Which Demographic is Most Likely to be Shot By Police?

Last week a guest on the air suggested that “cops never shoot unarmed white guys”. I felt like that might not be accurate, so after the show I decided to do some research. Check out the shocking details that I found!

First, I turned to the Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics which you can see here. I soon learned that this was not going to be helpful as the FBI doesn’t keep track of the race of the deceased. Other meta-data I checked varied wildly because of differences in how police-related shootings are important. For example, one set of statistics might break PRS into race, but include Hispanics under heading of race.

Finally, I turned to Wikipedia and their List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States page these were also not broken down by race so I decided to go through a sample of 3 months, chosen at random, of reported statistics and then do Google searches on each and every case reported. This took the rest of the day. Again I was stymied because many of the news articles I looked up did not specifically state the race of the deceased person. But, I do feel that I was able to get a feel for who got shot by police in 2014. The number one sub-group of people killed by police in 2014 was…males between the ages of 25 and 40 who had previous crime records. In the radio business, we would call that our “target demo”. Coincidentally, KLAQ’s target audience is ALSO men 25-40 years old. Yes, the police have their own “P-1’s” and they are 25-40 year old criminals.

Also, the vast majority of people shot by police were, themselves, armed when they were shot. Of course, it makes sense that criminals are most at-risk for being shot by police. But that wasn’t precisely the information I was interested in. So, I threw out all of the cases which happened in the commission of a crime and all that involved a suspect pointing a gun at the police. I think we can all agree that an officer is justified in shooting someone who is committing a crime and pointing a gun at them.

So, that left me with three months of reported incidents where someone was shot while unarmed, not an immediate threat to the police, and not in the middle of committing a crime (other than misdemeanors). Here’s what I found: 1.) I can’t stress enough again how much more common it is for police to shoot a person who is pointing a weapon at them. Of the 48 total cases in the 3 months I examined only 5 of them fell into the category of “unarmed and unthreatening”. 2.) Of those 5 cases, 2 were black, 2 were white and 1 was Other/Hispanic.
I was only mildly surprised to find that as many whites as blacks were shot under the specific circumstances that I had decided to use. My sample size was not nearly large enough to draw any real conclusions from and my research was far from comprehensive. But there was one recurring theme I noticed in all of the three months worth of cases I tracked down. That is, the number of mentally disturbed people who were shot after family members called 911 to report that they were worried their loved one was going to harm themselves. Some of these I couldn’t even fit into my sub-demo of “not armed” like Grace Louise Denk, a young student and former Marine who was shot by police while she held a gun to her own head threatening suicide.  Others were even less-threatening, like 18-year old Keith Vidal who was having a schizophrenic episode when police responded to a call from his family who were worried that he was going to hurt himself. Keith was armed with a screwdriver when he was shot.
Here are my conclusions:

• Police mostly kill people with damn good reason.
• If you point a weapon at an officer you will probably be shot.
• If you have a mentally ill family member who is acting out of control, DO NOT CALL THE COPS!
• Don’t open the door holding a Wii remote like this white kid in Georgia did