Study finds police fatally shoot unarmed black men at disproportionate rates

In 2015, The Post documented 990 fatal shootings by police, 93 of which involved people who were unarmed. Black men accounted for about 40 percent of the unarmed people fatally shot by police and, when adjusted by population, were seven times as likely as unarmed white men to die from police gunfire, The Post found.

Researchers, who used data collected by The Post, found that when other factors are considered, the racial disparity persists, but it is lower — twice the rate for unarmed black men compared with unarmed white men. Researchers adjusted for the age of the person shot, whether the person suffered from mental illness, whether the person was attacking a police officer and for the crime rate in the neighborhood where the shooting occurred.

“The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”