Do Black Lives Matter? A Statistical Analysis of Police Violence
Whose live matters anyways?
Death is permanent evidence of a problem that has a spectrum of severity. A victim can not recover from dying short of resurrection, but it also leads to much less gray area in the way of harm done to an individual, a society, and a minority. To understand whose life matters to a society, we can look towards the authorities and how they treat people and how people treat authority. So I examined death as a primary metric to assess violence by the police and violence towards the police. I wanted to answer the question, do black lives matter, and in doing so, I stumbled upon another interesting question, do white lives matter?
While the data clearly shows black people are killed at a higher rate than white peoples, it also shows that a lot of people are shot by the police. So if you believe that “All lives matter”, then you should be asking the same question as the black community: why are the police so violent?
I’m not here to answer the question of why but how, where, and to who. How violent is violent? Where is this violence? Who is more affected by this violence?
General Statistics
First, I looked from a higher level at the statistical data available for people killed by police. I then adjusted the populations based on the ratio of 4.91 because for every 100 black people in the US, there are 491 white people. Looking at this data on the top left graph, one could think there is not a problem. When those values are adjusted by population, there is clearly a problem especially for Unarmed people.
Then we can look at the ratio of black to white murders, and again, if you are black, you are more likely than a white person to be killed by police regardless of the situation.
Arrests
The first criticism would be that maybe a higher percentage of black people are involved in violent crime. We have to consider this might be possible, but it should be noted that such a scenario might also be caused by systematic racism. Leaving that aside, let’s look at the number of arrests.
Black people are arrested twice as often as white people when adjusting those arrests by population. Now we can look at the number of deaths caused by police adjusted for the number of arrests. The problem is lessened, but it is still there particularly for being unarmed or being in a vehicle.
The caveat is if there is systematic racism, how are we certain that black people aren’t targeted and arrested at a higher rate than white people? I don’t have the data, so it is hard to say, but most of the data points to a problem.
Age
Breaking down by age shows an even worse trend for young black men than the general statistical trend.
By State
Let’s break this down by states. Any of the states in white don’t have enough data. The deaths per state were adjusted to that states’ racial demographics. I would have thought the Southern states would have been a lot worse, not to say a 4 to 1 ratio is good. California is definitely surprising.
General police brutality to white and black people is quite high, especially in the South. Let’s break that one down by ethnicity by looking at the probability of you getting killed by the police. Again, if you are black, being around the police is not something you’d like to do, but oddly enough, the South seems less terrible.
The Police
A discussion about policy brutality would not be complete without a discussion on brutality towards the police. Again, let’s start with deaths over the past few years to understand the risk. Total counts of police murder over 5 years and 5 months is at 369, so on average 68 police officers are killed a year violently due to assault.
According to https://datausa.io/profile/soc/police-officers, the ratio of white to black officers is 5.84 to 1 which is relatively close to the national average of 4.91 to 1. We can look at the number of police murdered broken down the by the ethnicity of the police officer and the offended. In this case, the ethnicity of the police officer doesn’t seem to be connected to whether they were killed or not. However, when adjusting police murders by population, the people who have killed police were disproportionately black.
Who is in Charge?
An important aspect of policing is who polices? Who runs the police departments? Who is putting up with such violence? So I pulled some data, and I found an interesting trend. For larger cities, the positions of authority adjusted by population are equitable. I used the 4.91 ratio of white to black people, but the ratio is much higher for smaller cities. That means the discrepancy for smaller towns is even worse.
We can look at large cities vs small towns, and there is a large discrepancy.
As a result, I decided to pull town populations for the data I had on police violence. Where are all of this police brutality occurring?
Brutality by City Size
I separately pulled city size information and correlated the data. This first breakdown shows people killed by the police, and then I adjusted it by the populations assuming the white and black distributions according the Pew Research which breaks down based on urban, suburban, and rural areas. My assumption is that cities with populations less than 9,999.
Now, let’s determine the death rate by police per 100,000 people for these areas. The trend is that living in smaller towns is much more dangerous for black people, but that other interesting trend is that they are much more dangerous for white people, with respect to police brutality.
Why aren’t people marching in the small towns?
Breaking Down the Data by Ethnicity per City
I broke down the data further. I used a Census Tool to look at as many major cities as I could to determine their ethnic make up. This covered most cities with more than 50,000 people. For the rest, I combined the racial breakdown per state and the general data for the racial breakdown for urban, suburban, and rural areas. With this data, I was able to look deeper, and I normalized black deaths by police to their city or state population.
Firstly, the ratio of black to white deaths caused by the police are much higher in states I wouldn’t expect like New York, California, and many northern states. However, what is shocking is that so many states are dangerous. The police are dangerous.
Let’s break it down by race and see how black and white the situation is as shown below. On the left, I have a different scale for white and black deaths per 100k. On the right, you can see, once you use the same scale, white deaths are no where near black deaths, but one thing is clear, Oklahoma is not where you want to be.
We can split this data into larger cities of more than 50,000 people and less than 50,000 people. This shows that smaller towns are more dangerous for black people especially, and also for white people.
To summarize this data adjusted city and racial breakdown, we can see there are far more deaths in small towns, but the ratio is a bit lower.
I’ve been trying to be objective and unemotional about this analysis as I could, but this analysis has been draining. I knew the problem of police violence was large, and I looked at this data 3 years ago. However, this data is important to see, and it is still incomplete.
A better dataset would have the following:
- Document every stop
- Document every arrest
- Document every shooting
- Document every act of violence by the police
- Document the officer involved
The reason this data hasn’t been collected or even attempted is because it would show this problem is even worse than presented here. This data is the tip of the iceberg. This data shows the most extreme form of racism, and at times it can be difficult to see.
So who’s life matters anyways? You tell me. Show me the data.
