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Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The Viral Claim That A Black Person Is Killed By Police ‘Every 28 Hours’

Search the phrase “every 28 hours” on Google, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook and thousands of messages like these will come up. This is the phrase that has gone viral after police-involved killings of black males in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.: “Every 28 hours, an unarmed black person is killed by police.” It is now being used to describe the deaths of two New York City police officers, to draw comparisons between the deaths of police and deaths of unarmed African Americans killed by police.

PolitiFact rated this claim false in August when a CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill said it on air. Hill corrected his statement after the PolitiFact article.

Yet the claim is still being perpetuated widely. It’s written on signs at protests, shared through #every28hours or written on social media memes. Where did this statement come from, and is it accurate?
The Facts

The figure “every 28 hours” comes from an April 2013 report titled“Operation Ghetto Storm” by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The report analyzed officer-involved killings of African-American victims in 2012. The report “is a window offering a cold, hard, and fact-based view into the thinking and practice of a government and a society that will spare no cost to control the lives of Black people,” according to the preface.

It’s not hard to debunk the claims using basic findings and methodologies from the report. (Twitter user @FeministaJones did it in a series of tweetsusing Storify.)

The report looked at the deaths of 313 African-American men, women and children in 2012, who were killed by police officers, security guards or “vigilantes.” Vigilantes are defined “self-appointed enforcers of the law” who had immunity under self-defense legal protections such as the stand-your-ground law or the castle doctrine.

If you divide the number of hours in a year (8,760) by 313 deaths, it does come out to one death per 28 hours. But the rest of the claim is problematic.

Among those killed in 2012, 136 people (44 percent) had no weapon on them when they died. That negates the claim that people who were killed “every 28 hours” were unarmed. Since the study looked at police officers, security guards, police officers moonlighting as security guards, and “vigilantes” that do not fit under any of the other categories, the claim that an African American is killed “every 28 hours” by a police officer is also false.

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