I BELIEVE I have solved ONE PROBLEM with My eBook! Ironically while I was doing some digging for SOLUTIONS TO THAT, I UNCOVERED THIS ARTICLE THAT I HAD SITTING SINCE EARLY-JUNE!
These Numbers Prove the High Risk of Being Black in America
These Numbers Prove the High Risk of Being Black in America
Unarmed black man killed by police: Variations on this disturbing theme have made headlines, month after month, for much of the last year, alongside stories of protests from Ferguson to Baltimore to New York. With the headlines have come community members, officials, and grieving families looking for answers. More often than not, they’ve come up empty-handed. That has put a spotlight on the U.S. government’s lack of comprehensive data on fatal encounters with police and which groups of people are most affected by these deadly incidents.
As journalists and activists have worked to fill in the gaps, two key projects have emerged in the last two days: one by The Guardian and another by The Washington Post. The new data, which records more than 400 people killed by police so far this year, begs the question: Why is simply existing in an unarmed black body in America so risky?
Here are five highlights from the two ongoing reports:
1. Unarmed people killed by police are more than twice as likely to be black than white.While approximately half of people killed by police were white and half were minorities, almost two-thirds of the unarmed subset of that group were minorities.
2. Among all victims of fatal police encounters—armed or unarmed—blacks were killed by police at three times the rate of whites or other minorities. The Washington Post established this by adjusting its data by population of the census tracts where shootings occurred.
3. The Los Angeles Police Department is responsible for 10 deaths this year, more than any other police department in the U.S. so far in 2015. Three hundred and six law enforcement agencies have recorded officer-related fatalities this year, and most departments only reported one.
4. More than 80 percent of the victims recorded were armed with a “potentially lethal object.” This includes guns, knives, machetes, and revving vehicles, according to The Washington Post. Thirteen of the “guns” turned out to be toys.
5. Eight children under the age of 18 have been killed in 2015. The victims range in age from 16 to 83.
Numbers like these make it unsurprising that less than half of black youths trust the police, according to a poll conducted by the Black Youth Project, a member-based organization of young black activists. The militarized presence of police in camouflage, wielding assault rifles, and rolling down neighborhood streets in tanks—as seen after Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore and Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson—further drives these communities’ perception of police as an occupying force rather than as protective guardians, as TakePart has reported.
The misperception of black people as criminally suspect is driven in part by the media. One study found that while 50 percent of people arrested by the New York Police Department are Black, crime reporting on local news depicts 75 percent of suspects as Black. Perpetuating this notion of the black body as dangerous contributes to the documented violence against unarmed black people: Consider the case of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin, shot to death in Florida by George Zimmerman for looking “dangerous.” It’s one thing when these perceptions are held by people passively watching the news. But it’s something else entirely when they fuel the work of the armed officers who are charged with protecting communities.
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