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: Of the 1,034 people killed and tracked by Burghart’s Fatal Encounters database so far this year, 215 were black while 338 were white, so thus far in 2016 black Americans have been three times more likely than white people to die in interactions with police. That statistic holds for figures sent to us by Burghart compiled between Jan. 1, 2013 to Sept. 21, 2016, with suicides-by-cop removed. Burghart told us: I think it’s pretty obvious that black people are killed at much higher rates than white people. I’m not going to say that white people are underrepresented in these numbers, since I think all people are overrepresented in this data, but it’s clear that black people are highly overrepresented. Other factors that are also prevalent in analyses of deadly use of force by police officers include age, gender, mental illness, and the circumstances of the deaths. In 250 of the fatal shootings recorded by the Post in 2015, the victims showed signs of mental illness. Men were far more often killed than women. In 782 instances, the person killed was armed with some type of “deadly weapon.” In 28 instances, no record was made of the victim’s race.