Includes:
-Yearly deaths by race
-Proportions of yearly deaths by race
-State racial demographics
Sources:
- Mortality data from Fatal Encounters: https://fatalencounters.org/
- 2010 Demographics: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=8&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
- 2019 Demographics: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/AZ
- Dataset: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xshy3YgyvQMfnfHpYoQdcnYTkSZxk8S5kuG3Ru1Xkw0/edit?usp=sharing
Would be helpful to include what percentage of the population each of these groups are. The raw numbers are already scary to me.
That’s in the lower table.
I would hope that these figures would be somewhat comforting. In a state with a population of 7 million, if 45 people are killed in incidents involving cops, that means your chance of dying that year in an incident involving police was less than a thousandth of a percent, regardless of race. That’s a little more likely than your chances of getting struck by lightning (0.0006% vs 0.0001% chance).
You may want to look at the details as well. For example, one of these deaths was an Asian-American cop in Tucson who was tased as part of a training exercise. He seemed fine afterward but died the next day. (To be clear, I understand that tasers can kill people, but they are much less deadly than guns.)
Another incident involved police chasing someone in a car. The driver lost control and crashed. One of his passengers, a black person, died in the accident. One of the people coded by law enforcement as black was actually Arabic, a guy from Qatar. (However, incorrect categorization seems to be rare in this dataset.)
Yes, a lot of these people were shot to death, but many of the reports suggest that they were armed and that police were called because the person was threatening a family member with a weapon, usually a gun or knife.
All of those details are in the spreadsheet, and I think they’re worth looking at.