Black Teens Are 21 Times More Likely to Be Killed by Cops Than Whites
The national data on police shootings is shamefully spotty—that's why our colleagues at Deadspin are putting this together—but using the numbers that are available, ProPublica put together a detailed demographic analysis of the victims. The conclusions are both horrible and totally unsurprising.
According to ProPublica's data, in the 1,217 fatal police shootings that were reported to the FBI between 2010 and 2012—reporting is optional; that's why the numbers are so incomplete—black people aged 15 to 19 were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, compared to 1.47 per million for their white counterparts. That's 21 times more often.
But the data is incomplete, you might argue, so there's no way to tell how accurate that analysis is. And you'd be right. However, David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor interviewed by ProPublica, said he doubts that "measurement error would account for" the enormous disparity.
There are other striking statistics: of the 15 reported people who were killed by officers while fleeing arrest in that two year period, for instance, 14 were black. See the full study here.
