Why not?
From CNN:
Syndicated columnist Nicholas Kristof
wrote this week that young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men. Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly had a much different take on his show Monday night, offering that more whites are killed by police than blacks.
"In 2012, 123 African-Americans were shot dead by police. There are currently more than 43 million blacks living in the U.S.A.,"
O'Reilly said on his program. "Same year, 326 whites were killed by police bullets. Those are the latest stats available."
Two dramatically different statistics -- and they could both be right.
You're welcome...
Good Post Randwolf. the FBI study on which the 21 to 1 ratio is based on has some glaring holes in it. Some large states like Florida haven't reported for many years if not decades. So it really cannot be used to substantiate the number reported by ProPublica. Essentially the ProPublica numbers are worthless. The CDC is a much better source because it is more complete and it certainly doesn't rely on self reporting.
Per my previous post on this issue and Politifact citation, an analysis based on the CDC database, over a 19 year period, almost twice as many whites are killed by law enforcement than blacks. But when adjusted for population differences, blacks are 3 times (not 21 times) more likely to be killed by law enforcement than are whites. But that doesn't mean blacks are the victims of racism. In all likelihood, the rate differences are more related to class than race. The statistics also show blacks are more likely to be involved in crimes and therefore much more likely to have encounters with law enforcement. To state as some have, that just because blacks are more likely to be killed by law enforcement, it doesn't mean the cause is racism. People in lower social classes be they white or be they black are far more likely to be involved in crime and therefore far more likely to have fatal encounters with law enforcement.
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/index.html
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/so...-baltimore-tonight.145828/page-8#post-3295550
From Politifact:
"Over the span of more than a decade, 2,151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks. In that respect, Medved is correct.
However, Brian Forst, a professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University, said this difference is predictable.
"More whites are killed by the police than blacks primarily because whites outnumber blacks in the general population by more than five to one," Forst said. The country is about 63 percent white and 12 percent black.
Rather than comparing the raw numbers, you can look at the likelihood that a person will die due to "legal intervention" in the same way you might look at the chance a person will die in a car accident or a disease like lung cancer. When you do that, the numbers flip.
A
2002 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that the death rate due to legal intervention was more than three times higher for blacks than for whites in the period from 1988 to 1997. That is not the final story though. There are different theories as to why the black rate is so much higher.
Candace McCoy is a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. McCoy said blacks might be more likely to have a violent encounter with police because they are convicted of felonies at a higher rate than whites. Felonies include everything from violent crimes like murder and rape, to property crimes like burglary and embezzlement, to drug trafficking and gun offenses.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2004,
state courts had over 1 million felony convictions. Of those, 59 percent were committed by whites and 38 percent by blacks. But when you factor in the
population of whites and blacks, the felony rates stand at 330 per 100,000 for whites and 1,178 per 100,000 for blacks. That’s more than a three-fold difference.
McCoy noted that this has more to do with income than race. The felony rates for poor whites are similar to those of poor blacks.
"Felony crime is highly correlated with poverty, and race continues to be highly correlated with poverty in the USA," McCoy said. "It is the most difficult and searing problem in this whole mess."
On his website,Medved tried to link police killings with whether someone resisted arrest. "If you defer and don’t try to challenge a police officer, he may insult you but he won’t kill you," Medved said.
But criminologist Lorie Fridell at the University of South Florida told PunditFact that the research on this point is mixed. Some studies that factor in the level of resistance show that race doesn’t matter, and some show that it does." Politifact
While racism isn't dead, it probably never will be, you cannot legitimately attribute the cause for all woes to racism. We are not well served by blindly attributing every woe to racism. It's too easy to blame everything on racism. There are causes afoot here which go beyond racism.
