The fact is that the only correlation between the racial disparity of shootings is the exact same as the racial disparity in violent crime rates. Blacks commit disproportionately more violent crime in America despite being around 13% of the population. Sometimes it’s a VERY disproportionate rate, such as homicide, where they commit 52% of all murders. You can see this in the FBI crime statistics, where it is broken down by crime, arrests, convictions, etc.
Note that 2017 seems to be the final time the FBI broke down crime by ethnicity of perpetrator (interesting), but going back each year yielded similar disparities each time.
More crime = more exposure to police = more shootings. But that doesn’t fit the news’s favorite narrative to generate views, clicks and likes, so you won’t hear it. In fact, studies that focus on the race of the police that shoot minorities actually show that African-American police shoot African-American suspects MORE than Caucasian police, because African-American police are more likely to patrol communities that they were raised in. Source:
New research from MSU reveals findings that contradict what many people think about racial disparities in fatal police shootings.
msutoday.msu.edu
There are a few things to note here. This absolutely does not mean that the deaths of African-American suspects are not sometimes bad shoots. They are. This does not mean that some police are not racist, or aren’t criminals themselves, as some can be but the majority are not. In the case of George Floyd, he died of drugs. Did the knee have something to do with it? Yeah probably. The coroner cited the knee as part of the reason he had a heart attack. He had a ridiculous amount of fentanyl in his blood. He had an artery 90% blocked. He had coronavirus.
If he didn’t have enough fentanyl in his system to kill an elephant, and wasn’t forging money or breaking into homes robbing people, was not a violent criminal, did not resist arrest, George Floyd would be alive. I’m totally fucking over people calling Chauvin a murderer before the trial.
You could list other examples of terrible incidents until your hands get tired of typing. You could do the same with bad shoots of white people too. Anecdotal cases in the end will not show you the forest through the trees. It also does not mean that by virtue of being black, you are inherently more prone to crime. There are a number of reasons that explain why they may be, a common one is poverty. These explanations probably run the gamut from reasonable to completely ridiculous, but stats do not explain the why of things, simply the way of things. And the stats are perfectly clear.
One of the biggest factors I think is the media and racist black supremacist groups like black lives matter. They are creating a bad faith narrative to inflame the public every single time a bad shoot happens for the sake of ratings. What should be a tragedy and a discussion on how to prevent it next time becomes a brick they chuck at the American audience to keep people pissed off and watching. They never provide context, relevant statistics, and they practically never run investigative reports as to what happened and what the follow up is. Just the shooting, the coverage of the anger, the hashtags, the celebrities, the arguments and eventually, here’s the verdict, doesn’t that piss you off America? Cue the fireworks and pointless riots.
