The 'BLM' Paradox - Black Accountability Matters

Given recent distressing killings between Blacks and police -in the past week - it is worth poring into the broad statistics that underlie homicides in this country, by race.  The subject here has become far more emotional of late due to three reasons:

• (A) a lack of recent official national data covering homicides by race and by the police,
• (B) activists have somewhat diverted our attention away from the broader statistics and instead focused us on a few edited videos of murders under the premise that this is what all Whites are about, and
• (C) we have an election season where both sides of the aisle want a voice on this topic as it comports with their "broader" socioeconomic policies.

It is as important to get the truth out there in terms of where the threat lies, as it is to be compassionate to the many thousands of murdered innocent Americans (of all stripes) each year but that happen disproportionately by one race.  It is also worth reminding that the vast majority of initial deplorable headlines, about Blacks killed by police, have never later led to convictions by a balanced jury of peers who saw more concerning evidence than the (social) media showed you.  Clearly there are some false positives, though there are far many more false negatives.

 

Let’s start by dissecting some headlines recently by both Former Mayor Giuliani, and also blogger Nate Silver.  Both have made slightly different points, though both are factual in some sense, one is generally closer aligned to the broad statistics.

• In the U.S. Blacks are killed at nearly 8x the rates of Whites. (based on this Silver is pointing to Rwanda, though brining this up in this past week only conflates and misdiagnosis the situation)

Now let’s dig into these deaths, by race:

• If you are Black, then you were nearly 9x as likely to have been killed by another Black versus by the police.  And there was a very little chance at all that a White civilian killed you. (based on this Giuliani is wrong only in the accuracy of his stated probability, during a conversation about Black Lives Matter, but he is certainly close)
• If you are instead White, then you were nearly 3x as likely to have been killed by another White versus by either the police or a Black civilian (this too would have supported Giuliani’s point, though he chose to never make it)
• To drive home the point of where the threat is, something critical should be retold as we will below, that the 8x murder rate for Blacks versus Whites would rise to 8.5x if there were no police murders at all. (this reflects how much more impactful police killings are on White people then they truly have on Blacks)
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