Vox:
If you kill someone, whether the criminal justice system throws you in prison may come down to your race.
That’s the takeaway from a recent report by Daniel Lathrop and Anna Flagg at the Marshall Project. They looked at federal data to analyze the circumstances in which a homicide was deemed “justifiable” by police. Their findings were astounding:
The racial disparity held up after controlling for different circumstances. When they adjusted for how well the killer and victim knew each other and how the victim was killed, white-on-black-men homicides were two to 10 times as likely to be called “justifiable.” And when controlling for age in addition to those other factors, white-on-black-men homicides remained 4.7 times as likely to be called “justifiable” as other cases. The disparity also seemed to hold up across the country, according to the report.
If you kill someone, whether the criminal justice system throws you in prison may come down to your race.
That’s the takeaway from a recent report by Daniel Lathrop and Anna Flagg at the Marshall Project. They looked at federal data to analyze the circumstances in which a homicide was deemed “justifiable” by police. Their findings were astounding:
In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing was categorized as justifiable, which is the term used when a police officer or a civilian kills someone committing a crime or in self-defense. Overall, the police classify fewer than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable. …In comparison, when Hispanics killed black men, about 5.5 percent of cases were called justifiable. When whites killed Hispanics, it was 3.1 percent. When blacks killed whites, the figure was just 0.8 percent. When black males were killed by other blacks, the figure was about 2 percent, the same as the overall rate.
The racial disparity held up after controlling for different circumstances. When they adjusted for how well the killer and victim knew each other and how the victim was killed, white-on-black-men homicides were two to 10 times as likely to be called “justifiable.” And when controlling for age in addition to those other factors, white-on-black-men homicides remained 4.7 times as likely to be called “justifiable” as other cases. The disparity also seemed to hold up across the country, according to the report.
This might be a good time to remind ourselves that research like this is not being supported properly by a government that insists on hiding the truth - or worse, denying the truth.
Gun violence studies have all but disappeared at CDC, almost exclusively because "conservatives" have written prohibitions against it into the legislation funding that agency.
We've seen the same kind of thing at FDA and NIH, and now federal funding to study and report the health effects of coal mining is being eliminated.
Good luck trying to make good decisions without good evidence.
