Blacks have been misled about police shootings

Washington Free Beacon:
Black Americans are not more likely to be shot by the police than White Americans in proportion to each group's rate of interaction with the police, as measured by crime rate, a new study argues.

The report, by psychologists Joseph Cesario and David Johnson and criminologist William Terrill, analyzes trends in fatal shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 using a variety of data sources.

Measuring racial disparities in police use of force is a touchy subject. High-profile shootings of black men by police have been a focal point for Blacks Lives Matter and similar groups, which see such shootings as both endemic of larger police abuses and an epidemic in their own right.

Most analyses of the police shooting disparity compare the number of black and white people shot to each group's proportion in the population. Black people make up about 13 percent of the population, the argument goes, so should make up about 13 percent of police shootings. These analysesregularly find vast disparities between racial groups, with whites underrepresented and blacks substantially overrepresented.

Black Americans are not more likely to be shot by the police than White Americans in proportion to each group's rate of interaction with the police, as measured by crime rate, a new study argues.

The report, by psychologists Joseph Cesario and David Johnson and criminologist William Terrill, analyzes trends in fatal shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 using a variety of data sources.

Measuring racial disparities in police use of force is a touchy subject. High-profile shootings of black men by police have been a focal point for Blacks Lives Matter and similar groups, which see such shootings as both endemic of larger police abuses and an epidemic in their own right.

Most analyses of the police shooting disparity compare the number of black and white people shot to each group's proportion in the population. Black people make up about 13 percent of the population, the argument goes, so should make up about 13 percent of police shootings. These analyses regularly find vast disparities between racial groups, with whites underrepresented and blacks substantially overrepresented.
...
In both instances, the study found at best limited evidence of systematic anti-black disparity in police shootings. In the case of unarmed citizens, "officers either showed no meaningful disparity in either direction [between white and black] or, if anything, an overall pattern of anti-White disparity."
...
It makes more sense to do the comparison based on interaction with people engaged in criminal activity.  Somebody needs to get this data to NFL players who are kneeling for the national anthem.

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