Since so many people are replying to you with derision, I’ll link to the Washington Post database on police shootings which is considered to be pretty comprehensive and has a lot of work put into each case to determine the situation around it.
A lot of people are surprised to learn that the number of unarmed black men shot by police in recent years is often between 15-20 given the rhetoric around the issue.
The number is disproportionally higher than white men, but Roland Fryer’s research suggests that when taking into account context, such as crime rates, there is no statistical difference in police shootings based on race, though he did find a persistent difference in other types of police encounters.
Black Americans are disproportionately poor, disproportionately raised in single parent homes, disproportionately forced into poorly run schools, and disproportionately victimized by crime. Those issues are difficult to address and should all get a lot of attention because they are the context in which disproportionate encounters with police occur. While police reform is an important issue for everyone, the overheated rhetoric around racist cops is performative and distracting.
It's quite hard to come up with reliable statistics for police killings in the US. It's not that deaths aren't counted, it's that they're misclassified.
> Feldman used data from the Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). That dataset, which is kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was found to have misclassified 55.2% of all police killings, with the errors occurring disproportionately in low-income jurisdictions.
Seems hard to make an argument either for or against racial disparities in police shootings then, if the data is unreliable. In which case the answer is to not make assumptions, but collect better data.
A lot of people seem to take the approach of: the data's good if it says what I want; if it doesn't, it's probably wrong.
Hard doesn't mean impossible. There's been a lot of good reporting on this in the last half-decade. But it's required sustained effort from journalists, and insofar as statistics are getting better, it's not because the US has become more first-worldier than it was.
I'm very open to specific critiques of specific statistics. Data collection and aggregation are hard problems!
General claims that the statistics are wrong (all of them?) don't seem particularly helpful, especially if the implication is that we should follow anecdotes or preconceived ideas instead of statistics.
