Can you point me to any? Or press about police officers killing whites? Or racially motivated shootings of whites?
I know they happen, but they get little press coverage. 7/15/21 Washington Post:
The Rev. Al Sharpton has spent almost half a century fighting for Black people. Ben Crump has become the go-to attorney for families of Black people who have been killed by police, including Breonna Taylor’s and George Floyd’s.
Now the major names in Black civil rights are shifting their focus to Arkansas — where a White teenager was killed by an officer — and saying police brutality hurts communities of all races.
Hunter Brittain, 17, was fatally shot by a White Lonoke County sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop in a Little Rock suburb on June 23, according to police.
A weekend shooting spree that injured five people in Alabama and Georgia was racially motivated, police allege.
At a preliminary hearing Monday in Columbus Recorder's Court in Georgia, a detective testified that 39-year-old Justin Tyran Roberts, who is Black, allegedly admitted to police that he was targeting white men during a series of attacks over two days.
"Basically, he explained throughout his life, specifically white males had taken from him, and also what he described as military-looking white males had taken from him," Detective Brandon Lockhart testified, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reports.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating after an officer-involved shooting in Tarpon Springs that left a 17-year-old boy dead, according to the Tarpon Springs Police Department.
The boy who was shot and killed by officers Saturday night was identified during a news conference Monday as Alexander King, an 11th-grader at Tarpon Springs High School.
Police said they received several calls Saturday evening about a white male walking down N. Pinellas Avenue and pointing what appeared to be an AK-style rifle at passing vehicles.
When officers arrived at the southeast corner of the intersection of N. Pinellas Avenue and Tarpon Avenue around 9:30 p.m., they spotted King on the northwest corner of the intersection. King pointed the gun at them and at several occupied cars on the road, police said....
Officers had received reports that King was possibly armed with an AK-style rifle but, according to Young, King actually was carrying an airsoft gun, which is also known as a pellet gun.
King was hit and fell to the ground. Officers then handcuffed King as a precaution, Young said, and began CPR until paramedics arrived.
King was transported to Bayonet Point Hospital, but was pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m., Young said.
UPDATE: Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill ruled on July 22 — 10 days after The Salt Lake Tribune published this article — that Sgt. Tyler Longman acted within the law when he shot Michael Chad Breinholt and won’t face charges.
The last words Michael Chad Breinholt heard were, “You’re about to die, my friend.”
Then a West Valley City police sergeant pulled the trigger.
Breinholt’s mother, Susan Neese, has seen the final moments of her 31-year-old son’s life. The body camera footage from Aug. 23, 2019, shows he was intoxicated at the police department.
With his hands cuffed behind his back, he briefly wrestled with two officers. One screamed that Breinholt was grabbing his holstered gun. Sgt. Tyler Longman rushed into the room, made his declaration and fired.
“He took the time to think about that, to say those words,” Neese said in a recent interview. “And then aim and shoot. And kill Chad.”
One of the pictures shows Breinholt handcuffed in a chair.
Are blacks especially victimized by police?
Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White Americans
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.
Of course, blacks are arrested at more than twice the rate of whites, explaining disparities in contacts between officers and blacks. This might be evidence of racism, but it might also be because of higher rates of crime. The National Crime Victimization Survey (which is based on victim reports, not arrests) used to record race of offender. At least the 2020 data no longer does so. They still categorize victims by race, so this was likely not an oversight. As late as 2015 they were still doing so. Table 3 in the 2015 report shows that black offender against black victim violent crimes were at a higher rate (16.5) than white offenders against black victims (3.1) or white offenders against white victims (12.0) in spite of whites greatly outnumbering blacks. These rates appear to be based on the number of crimes. Because blacks are disproportionately victims of violent crime, mostly by black criminals, this disparity in criminals by race is not as extreme as the rates alone suggest. Table 1 may be more useful. Blacks were 22.7% of violent criminals, so about twice the rate of their share of the population, much like the Washington Post's analysis above.
Now, remember that black criminals are a tiny part of black America, atypical in many ways (as is true in white America), but disproportionate rates of police shooting of blacks is hardly evidence of racism.
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