The Tragedy of Assumptions

More often than not, there will be a mainstream story floating around based on a police shooting that involves the stereotypical story of a white police officer shooting an "unarmed" black male. Yes, it is indeed true that there are some genuine cases where an officer unjustly killed a person (regardless of race), yet the majority of the stories being drummed up by the Mainstream Media miss out on a few points.

First off; the main narrative that almost always gets brought up by the main news networks is race. It is almost common place to hear the words "white police officer", "black male shot", and "racism" be thrown around whether it's simply there to emphasize certain details of the story or create contempt in the general public against whites or police officers. But the important thing to note is that the majority of police shootings don't even involve black people. According to the Washington Post, as of July 9th, 2016 counting for the year up to that point, there were approximately 440 police shootings in which the race of the person shot was known. Out of these 440 people, 54% were white whereas only 26% of the people shot were black. However, there also comes another question in which people have a hard time understanding (and understandably so), "blacks represent only 13% of the U.S. population and 26% of police shootings, isn't this disproportionate?"

To easily word it, no this isn't disproportionate in the least. It is worthy to note that in many of these cases where the police officer had to shoot an unarmed person, the person had made a threatening move towards the police officer and in many actual cases where the person wasn't unarmed, they had also threatened or brandished their weapon in front of the officer. On the other hand many people may wonder why had the police officer been chasing or holding the suspect in custody (and blacks in a seemingly disproportionate rate), but it is worthy to note according to the Washington Post that in America's 75 largest counties that comprised most of the countries' population in 2009, blacks constituted 62% of all robbery defendants, 57% of all murder defendants, and 45% of all assault defendants. According to the same source in New York City alone, blacks only make up 23% of the city's population yet commit over 75% of all shootings and 70% of all robberies. Compare this to whites who commit less than 2% of all shootings and 4% of all robberies yet they comprise 34% of the city's population.

In conclusion, the United States does not harbor a justice system that innately single out blacks and shoot them unjustly but rather it tends to be according to facts and statistics that blacks are the main perpetrator in many of these police shooting cases and are so heavily involved with getting in trouble with police officers and landing themselves in the situation to be shot as they commit an disproportionately high percentage of crime compared to their low percentage of the total population. Whatever you decide to take away from this, it is wise to not rush to assumptions that white-on-black police shootings automatically indicate racism or a problem with our justice system but rather a need for change and reform in the black community itself.