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: “For whatever reason, juries are much less likely to convict” police who kill. “Unfortunately, the patterns that we’ve been seeing recently are consistent: The police don’t show as much care when they are handling incidents that involve young black men and women, and so they do shoot and kill,” says Jones-Brown, a former assistant prosecutor in Monmouth County, New Jersey. “ And then for whatever reason, juries and prosecutor’s offices are much less likely to indict or convict.” Between 2003 and 2009, the DOJ reported that 4,813 people died while in the process of arrest or in the custody of law enforcement. These include people who died before an officer physically placed him or her under custody or arrest. This data, known as arrest-related deaths, doesn’t reveal a significant discrepancy between whites, blacks, or hispanics. It also doesn’t specify how many victims were unarmed. According to the FBI, which has tracked justifiable homicides up to 2012, 410 felons died at the hands of a law enforcement officer in the line of duty. * Bureau of Justice Statistics
But black people are more likely than whites or Hispanics to experience a police officer’s threat or use of force, according to the Department of Justice’s Police Public Contact Survey in 2008, the latest year for which data is available.