Colouring by numbers: the importance of contextualising data in the fight against racial inequality
Black Lives Matter Protest in Washington DC, June 2020
Tanya Singh takes a closer look at homicide statistics, dispelling any doubt about systemic racism.
Many things have changed in this strange lockdown era. There is a deeper sense of gratitude for key workers around the world. Coupled with this is a renewed anger at governments for allowing the chronic under-funding of their healthcare systems. The sharing economy is facing a great test of resilience. My friends are more freely pursuing creative endeavours at home. Zoom is thriving. I am becoming unfit.
Yet the recent murder of George Floyd highlights something that has stood the test of time in the worst way. Black people, many unarmed, remain the target of an institutionally racist, abominably powerful police system in the United States and elsewhere.
For those of us with racial privilege, research and scrutiny are important steps in increasing awareness. In extreme cases, a lack thereof can perpetuate dangerous ideals and ignorant conclusions. Yesterday, I was sent a supposedly reputable source in an attempt to be convinced that: “blacks killed 533 whites last year, whites killed 243 blacks, despite there being 6x more whites than blacks in America.” I became acutely aware of the gaps in my own knowledge when I struggled to refute this statement with confidence. Here is what I have found since.
The website in question contains a data set of expanded homicide cases by the FBI. You can immediately identify some obvious problems. Namely, the table is from 2013. Upon closer inspection, the following appears in fine print below it: “This table is based on incidents where some information about the offender is known by law enforcement; therefore, when the offender age, sex, and race are all reported as unknown, these data are excluded from the table.”
A critical takeaway is that not all information about the offenders was “known” by law enforcement. So, just how many of these offenders represent police themselves? (Hint: it took a national uprising for Derek Chauvin to be charged with second-degree murder. At the time of writing, the other three officers had yet to be charged with aiding and abetting murder - despite video evidence.)
Is this anecdotal?
No. After the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by police in Missouri in 2014, an investigation uncovered that FBI under-counted fatal police shootings by over half. In 2015, The Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the US. The newspaper finds this: although around 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% of the US population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.
Importantly, the data relies mostly on news accounts, social media postings, and police reports. At first glance, this method may understandably raise doubts. Yet over 5000 recorded shootings over a period of 5 years suggest a consistent pattern in the overall demographics of the victims year by year. You can view the full source here. The conclusions drawn by The Washington Post are sadly only confirmed by an earlier research paper on the deaths due to lethal force by law enforcement between 2009 and 2012, which found the following:
Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%)
The fatality rate was 2.8 times higher among black people than white people
Black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%)
The US population in 2010 was 13% black and 72% white. In other words, black people were killed at a rate far greater than that of their overall population.
For my love of numbers, there are none quite as painful and perplexing to digest as these. Here are some of the steps you can take to support protesters and show solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Students’ Union UCL have also put together resources for political education about racism, acts of solidarity, and welfare support for black students.
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