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: The 36 unarmed black male victims of police shootings in 2015 measured against the total black male population [nearly 19 million in mid-2014, per the Census Bureau] amounts to a per capita rate of 0.0000018 unarmed fatalities by police. By comparison, 52 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in 2015 while engaged in such duties as traffic stops and warrant service, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. The FBI counted nearly 628,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States in 2014. Assuming that the number of officers did not markedly increase in 2015, the per capita rate of officers being feloniously killed is 0.000082, or 45 times the rate at which unarmed black males are killed by cops. The Memorial Fund does not have data on the race of cop-killers in 2015, but applying the historical average over the last decade in which 40 percent of all cop-killers were black would yield 21 cops killed by blacks in 2015. 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: