Posted on December 7, 2023

White Homicide Victims Are Four Times More Likely to Have Been Shot by the Police Than Black Homicide Victims

Steve Sailer, Unz Review, December 4, 2023

America has crucified itself in this decade over a single stat: In 2020-2022, blacks have been fatally shot by the police at a per capita rate 2.5 times higher than non-Hispanic whites (using data from the Washington Post database of fatal police shootings and the CDC WONDER database of deaths-by-cause):

2020-2022
WP Fatal Police Shootings Population Police Shootings per 100k Ratio vs. White Rate
White 1,297 196,813,417 0.22 1.0
Black 700 41,714,804 0.56 2.5
Hispanic 428 62,202,322 0.23 1.0
Asian 40 19,579,666 0.07 0.3
American Indian 31 2,445,390 0.42 1.9
Other or Multi 3 8,334,937
Unknown 665 0
Total 3,164 331,090,538 0.32 1.5

But, is that the only way to look at this data?

What about police shootings as a percent of total homicide victimizations suffered by each race?

2020-2022
WP Fatal Police Shootings CDC Total Homicide Victimizations Homicide Victimizations per 100k Ratio vs. White Rate % Police Ratio vs. White Rate
White 1,297 18,344 3.1 1.0 7.1% 1.00
Black 700 41,036 32.8 10.6 1.7% 0.24
Hispanic 428 12,863 6.9 2.2 3.3% 0.47
Asian 40 911 1.6 0.5 4.4% 0.62
American Indian 31 1,037 14.1 4.5 3.0% 0.42
Other or Multi 3 1,114 4.5 1.4
Unknown 665 158
Total 3,164 75,463 7.6 2.4 4.2% 0.59

Well, it turns out that police shootings made up 7.1% of all white homicide victimizations compared to only 1.7% of black homicide victimizations. So whites who die by homicide are about four times for likely to be shot by a cop than blacks who die by homicide and about twice as likely as Hispanics who die by homicide.

Why are the cops shooting so many whites relative to the the threat that whites are in and/or pose?

My guess is that suicide-by-cop is much more common among whites, while the contrary black tendency toward homicidality helps gets them shot by scared cops more.