Cops Shoot White Guy in Fresno CA and Nobody Pays Attention According
to Fresno police, they responded to a report that a man was walking
around with a rifle. Spotting a speeding truck, they tried to accost the driver, Noble. Instead, he fled and led the police on a
half-mile
chase Police said Noble muttered that he "hated his life," reversed
direction and walked back toward the police, prompting them to shoot him
four times.\
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison says she wants to see an
officer shoot an unarmed white teenager in the back before agreeing that
the “conversation about race” is over, but she almost certainly already
has received her wish.
An analysis released last week shows that
more white people died at the hands of law enforcement than those of any
other race in the last two years, even as the Justice Department,
social-justice groups and media coverage focus on black victims of
police force.
“People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation
about race,’” Ms. Morrison told the (U.K.) Telegraph in an April 19
interview.
“This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a
white unarmed teenager in the back,” said Ms. Morrison, who also has won
the Pulitzer Prize for her work, which includes the bestsellers
“Beloved” and “Song of Solomon.” “And I want to see a white man
convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’,
I will say yes.”
Her comments reflect a widespread view that
blacks are routinely targeted by law enforcement while whites shot by
police are a rarity. Outrage has surged in recent weeks over the
high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of police, notably
50-year-old Walter Scott of South Carolina, who was shot in the back and
killed April 4 as he tried to run away from an officer after a traffic
stop.
his is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed
teenager in the back,” said Ms. Morrison, who also has won the Pulitzer
Prize for her work, which includes the bestsellers “Beloved” and “Song
of Solomon.” “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black
woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”
Her
comments reflect a widespread view that blacks are routinely targeted by
law enforcement while whites shot by police are a rarity. Outrage has
surged in recent weeks over the high-profile deaths of black men at the
hands of police, notably 50-year-old Walter Scott of South Carolina, who
was shot in the back and killed April 4 as he tried to run away from an
officer after a traffic stop.
The officer who shot him, Michael
Slager, has been charged with murder, and the Justice Department is
investigating the case for civil rights violations. Department officials
announced Tuesday that they have opened a federal probe into the death
of Freddie Gray, 25, who died Sunday from injuries sustained while in
Baltimore police custody.
Meanwhile, the deaths of whites at the hands of law enforcement
typically receive less attention, even when the case is shrouded in
controversy. For example, Gilbert Collar, an 18-year-old white student
at the University of South Alabama, was shot and killed while naked,
unarmed and under the influence of drugs by a black police officer.
The
officer, Trevis Austin, was cleared of wrongdoing in 2013 by a Mobile
County grand jury in a case that received little media coverage outside
Alabama. Mr. Collar’s parents filed a federal lawsuit last year against
the officer.
As researchers are quick to point out, FBI data on
police shootings by race is notoriously incomplete, which may explain
why Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, decided to use
figures from the website Killed by Police.
Based
on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those
killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30
percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2
percent were Asian and other races.
His results, posted last week
on his blog Cop in the Hood, arrived with several caveats, notably that
25 percent of the website’s data, which is drawn largely from news
reports, failed to show the race of the person killed.
Killed by
Police lists every death, justified or not, including those in which the
officer had been wounded or acted in self-defense.
“The data
doesn’t indicate which shootings are justified (the vast majority) and
which are cold-blooded murder (not many, but some). And maybe that would
vary by race. I don’t know, but I doubt it,” Mr. Moskos said on his
blog.
Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the
U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be
killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account
the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that
police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.
“If
one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate
at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely
to be killed by police than blacks,” said Mr. Moskos, a former Baltimore
cop and author of the book “Cop in the Hood.”
“Adjusted for the
homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the
hands of police,” he said. “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which
police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than
blacks to die at the hands of police.”
Mr. Moskos listed two
possible reasons for the racial disparity. The first is that police
assigned to largely black neighborhoods face “more political fallout
when they shoot, and thus receive better training and are less inclined
to shoot.”
The second is that police assigned to black communities
with high crime rates are more accustomed to dangerous situations and
thus are more likely to be able to resolve them without resort to lethal
force.
Figures on police shootings by race are thin on the
ground, but Mr. Moskos’s results have some support: The investigative
journalism website ProPublica came up with a similar percentage in an
Oct. 10 article, reporting that 44 percent of all those killed by police
were white, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012.
The fact-checking
website PolitiFact concluded in August 2014 that police kill more whites
than blacks after the claim was made by conservative commentator
Michael Medved. PolitiFact cited data from the Centers for Disease
Control on fatal injuries by “legal intervention” from 1999 to 2011.
“Over
the span of more than a decade, 2,151 whites died by being shot by
police compared to 1,130 blacks. In that respect, Medved is correct,”
said PolitiFact.
But PolitiFact gave his assertion a “half true”
rating because whites make up 63 percent of the population, while blacks
make up just 12 percent.
“Yes, more whites than blacks die as a
result of an encounter with police, but whites also represent a much
bigger chunk of the total population,” PolitiFact said in its Aug. 21
post.
But PolitiFact did not take into account the percentage of
those by race involved in violent crime or shootings of police, as Mr.
Moskos did.
Despite the recent flood of media coverage involving
police shootings, Mr. Moskos advised his readers to “keep all this
morbidity in perspective,” reminding them that very few people, white or
black, will ever be shot or killed by police.
“The odds that any
given black man will shoot and kill a police officer in any given year
is slim to none, about one in a million. The odds for any given white
man? One in four million,” he said. “The odds that a black man will be
shot and killed by a police officer is about 1 in 60,000. For a white
man those odds are 1 in 200,000.”
