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The deliberate murders of white police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas are terrible acts of lawless revenge for earlier shootings of apparently innocent black people during routine interactions with police officers, such as Philando Castile in Minnesota. Videos of these and other violent encounters between black people and police officers have sparked wide outrage and mass protests across the United States, and the recent vigilante killings.
Some claim these videos are cherry-picked examples, and do not represent a broader trend. However, in a poll released by CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation in November 2015, long before the recent shootings, six times as many African-Americans report being treated unfairly in dealings with the police by comparison to whites. A report from the federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics on traffic stops shows that twice as many black people described their traffic stop as being for illegitimate reasons in comparison to whites. Going from feelings to facts, the same report indicates that black people were three times as likely to be searched as whites in a traffic stop.
Certain police officials wave away data suggesting unfair racial profiling by claiming that blacks are more likely to be involved in criminal activity than whites. Yet a study just released by the Center for Policing Equity shows the reality of racial discrimination. The data corrects for racial difference in criminal activities, and the study’s outcomes show that African-Americans are more than three times as likely to suffer from police use of force compared to whites, for everything from mild restraint to gunshots.
Based on this evidence, the fear and anxiety experienced by black people in their dealings with the police is quite justified, and so is the outrage over the recent shootings. As Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton stated, Castile would likely be alive if he were white. Using probabilistic thinking, we can calculate that if Castile was white, he would be half as likely to be stopped and more than three times less likely to be shot, thus six times more likely to avoid being killed.
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