According to Mapping Police Violence, When examining data around police violence outcomes of police killings, we show that Blacks are approximately three times more likely to be killed in comparison to their White counterparts (Mapping Police Violence, 2022). Additionally, it is worth noting that 97% of the killings in our database occurred while a police officer was acting in a law enforcement capacity. This dataset does not include killings by vigilantes or security guards who are not off-duty police officers.

Recent studies employing Mapping Police Violence data have found that the threshold for police killings of Whites are much higher than those of Blacks (DeAngelis, 2021). Similarly, other research using Fatal Encounters data finds that Blacks are two times more likely to be killed by police “...even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable” (Fagan and Campbell, 2020).

We encourage continued scholarship using the Mapping Police Violence, Fatal Encounters, and the Washington Post Police Shooting databases. For independent research, we encourage a combination of data sources to allow for validation and welcome any feedback, criticism, or issues that you come across with the data. Feel free to email us with any questions.

The following graphs and data are current only as of 3/31/2022. The WashPost database (further below) is more current.

The Washington Post police shooting database is current. It states, Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

It says 35 Black people have been killed by cops this year

According to Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, ‘Open warfare is continuously being waged against the Black collective.

We Black people do not see the war being waged against us because we don't want to and because we are afraid. We are engaging in behavior designed specifically to block out any awareness of the war - our true reality. Our behavior thus forces us into the insanity of hoping and begging - as opposed to the sanity of analysis, specific behavioral pattern design and specific conduct in all areas of people activity: economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war.

A major strategy in the war against the Black collective is the killing of Black males. Black males are being killed daily, in ever-increasing numbers, across the country. Other as non-white males also are being killed in ever-increasing numbers. These Black and other non-white males are being killed by white males in uniforms who have been authorized to carry guns. This particular form of murder and slaughter is called justifiable homicide.

Our Black collective today has no greater understanding of this war and the phenomenon of justifiable homicide than it did when Black males were being lynched and castrated daily, 100 years ago in the period of "Reconstruction," or reestablishment of white supremacy following the Civil War. Nor does the Black collective have a greater understanding of the current "open hunting season" on Black males than it did two and three decades ago.

Because we really do not understand what is going on, in our impotence and ignorance, in our powerlessness and frustration, we start getting mad, fussing, crying, rhyming, begging with picket signs, rioting in misdirec­tion, hooping and hollering, moaning in our churches and preparing again to vote for any white man who smiles at us even though he lies to us. These behaviors are all absolutely useless. Such behaviors are in vain and will take us nowhere. They will all come to naught and the problem - the war - will simply continue and intensify.

The stage has been reached in our experience of captivity out of Africa wherein we are being challenged to demonstrate a deep self-respect, requiring us to use our whole brain-computers - not just the right side, which permits us to engage in rhetoric, rhythm and rhyme. Now we must begin to exercise and use the left side of our brain-computers, the left cerebral hemisphere, which permits us to analyze critically and decode what is happening daily in front of our eyes and to organize a self- and group-respecting behavioral response to that which the environment is presenting us. We must have a disciplined, self- and group-respecting response to the specific war being waged against us. [MORE]