We also don’t tend to hear that cops kill far more whites than blacks. Or, if we do, the issue of disproportion arises, as it must be with redlining. But then comes poverty – again leaving us with a more complicated picture that many seem to find convenient.

In 2020, a plurality of the more than 1,000 people shot dead by police, according to data compiled by the Washington Post, were Caucasian (459); Blacks were about a quarter. It is typical from year to year. From these statistics, some people might wonder why we view cop murders as a black problem.

But not so fast. Black Americans make up about 13% of the nation’s population, but they are more than twice as likely as whites to be shot by police officers. It needs to be taken care of, although not that black men are all, or even most, of the people killed. The disproportion is usually taken to suggest that racism causes cops to value our lives less.

So: Just as racism was the reason why most blacks lived in red light districts, even though they were predominantly white, racism is the reason why blacks are disproportionately killed by cops, even if they are overwhelmingly white. they kill more whites in numbers. Law?

Yet poverty is also relevant in the case of police murders. Black Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to be killed by cops, and also more than twice as likely to be poor. And most importantly, as a report on police, poverty and racial inequality in Tulsa clearly shows, police are concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods, which are more frequently communities of color and which receive more calls for service. . And modern ‘war on crime’ style police horrors focus on poverty.

Just as racism certainly operated in the home loan system, so racial prejudice certainly operated in the police force. Strong evidence shows racial prejudice against those arrested (black people are less likely to be arrested after dark, when the race of the driver is more difficult for officers to discern), wanted (the bar to search for black drivers is lower than that to find white drivers) and verbally assaulted.

Yet the data also suggests that when it comes to police shootings, with all the factors taken into account such as whether the suspect was armed and the police just had reason to fear for their lives, the cops kill more than Whites than blacks, but they kill blacks to a much higher degree disproportionately. White cops might not like black people very much in a lot of cases – and they show it – but when it comes to ending black lives, maybe we can open up to the possibility. that they hold back from resorting to shooting as much as they do with white man?