So I'm on twitter earlier today, and I see a link to this http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/5/police-officers-more-hesitant-to-shoot-black-suspe/.
The study doesn't look into actual data on police killings. It's more of a look into the mentality of police officers. Still I wanted to do some numbers crunching. I wanted to look at some data. The FBI's statistics on arrest in 2015, and the Washington Post data on police killings from 2015, were two key pieces to the puzzle. I've read stories that mention that black men being more likely to be killed by police. While that is true when you adjust for population, it is deceiving. Police are more likely to shoot people they interact with, and more specifically criminals. You would have to adjust for crime, and more importantly violent crime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/
Let me mention one important thing. The Washington Post counts Hispanic as a race, while the FBI data doesn't. Hispanics get added on to the population of other races, and most of them are white.
http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00
Let's go to the census data on the U.S. population in 2015. Going by that data 61.6% of the countries' population are non hispanic whites. Counting hispanics brings the white population up to 77.1%, so doing some math about 15.5% of the countries' population is white hispanics. Hispanics make up 17.6% of the population. So I can estimate that 88.1% of hispanics in this country are white. The census doesn't give data for how many black people in the country aren't hispanic. Total blacks in the country are 13.3% of the population. I'll instead use data from 2010 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762156.html. This counts Hispanic separately from races. 12.2% of the country was non hispanic blacks in 2010. Counting black hispanics like the 2015 census link does, gives the black population for 2010 at 12.6%. The hispanic population in 2010 was 16.3%, meaning blacks made up just 2.45% of the hispanics in the United States in 2010. I'll use that estimate for 2015. Going by that data black hispanics would still make up about 0.4% of the population, and non hispanic blacks 12.9%. I'll estimate that there were 198 million non hispanic whites, 41.5 million non hispanic blacks here in 2015, and 25.4 million who weren't black, white, or hispanic. Those would be in the other category according to the Washington Post.
According to the Washington Post's data 495 whites were killed by police shooters in 2015, compared to 258 blacks, and 172 Hispanics. I wanted to guess what number of those Hispanics killed by police who would count as white according to the FBI. Time to go into some complex math. Based on census bureau statistics I estimated that there were 198 million non hispanics whites in the country. The 495 deaths equals ~0.23 per 100,000. 258 blacks being killed means 0.62 per 100,000. Just based on population non hispanics blacks were 2.7 times more likely to be killed than non hispanic whites. When it comes to others 38 deaths mean 0.15 per 100,000. That means blacks were around 4 times more likely than them to be killed by police Let's say the ratio is similar for white and hispanics, which they might not be. If I were to act as if white and black hispanics were killed by police at equal rates, it would actually project to more whites being killed relative to blacks, than if I do things the way I am. Without going over all of the math, I estimated the black hispanic population at 1.3 million, and the white hispanic population at 49.8 million. The closest I could get to the ratios was with 150 white hispanics, and 10 black hispanics, and 11 others. Those estimates would mean 608 whites, and 248 blacks, a ratio of 2.45/1. Does that fit arrest statistics?
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/table-43
Whites were arrested 2.6 times as much as blacks, so that isn't great evidence of police bias against blacks, but lets look at violent crime. The ratio goes down to 1.65/1. That is very important. I am just going to guess that someone arrested for a violent crime is more likely to get into a confrontation with police, than some arrested for embezzlement. In terms of murders blacks committed more, and were arrested more. 4347 for blacks, and 3908 for whites were arrest for murder. The overall data doesn't give a clear picture of police bias against black people, but the argument that police are more careful with black people isn't some stupid idea. The numbers offer it some support. There is also the fact that black people are more likely to resist arrest.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/07/08/stefan_molyneux_lies_about_the_dangers_of_white_racism_do_a_massive_amount_of_damage_to_the_black_community.html
This article says blacks are 9.6 times more likely to resist arrest than whites. They may be adjusting for population, and not for police encounters, but blacks aren't close to 9.6 times more likely to be arrested than whites, and I don't think that number is just made up. Black people are more anti police than white people, so it makes sense that black people would be more likely to resist. If you factor that in, the argument that police are actually more likely to kill whites (adjusting for encounters with police), isn't that far fetched. Even without it, we have a picture that doesn't back up the narrative that police are racist against black people.
