Since the egregious death of yet another unarmed black citizen in the United States sparked worldwide protests back in May, perhaps we should look at the States’ statistics of racially disproportionate police brutality.

In 2015, the year when the Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting by an on-duty police offer in the US, 94 unarmed citizens were killed by the police. In the years since then - except 2017, where 70 unarmed citizens were killed- that number has been in the range of 51-58, with last year’s unarmed deaths at the hands of the police totalling 55 (only 9 of those deaths were black).  

Since these records began, 2694 white people have been killed by the police (155 unarmed), compared with 1,403 black people (126 unarmed). Although, in absolute terms, more white people have been killed by the police, relative to their percentage of the population, black Americans are killed at a disproportionate rate (they comprise roughly 14 percent of the population but around 35 percent of Americans killed by the police).  

Yet, the existence of an institutional bias is not the only inference you can draw from this data. One needs to account for confounding variables if we’re interested in examining whether a suspect’s race influences their chances of being killed in police custody. At least four studies have investigated this. Harvard economist Roland Fryer found that “on non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police.” However, Fryer also found that “on the most extreme use of force – officer involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”

Reaffirming my earlier statement, Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Computational and Behavioural Science at the University of Chicago stated that “police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin. And police bias may be responsible. But this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter.” To test whether a bias exists, Mullainathan looked at arrest data and found that 28.9 percent of arrestees were African-American. This number was not far off from the 31.8 percent of police-shooting victims [data available in 2015] who were African-Americans. Subsequently, he argued that “if police discrimination were a big factor in the actual killings, we would have expected a larger gap between the arrest rate and the police-killing rate.” A group of public health researchers drew similar conclusions: “While minorities were more likely to be stopped and arrested by the police, the probability of being killed or injured during a stop or arrest did not vary by race.”

David Johnson et al. published research in PNAS, a prestigious journal, that has been retracted following mis-citation in the public domain. It is useful to know that research is only usually retracted when there is a miscalculation with the data itself (and even then, researchers often just attach an addendum). In this case, the study was accused of denying the existence of a racial bias in police shootings, or policing in general, and the researchers were pressured to pull their article; viewers misinterpreted the data and accused the researchers of drawing conclusions that they did not draw (in philosophy this is called a strawman argument). What the researchers did actually find was that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

A consistent finding in the literature then is that an increase in police altercations correlates with an increased likelihood of fatal shootings. Given that none of these studies found a racial bias in police shootings, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover a bias close to what BLM protestors believe exists. In spite of this, however, given that black Americans are disproportionately involved in violent altercations with the police, it does seem fair to ask where wider culpability may lie. But that is a different problem to racist policing. It is also a more complicated problem.

With all this said, however, the notion that any group would – or, indeed, should - be equally represented in any kind of statistical analysis if it were not for institutional prejudices is absurd. Groups are always going to be over or under-represented in certain areas of society and to only consider systemic racism as a causal factor, whilst neglecting other explanations, is over simplistic at best (at worst it can complicate the possibility of finding real causes and enacting meaningful change). As Coleman Hughes stated, “you could prove that police shootings were extremely sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50 percent of the population but 93 percent of unarmed America shot by cops”. Yet, Hughes, also draws attention to the fact that, “on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect; and […] that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished”. This, of course, is a matter that should be addressed, and we have seen radical police reforms taking place across the US - at both the federal and state level - with pressure from BLM driving a lot of the progress. Nonetheless, their main premise is false: racist police are not disproportionately killing black people.

Bradley Strotten