What that statistic shows is that even if some white people can't bring themselves to get angry about police murdering black people they should at least be angry about police also murdering white people.

What that statistic definitely doesn't mean is that people shouldn't be angry about police murdering black people.

It does show however that the police very likely doesn't target people by skin color or that some is disproportionate violence. I am not from the US and I thought the numbers to be higher to be honest.

The 2020 data there is interesting. It's less dramatic than it looks on that graph because they only have the numbers from the first quarter for 2020, but even extrapolating from the quarter to the year, it looks like "number of people shot to death by the police in the United States" has been more than cut in half by the coronavirus.

I noticed that too, and had the same thought. It will be fascinating to see the full statistics for the year.

That stat becomes more useful when you take into account black Americans are roughly 15% of the population.

I am not sure that per-capita is the right metric. I would prefer to look at it by police encounter or by crime or something like that.

This is slightly old but has some interesting data on killings by race: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-hom...

In these graphs you can see that total number of killings for white on white or black on black is roughly the same despite the 15% number you quoted.

Edit: fix autocorrect typo

> I would prefer to look at it by police encounter or by crime or something like that

How would that fix anything? Look at the numbers of white vs black people who were picked for stop-and-frisks (read: number of white vs black people who were suspected of crime) as well as the innocence ratings: https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data

To see how innocent minorities are, look at this article about stop-and-frisks: https://www.nyclu.org/en/press-releases/nyclu-releases-repor...

If 5% of a population ("Young black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24") accounts for 38% of the stop-and-frisk and is innocent 80% of the time, doesn't that sound like targetting? If you look harder for crime from certain demographics, you'll find more crime from them. Replace the targetted demographic with another demographic and you'll find way more crime in that other demographic. But get this - once you target people and get stats on them, you now have "statistics" and "facts" that show you were right and should continue to target them - even though your statistics are garbage collected on unrepresentative samples! This is why per-capita is the best metric to use - any other metric is tainted.

> total number of killings for white on white or black on black is roughly the same despite the 15% number you quoted.

What does this have to do with anything? Just because there are a lot of "black on black" murders doesn't justify the amount of black people killed by cops. Honestly, I don't even care if the officers are white, black, or any other race or ethnicity. It's the victims who matter. Just because an innocent black person is killed by a black police officer, does not mean it had nothing to do with the victim's race, nor does it mean we can ignore how disproportionately policing is applied.

> If you look harder for crime from certain demographics, you'll find more crime from them.

Not just that: if you look harder for crime in certain areas, you'll find more (and this leads to more potential for escalation).

If you adjust by per-police encounter you've already shot yourself in the foot - we know that police stop black people at a far greater percentage than white:

https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/findings/

Another interesting stats though a little old:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2013/tables/table...

Thank you, this was the article I was trying to find but my google search skills failed me.

Use duck duck go or qwant.

Hahahaha I gotta say I wasn't expecting a gamer statistic poster on HN. At a minimum I'd expect everyone here to understand the difference between "volume" and "per capita."

Statistics can absolutely be racist. Numbers might not lie (except when they do), but they can use some odd definition, use different metrics, or scale different populations differently/unevenly (as is the case here).

When you use any misleading technique on a statistic that obscures the truth, you are lying. When you put up a number to proof a point about a minority that is absolutely not true, that is a lie, and this number is racist.

Why are you linking non-normalized statistics? It is such a basic error to not adjust per-capita that part of me doubts how much you care about the truth.