Brief #14—Social Justice
By Erika Shannon
The police use of deadly force in America is a plague; the Washington Post reports that cops kill around 1,000 people per year, a number that has remained steady since 2015. There is an even bigger problem with the police use of deadly force – they disproportionally target black Americans in deadly force incidents, and this issue is unfortunately nothing new.
The numbers are alarming in cities across America. If we take a look at Minneapolis, where ex-police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, Minneapolis Police use force against black people seven times more than against white people. Since 2015, there were 11,5000 instances of force documented in Minneapolis; at least 6,650 of those instances involved black people. While white people make up 60% of the population in Minneapolis, force was only used against them 2,750 times. These numbers are similar to the rest of the country, where black Americans are twice as likely to be killed by police as white Americans. The Washington Post reports that police will kill 36 out of a million black Americans, while police will only kill 15 out of a million white Americans. The statistics are troubling, considering that black Americans only make up 13% of the population, yet account for so many instances of police-involved deadly force.