Unjustified shooting by police of people of any race is deplorable.http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/21/police-kill-more-whites-than-blacks-but-minority-d/?page=all
People get their impressions from what the news media, and also their own tribe/group, chooses to report. The news media chooses to play up misbehavior against African-Americans by Caucasians, esp. police, because it's good for the bottom line. It generates a lot of audience to them, which increases ad revenue. It is likely to generate protests, more drama drawing more audience.
And the media serves the power elite, being owned by them and depending on them for ad revenue. The power elite benefits from fostering racial divisions, drawing attention away from problems that affect all of us, reducing the ability for us to work together on those problems.
I'm not saying there is no racism. If you're as old as I am, you know that things have gotten much better, so we can continue to improve in this area if we work together. And you can't do this by demonizing and alienating people because they have light skin.
By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Tuesday, April 21, 2015
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.
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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,
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The officer who shot him, Michael Slager, has been charged with murder, and the Justice Department is investigating the case for civil rights violations.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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http://investigations.myajc.com/overtheline/#shot-at-home
Shot at home
Calls for help ended in death. Home is where many deadly police shootings occur.
By Brad Schrade, Jeff Ernsthausen and Jennifer Peebles
More than a third of all Georgians fatally shot by law enforcement since 2010 were killed at home, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Channel 2 Action News investigation has found.
In roughly half of the cases, police responded to a call for help or to intervene in a domestic violence case — only to have the incident end with officers killing someone at the residence instead.
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The wrenching details of the Felio case emerged in the most comprehensive examination of police shootings in Georgia to date. As in many states, no agency in Georgia tracks police violence, and little information exists about how often and under what circumstances these shootings occur. Reporters from the AJC and Channel 2 spent months analyzing law enforcement investigative files, medical examiners’ reports, media accounts and other public records to identify at least 166 fatal shootings by police in Georgia from 2010 through the end of June.
One of the clearest patterns identified was the number of Georgians shot by police at their homes or those of family members. At least 65 cases fell into that category, including Felio’s. None of the officers faced charges for the domestic shootings, although prosecutors are still reviewing at least six cases.
The concentration of police shootings at residences contrasts sharply with the narrative of police shootings nationally, which have focused on unarmed black men shot in the street.
The AJC and Channel 2 investigation of 65 citizens shot at home reveals that those police shootings cut across many racial and demographic lines. Forty-one of those shot were white and 21 were black.
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