What Responsibility Do Black Americans Have to Prevent Police Shootings?

The job of the police is to deal with the dangerous, deranged people that the rest of us would rather avoid. Because of that, a number of police officers are going to kill people who pull out guns, attack them, act in a bizarre and dangerous way that makes them think they have a weapon they are about to pull out, etc., etc., etc.

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Under perfect circumstances, even if everything is followed to the letter of the law, the police are going to kill people every year. This is an unavoidable reality.

Additionally, it is also an unavoidable reality that some people from all races, including black Americans, are going to be killed by the police. The good news if you are black is that you are no more likely to be killed by the police than people of other races, but, don’t take my word for it. Here’s the ultra-liberal New York Times,

But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.

“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard. The study examined more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. 

Moreover, many more white Americans than black Americans are killed by the police. Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. According to the ultra-liberal Washington Post, there were almost twice as many white Americans killed by the police as black Americans in 2015.

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Federal tallies of lethal police shootings are notoriously incomplete; the Post sought to correct that lacuna by searching news sites and other information sources for reports of officer-involved homicides. The results: As of Jan. 15, the Post had documented 987 victims of fatal police shootings in 2015, about twice the number historically recorded by federal agencies. Whites were 50 percent of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent. By comparison, whites are 62 percent of the U.S. population, and blacks, 13 percent.

If anything, given that “Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do,” black Americans seem to be underrepresented in the number of people shot by the police.

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