Title: How Conservatives Use Made-Up And/Or Misleading Nonsense To Justify Police Killings | Current Affairs
Headings: How Conservatives Use Made-Up And/Or Misleading Nonsense To Justify Police Killings
How Conservatives Use Made-Up And/Or Misleading Nonsense To Justify Police Killings
“A police officer is 165 times more likely to be killed by a white man than an unarmed white man is to be killed by a cop.”

Content: An officer’s chance of getting killed by a black person is 0.000033, which is 18.5 times the chance of an unarmed black person getting killed by a cop. After this year’s 72 percent increase in felonious killings of police officers, these ratios will be even more lopsided. You should be able to instantly notice that “18.5” can’t actually be correct for Mac Donald’s particular conclusion. She uses the “unarmed black male victims of police shootings” to calculate “the chance of an unarmed black person getting killed by a cop.” Hang on, though: Eric Garner didn’t die in a police shooting. Neither did Freddie Gray. If we consult the Guardian’s compilation of deaths, we discover that actually, if we include causes of death beyond shooting (like being choked, beaten, tased, or bitten by a police dog), 76 unarmed black men died at the hands of police in 2015, not 36. That’s more than twice as many, which means that Mac Donald is significantly undercounting the dead and is full of crap when she says she’s measured the chance of an “unarmed black person getting killed by a cop.” But wait a second: