Their overall takeaway is that 1,000 lethal police shootings per year are almost unavoidable. Here's an excerpt:
-- First, the math. “The number of improper, bad shootings is very small,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor in the criminal justice department of the University of South Carolina. “The vast majority are not questionable.”
There are some 18,000 police departments in the United States with a population of more than 335 million people, leading to some 50 and 60 million annual encounters between police and civilians, according to an analysis of Justice Department data, said Justin Nix, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska. Nix said only a tiny fraction of those interactions – “we’re talking about some .002% a year” – result in lethal gunfire.
Under present circumstances, he said, the ballpark figure of 1,000 fatal police shootings annually is “baked into the cake,” adding, “You have to wonder what all the reforms can do that would really make a dent in this.”
What’s more, police aren’t exaggerating the lethal threats they face. In 2023, the Washington Post database showed 83% of people killed by police bullets were armed – 62% with a gun and another 15% with a knife – percentages that criminologists said have held steady over the years. In other cases, officers are facing potentially lethal situations with vehicles, or even deranged people charging them with swords, hatchets, or garden tools.
I'm not sure your percentages of lethal police shootings, by race, are accurate. Here are the numbers I got using the filter tools on the left side of the Washington Post site you referenced:
White: 51%
Black: 27%
Hispanic: 18%
Asian: 2%
Native American: 2%
Other: < 1%
I used the full range of data, from 2015 until today, which included 9,268 fatal police shootings.
The National Academy of Sciences published an analysis of the lifetime odds of being killed by law enforcement by age, race, and sex back in 2019:
While there are differences by race, the lifetime odds of anybody being killed by law enforcement are low. Here's an excerpt from the report:
Significance
Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups. Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men.
This post from the National Safety Council helps put those numbers in perspective:
The data isn't broken out by race or gender, but the numbers show that the lifetime odds of dying from at least a dozen other causes are worse than the 1 in 1,000 figure for black men being killed by law enforcement. Here are a few examples as of 2021:
Heart disease: 1 in 6
Cancer: 1 in 7
Covid: 1 in 10
All preventable causes of death: 1 in 19
Chronic lower respiratory disease: 1 in 31
You have to go far down the list, to drowning (1 in 1,006) and fire and smoke (1 in 1,287), before you find lifetime odds of death that are comparable to a black male's lifetime odds of dying at the hands of law enforcement.
It's also worth noting the work of Roland Fryer that showed there are racial differences in how police use nonlethal force, but no racial differences in their use of lethal force:
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. 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. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. 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. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
To be fair, not everybody agrees with Roland Fryer. Here's one example:
Quibbles aside, it's clear that the national discussion about race and policing has often been based on faulty assumptions. It may take a while longer, but public perceptions are slowly coming into alignment with data from a number of credible sources.
None of the above is to say society should tolerate police misconduct. That said, the downsides of allowing demagogues to dominate policy discussions about policing and our criminal justice system have been painfully obvious in cities across the country. The violent crime spike that began in the early 2010's and peaked after the death of George Floyd speaks for itself.
I sincerely appreciate your additional analysis! (It is exactly what I hoped to receive.)
I will check my math at some point. I did much of the stats using relatively complex formulas in Excel, so anything is possible. I did not get into the additional factors, which you convey---the number of police encounters, for example. Any way you slice it, given the number of interactions a citizen might have with police, even assuming a small percentage of them involve violence, the numbers of shooting deaths strike both of us as "almost" unavoidable. There is a concept in statistics wherein the only way to change the number of observations requires an environmental modification so severe as to render the quest idiotic. Consider, in order to further lower the number of folks hit by lightning, one might have to restrict people to indoors only, or some such!
In full disclosure, I actually think that the behavior of police with respect to Black folks specifically, and minorities in general, reflects some bias. (Not a shocking discovery, right?) The war on (some) drugs is, in my mind, an excellent example of selective or "targeted" enforcement. Those quibbles aside, one is hard pressed to conclude that police are trying--at least very successfully--to shoot as many Black folk as they can. Or maybe the small numbers we see reflect the best they can do!?!?
Update: The numbers I reported are the fraction of the entire ~1000 that were armed with a gun AND were killed by the police. This, in contrast to the entire dataset. Again, thanks to Clifton Roscoe for the coattail pulling. (Errors in data analysis make it fun!)
RealClearInvestigations did an analysis last month that confirms much of what you wrote:
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/04/18/why_fatal_police_shootings_arent_declining_some_uncomfortable_facts_1025760.html#!
Their overall takeaway is that 1,000 lethal police shootings per year are almost unavoidable. Here's an excerpt:
-- First, the math. “The number of improper, bad shootings is very small,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor in the criminal justice department of the University of South Carolina. “The vast majority are not questionable.”
There are some 18,000 police departments in the United States with a population of more than 335 million people, leading to some 50 and 60 million annual encounters between police and civilians, according to an analysis of Justice Department data, said Justin Nix, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska. Nix said only a tiny fraction of those interactions – “we’re talking about some .002% a year” – result in lethal gunfire.
Under present circumstances, he said, the ballpark figure of 1,000 fatal police shootings annually is “baked into the cake,” adding, “You have to wonder what all the reforms can do that would really make a dent in this.”
What’s more, police aren’t exaggerating the lethal threats they face. In 2023, the Washington Post database showed 83% of people killed by police bullets were armed – 62% with a gun and another 15% with a knife – percentages that criminologists said have held steady over the years. In other cases, officers are facing potentially lethal situations with vehicles, or even deranged people charging them with swords, hatchets, or garden tools.
I'm not sure your percentages of lethal police shootings, by race, are accurate. Here are the numbers I got using the filter tools on the left side of the Washington Post site you referenced:
White: 51%
Black: 27%
Hispanic: 18%
Asian: 2%
Native American: 2%
Other: < 1%
I used the full range of data, from 2015 until today, which included 9,268 fatal police shootings.
The National Academy of Sciences published an analysis of the lifetime odds of being killed by law enforcement by age, race, and sex back in 2019:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821204116
While there are differences by race, the lifetime odds of anybody being killed by law enforcement are low. Here's an excerpt from the report:
Significance
Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups. Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men.
This post from the National Safety Council helps put those numbers in perspective:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/
The data isn't broken out by race or gender, but the numbers show that the lifetime odds of dying from at least a dozen other causes are worse than the 1 in 1,000 figure for black men being killed by law enforcement. Here are a few examples as of 2021:
Heart disease: 1 in 6
Cancer: 1 in 7
Covid: 1 in 10
All preventable causes of death: 1 in 19
Chronic lower respiratory disease: 1 in 31
You have to go far down the list, to drowning (1 in 1,006) and fire and smoke (1 in 1,287), before you find lifetime odds of death that are comparable to a black male's lifetime odds of dying at the hands of law enforcement.
It's also worth noting the work of Roland Fryer that showed there are racial differences in how police use nonlethal force, but no racial differences in their use of lethal force:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force
Here's the Abstract:
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. 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. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. 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. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
To be fair, not everybody agrees with Roland Fryer. Here's one example:
https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/on-arrest-filters-and-empirical-inferences-16-07-14
Quibbles aside, it's clear that the national discussion about race and policing has often been based on faulty assumptions. It may take a while longer, but public perceptions are slowly coming into alignment with data from a number of credible sources.
None of the above is to say society should tolerate police misconduct. That said, the downsides of allowing demagogues to dominate policy discussions about policing and our criminal justice system have been painfully obvious in cities across the country. The violent crime spike that began in the early 2010's and peaked after the death of George Floyd speaks for itself.
I sincerely appreciate your additional analysis! (It is exactly what I hoped to receive.)
I will check my math at some point. I did much of the stats using relatively complex formulas in Excel, so anything is possible. I did not get into the additional factors, which you convey---the number of police encounters, for example. Any way you slice it, given the number of interactions a citizen might have with police, even assuming a small percentage of them involve violence, the numbers of shooting deaths strike both of us as "almost" unavoidable. There is a concept in statistics wherein the only way to change the number of observations requires an environmental modification so severe as to render the quest idiotic. Consider, in order to further lower the number of folks hit by lightning, one might have to restrict people to indoors only, or some such!
In full disclosure, I actually think that the behavior of police with respect to Black folks specifically, and minorities in general, reflects some bias. (Not a shocking discovery, right?) The war on (some) drugs is, in my mind, an excellent example of selective or "targeted" enforcement. Those quibbles aside, one is hard pressed to conclude that police are trying--at least very successfully--to shoot as many Black folk as they can. Or maybe the small numbers we see reflect the best they can do!?!?
I don’t think any cop wants to be the next Derek Chauvin.
Update: The numbers I reported are the fraction of the entire ~1000 that were armed with a gun AND were killed by the police. This, in contrast to the entire dataset. Again, thanks to Clifton Roscoe for the coattail pulling. (Errors in data analysis make it fun!)