Dear editor,
As an aspiring journalist, I am sick and tired of all the memes and comments going around about (police shootings). It’s time to clear up misinformation being spread by social media outlets.
Based on a study conducted by the Washington Post, in 2015 approximately 990 people were shot and killed by the police. Of those shot, 494 where white and 258 were black, with the remainder being of other races.
So twice as many white people are being fatally shot by police, but how many make it onto the news?
Now, contrast that with federal statistics that show, on average, about 2,500 black people are killed by black-on-black homicides every year (although some studies, including those by the Tuskegee Institute, show the numbers as high as 5,000-plus per year).
According to a report put together in 2013 by the FBI on homicides for that year, 90 percent (2,245) are black-on-black and 83 percent (2,509) were white-on-white.
The numbers look pretty similar, don’t they?
Now, let’s look at the racial demographics of the U.S. so that we can put this into a more clear perspective. Based on figures put together by the Census Bureau, the U.S. population is about 60 percent white and 15 percent black; the remaining 25 percent is made up by all other races including mixed race.
So based on just the percentage of white to black, there are 4 times as many whites as blacks in the population. That makes a huge difference in the previous numbers given for homicides and police shootings.
We now see that twice as many black people per capita are shot and killed by the police than are white people. But when it comes to same-race homicides, the difference is a bit more dramatic.
A black person is four times more likely to be killed by a member of their own race than a white person is, again per capita.
But now let’s compare the exact number of black people killed in 2015 by police to the average number killed per year by their own race. In 2015, 258 black people were shot and killed by the police while about 2,500 were killed by a member of their own race.
When you put that all together, a black person is 10 times, or 1,000 percent, more likely to be killed by a member of their own race than by a police officer. And this does not even take into account whether the officer doing the shooting was black or white.
I would hope that all members of Black Lives Matter, as well as other social justice warriors, did not assume that the entire police force in this country was made up of only white male officers.
After all, that would be both sexist and racist.
VICKIE JOHNSON
Milton
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: LETTER: The truth about police shootings