The myth of the cop killing ‘epidemic’

The New York Post reports:

Don’t point a gun at the cops and don’t run when they tell you stop, and you’re likely to survive. Since the population of the US is about 318 million people, a thousand deaths at the hands of police works out to 1 in 318,000. You have a better chance of being killed in a violent storm (1 in 68,000) or slipping in the tub (1 in 11,500) than being shot by a cop, no matter what color you are.

But even these figures are deceptive. On those 965 killed, only 90 were unarmed, and the majority of those were white. (And that doesn’t take into account other extenuating circumstances besides a weapon that would have caused a police officer to fire).

Still, the “killer cop” narrative refuses to die, and The Washington Post decided to throw fuel on the racial fire with context-free statements like these: “Although black men make up only 6% of the US population, they account for 40% of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year.”

This ignores the fact that black violent-crime rates are far higher than those of whites. According to the Department of Justice, blacks committed 52.5% of the murders in America from 1980-2008, when they represented 12.6% of the population.

For you progressives out there: don't be a science denier.