re: Unarmed blacks are 5x more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by cop

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By my calculations, about 60 unarmed blacks are STRUCK by lighting every year (assuming the get struck at the same rate of everbody else) and 24 unarmed blacks are killed every year by cops (shooting and otherwise since about 1/8 are killed by something other than a gun). So that's 2.5 times more likely to be struck (not killed) by lightning than killed by cops.

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Our math is very similar. Based on the national reaction ("We have a widespread problem that demands major fundamental change"), do these numbers surprise you?

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Regardless, the more important comparison is how much more likely is an unarmed black likely to be killed by police than some other race/group. For example, roughly 24 unarmed blacks are killed each year compared to 30 unarmed whites; however, since blacks represent about 13.4% of the population and whites represent about 76.5% of the population, which means the odds of black being killed AND unarmed is 4.6 times greater than the odds of being killed AND unarmed.

Furthemore, looking at the sample of police shootings fatalities of unarmed individuals (109 for blacks; 138 for whites) out of the sample of all police shooting fatalities (1265 blacks; 2416 whites), black fatalties were 1.6 times more likely to be unarmed than whites.

So altogether, since unarmed blacks are more likely to be killed compared to their share of the population AND more likely to be killed compared to their share of fatalities than whites (and overall), then this clearly says more about unarmed black fatalities than a comparison to some other cause of death that aren't directly caused by a represenative of the government.

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It is true that more unarmed blacks are killed by cops than unarmed whites, proportional to their respective populations. That fact alone doesn't mean we have a major, widespread problem because it's possible (notice I didn't say "certain") that many of those shootings were justified/self-defense. We know blacks commit crimes at a higher rate, so it's possible that the disparity is attributable to cases where cops are defending themselves.