Title: Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People – Mother Jones
Headings: Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People
Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People
Plus: the crazy way the FBI classifies all police shooting victims as criminals.
Jaeah Lee
The FBI’s data only counts “felons,” but its definition of a felon differs from the common legal understanding of a felon as someone who has been convicted of a felony.

Content: In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who died by “legal intervention” involving a firearm discharge. In theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it does not include legal executions). The CDC’s cause-of-death data, based on death certificates collected at the state level, also reveals a profound racial disparity among the victims of police shootings. Between 1968 and 2011, black people were between two to eight times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than whites. Annually, over those 40 years, a black person was on average 4.2 times as likely to get shot and killed by a cop than a white person. The disparity dropped to 2-to-1 between 2003 and 2009, lower than the 4-to-1 disparity shown in the BJS data over those same years. The CDC’s database of emergency room records also shows similar racial disparities among those injured by police. However, these numbers provide an extremely limited view of the lethal use of force by law enforcement. For reasons that have been outlined by USA Today, Vox , FiveThirtyEight, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others, the FBI data is pretty unreliable and represents a conservative estimate. Some 18,000 agencies contribute to the FBI’s broader crime reporting program, but only about 750 reported their justifiable homicide figures in 2012.