So, I’m trying to figure out your chance of dying in a police encounter in the U.S. based on race.
This website: Our visualizations – Fatal Encounters shows that there have been 13,337 white people who have died in a police encounter, and 7617 black people.
So somewhere around twice as many white people have died in police encounters as black people.
I thought the OP was asking for (# of X race killed by police in a year)/(total # of X race living in the US).
“What is your chance…” can be a very ill-defined kind of question. Your chance is going to depend on all sorts of factors. It might be clearer to ask “What percentage (or proportion, or fraction) of all X’s are Y’s?”
If my calculations and the OP’s numbers are correct, approximately 0.0053% of white people are killed by police, and .0173% of black people are killed by police, which is about 3.26 times as high.
Your method doesn’t include people that may be killed by the police in the future. % of black people killed by police in a given year not % of black people killed by police.
This question is not well-formed. First I would like to know how you define “encounter.” But setting that aside, what do you mean:
*What are the chances that a white vs. non-white person living in the U.S. will die in a police encounter? *This is simple to answer based on the numbers of each class of person living in the U.S. and the numbers of people who die in such encounters, such as in Thudlow Boink’s response. However, it may not answer the underlying social question you want to get to.
*If a person has a police encounter, what are the chances that a white vs. non-white person will die in that encounter?*This is more complicated because you must know the number of police encounters by race to begin with. Police encounters includes more than just arrests, and are not even all documented. And the number of police encounters by race will probably show a bias against non-whites to begin with.
And finally, police encounters are sometimes initiated by police and sometimes initiated by other people. An encounter that involves an armed robbery suspect shooting at police and being killed when the police return fire is a much different scenario that other recent events in the news. Using these statistics does not distinguish between those scenarios.
So the math is quite easy but as is almost always the case in statistical analysis you have to ask the right question.
There is another site called Mapping Police Violence that has dramatically different numbers. There numbers are 39% fewer killings in 2019, than Fatal Encounters. The Washington Post’s Fatal Force site shows 44% fewer killings in 2019 than Fatal Encounters.
Looking at the dataset for Fatal Encounters (which you can download from the website) provides some hints, I think. For example, there are two entries for May 25, 2020 that state (names redacted):
The database classifies this as a suicide (Mom) and a murder (daughter).
Less emotional (at least for me), also on May 25, 2020:
It as the bicyclist and the Buick driver that were killed (not the suspect).
I had trouble opening the dataset for Mapping Police Violence, but it’s methodology is described as counting: “A case where a person dies as a result of being shot, beaten, restrained, intentionally hit by a police vehicle, pepper sprayed, tasered, or otherwise harmed by police officers, whether on-duty or off-duty.”
Neither of those events would seem to qualify, although I can’t confirm that they aren’t in the MPV database. I can’t tell what “Fatal Encounters” methodology is except that it describes itself as a database of “people killed during interactions with law enforcement”.
Taking no position on whether these should “count”, it could explain the difference in the numbers.