https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
A lot of people are surprised to learn that the number of unarmed black men shot by police in recent years is often between 15-20 given the rhetoric around the issue.
The number is disproportionally higher than white men, but Roland Fryer’s research suggests that when taking into account context, such as crime rates, there is no statistical difference in police shootings based on race, though he did find a persistent difference in other types of police encounters.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...
Black Americans are disproportionately poor, disproportionately raised in single parent homes, disproportionately forced into poorly run schools, and disproportionately victimized by crime. Those issues are difficult to address and should all get a lot of attention because they are the context in which disproportionate encounters with police occur. While police reform is an important issue for everyone, the overheated rhetoric around racist cops is performative and distracting.
> Feldman used data from the Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). That dataset, which is kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was found to have misclassified 55.2% of all police killings, with the errors occurring disproportionately in low-income jurisdictions.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/11/police-killi...
A lot of people seem to take the approach of: the data's good if it says what I want; if it doesn't, it's probably wrong.