Statistics show cops have more to fear from the public than vice versa

Federal statistics report 43 million blacks or African-Americans in the U.S. and 630,000 police officers, or about 68 blacks per officer. Combining that with the 11-to-1 homicide ratio suggests that police are six times as likely to be killed by black civilians than black civilians are to be killed by police.

A parallel calculation suggests a yearly average of 530 killings of nonblacks by police officers and 27 killings of police officers by nonblacks for a ratio of nearly 20 to 1. There are about 430 nonblacks per police officer. Hence police are 22 times as likely to be killed by nonblack civilians than nonblack civilians are to be killed by police.

Now let’s consider the inferences that can reasonably be drawn from these statistics. In risk of being killed, U.S. police officers have substantially more to fear from the public—white or black—than the public has to fear from police. Yet the juxtaposition suggests that the police respond far more defensively to blacks (a 1-to-6 homicide ratio) than to whites (a 1-to-22 homicide ratio). African-Americans would correctly perceive the police as three to four times quicker to pull a lethal trigger against them than against whites.

Police officers naturally take a different perspective. While blacks are 14% of the U.S. population, they account for 47% of killings of police. Given a random sample, blacks are 5.6 times as likely as nonblacks to kill a police officer. This likely causes officers to act more defensively with unfamiliar blacks than with unfamiliar nonblacks.