...But cops don’t kill white people because they are white”
Insinuates that cops
do kill black people because they are black - an unsubstantiated claim with no possible evidence or data. But this argument necessarily would include black officers too so it fails to be racist at all times. Actually,
more black people are killed by black officers, and white officers are statistically less likely to shoot black people. Also short of an explicit admission, it is impossible to demonstrate an individual’s state of mind, such as being racist; this is called qualia, the author needs to look it up. You can point to discrimination, which is ostensible, but not racism.
"Black people are killed by cops at a rate of 3X HIGHER than white people, often when unarmed."
The author concedes that more white people are killed by police than blacks, so I'm not sure what the rest of this "counter-argument" is here for. It's essentially rambling... looks like about how police brutality should be condemned. No shit, Sherlock. That's derails the attempt at a counter-argument, and we'll get to that term "derails" again in a sec.
But...
According to the
Washington Post, 11 unarmed black people were killed by police in 2019, 8 of whom were shot.
235 black people were shot and killed by police in 2019. This number is pretty steady across documented years. So 8/235 is 3.4%. This percentage falls entirely short of the word "often". But of those 8,
Tucker Carlson 101 will tell you more details as to
why they were shot when unarmed, and you quickly get the idea that "unarmed" is not necessarily "not life-threateningly dangerous", not even to the cops but to innocent civilians -- all of this damning information and more is available by searching the names in Google. The "often when unarmed" is entirely false and disingenuous.
The author uses
this source here. The "
About the Data" page is overtly anti-cop and counts kills made by police officers who are off duty. On the home page it says that blacks are 3x more likely to be shot by police than whites, but doesn't include any contextualizing data, probably intentionally. This is astoundingly relevant data, like that
blacks as 13% of the population commit >50% of murders, and often outpace whites in areas like gambling, robbery, and property crime index (
the trends continue into 2018). In nearly every category of arrests and crime (except for alcohol-related offenses like drunkenness and driving under the influence), blacks over-represent relative to their percentage of the population. Why would someone want to leave this data out? The answer is also the answer to the question of whether or not this is good research.
There are a load of such cherry-picked and skewed statistics on this page, like the one that claims "8 of the 100 largest city police departments kill black men at higher rates than the US murder rate". Reno is listed as the highest, with a murder rate of 12.1 (the US murder rate is # per 100k people). This data is said to be complied from the years 2013-2019. Down the page some, you can click on a particular police department to see how many people they have killed in so many years. Their data on Reno says they've killed 14 people in the years 2013-2019... not all black either. So how can killing 14 people in 6 years equal an annual black murder rate of 12.1 per 100k? No clue.
Assuming that the "murder rates" are not self-contradictory and are accurate though, for fun, there are several isolated data points that are going to be higher than the US murder rate because the US murder rate is an average. For example, New Orleans' is 52 per 100,000; 10 times the national average.
Also, nationally, 93% of black homicide victims were by other blacks, so if police are joy killing at this rate, chances are the ones pulling the triggers are also black.
The statistic ignores that police officers are more likely to be involved in fatal shootouts, particularly
in areas with high crime, or what percentage of these are justified killings.
But ultimately, police killings are only "murder" when they are unjustified. No one is going to charge a police officer murder for shooting a Dylann Roof. The site, neither in its statistics or repository of data, makes any indication of the circumstances of police killings. It is not defined on its page of methodological definitions. Instead they treat them all like straight up murders. One of
its sources it cites for data collection collects
all deaths in police presence, regardless of who did the killing or if it was a suicide. (The other source this page uses for its data is
another version of itself.)
Worst of all, at the bottom of the page, the site boasts all the articles that have quoted its statistics!
This is why you can't just look at an intentionally-eye catchy graphic and count yourself educated.
The other source used here is simply
US population data from the CIA.
So, all in all, this person admits the "racist talking point" is true and then ignores that.