My question: since Obama became president, the media has focussed upon incidents in which the police have (alleged) to have used unusual or excessive force, against black people. Since I don’t have access to national statistics, I wonder if there has been any increase in the number of such incidents in the past 6.5 years. or if what we have seen represents an average (say for the previous 8 years, before Obama.
It is like these mass murder incidents-i am told that the incidence of such events is actually going down (but i have no way of checking that).
So, have the Obama presidency years seen an abnormal, high number of police use of deadly force against black people?
The data for this is very poor. The website killed by police only goes back to 2013. The CDC reports on all causes of death since 1999 but only has data for 18 states and that data may not be complete. The CDC listed 114 black people killed by legal intervention excluding executions in 2007 the year before Obama was elected president and 133 in 2013 the last year they have data for. That is an increase of 16%. The data appears suspicious to me since the numbers drop to 87 in 2010 and then skyrocket to 124 the next year. That seems to indicate a change in data collection rather than an actual increase.
By comparison the white number went from 245 in 2007 to 326 in 2013 an increase of 33%.
So if the CDC data is correct then the number of incidents of deadly force by police toward blacks has gone up but not nearly as much as the number of incidents of deadly force by police toward whites.
I’m pretty sure there are no statistical summaries to answer your question. I haven’t seen numbers about how many police shootings ther are until the last couple of years.
I thought everyone knew this, but the increased attention is because these events are now being caught on (cellphone) video cameras. Smartphones didn’t become popular until the iPhone launched in 2007, and the cameras on popular pre-Apple phones were terrible.