content: Yet, the lack of comprehensive data means that we can’t know if there’s been an upsurge in such cases, says Samuel Walker, a criminal justice scholar at the University of Nebraska in Omaha and author of The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. “ It’s impossible to make any definitive statement on whether there were more incidents in the last 5 to 10 years than in the past,” he says. “ We just don’t have that kind of data.” But what is certain, Walker says, is that the fatal shooting in Ferguson “was just the tip of the iceberg.” Get our award-winning magazine
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UPDATE (8/15/14): USA Today reported that on average there were 96 cases of a white police officer killing a black person each year between 2006 and 2012, based on justifiable homicides reported to the FBI by local police. As I reported above, the FBI’s justifiable homicides database paints only a partial picture—accounting for cases in which an officer killed a felon. It does not necessarily include cases involving victims like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others who were unarmed when confronted by police.