www.lesswrong.com/posts/3aN9fxzsCnTHfyEbR/useless-knowledge-why-people-resist-ed...
1 correction found
That’s 100 lives saved per year
This annual figure is far too high. Published counts of police-involved killings of unarmed Black people are in the tens per year, not 100 per year.
Full reasoning
The article’s back-of-the-envelope estimate assumes 100 lives per year would be saved if police stopped killing unarmed Black people. Available datasets and reporting put the number much lower.
- An NPR investigation published in January 2021 found that since 2015, police officers had fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide. That is about 22.5 per year, not 100.
- A later AP summary of a JAMA Internal Medicine study reported 331 police-involved killings of unarmed Black people from 2013 through 2019 in the Mapping Police Violence database. That is about 47 per year, still well below 100.
So even using broader police-involved-killing counts rather than just shootings, the best available tallies are less than half of the article’s claimed 100 per year.
2 sources
- Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns - capradio.org
Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found.
- The effect of police violence on Black Americans' health is documented in 2 new studies | AP News
For the years studied, police-involved killings of unarmed Black people totaled 331 in the database used by the researchers: Mapping Police Violence...