2015 New York Times coverage of unarmed persons by race
The Washington Post police shootings database as of January 4, 2016, indicated that on-duty police officers in the United States shot dead 91 unarmed persons in 2015: 31 whites, 37 blacks, 18 Hispanics, and 5 persons of another race or ethnicity. The database updates; the screen shot below is the data as of January 4, 2016.
The New York Times search engine restricted to dates in 2015 returned 1,281 hits for "unarmed black", 4 hits for "unarmed white", 0 hits for "unarmed Hispanic", and 0 hits for "unarmed Asian":
Based on population percentages, African Americans (13% of pop) are overwhelmingly over-represented in police shootings and whites (63% of the pop) are overwhelmingly underrepresented. I'm guessing if it was the other way around, and if there was the same history in this country of police brutality against whites as there is against blacks, there would be way more stories in the NYT about unarmed whites being killed by cops.
What about comparing percentages of crimes committed instead of population? What's the story look like then?
Whites commit about 2.5 times more total crimes than blacks https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/43tabledatadecoverviewpdf (though there's reason to believe that number should be much higher http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-farbota/black-crime-rates-your-st_b_8078586.html, but blacks are more unarmed blacks are killed. This over-representation combined with the very long history of police brutality against African-Americans makes killing unarmed black folk more newsworthy.
Hi bj and bp,
The recent Ross 2015 PLoS ONE study included models that controlled for race-specific arrest rates for assaults and weapons-related charges. Someone alluded to the idea on Twitter that the baseline would ideally control for any race differences in rates of resisting arrest, which might produce a better predictor of police shootings. I did not find a good source of nationwide data on rates of resisting arrest disaggregated by race, and any data that we do find likely has some racial bias due to police perceptions of what constitutes resisting arrest improperly varying by the race of the suspect. But, for what the data are worth, here are links to resisting arrest data for New York and San Francisco.
Hi bp,
I think that newspapers should present an accurate picture of the world as it is right now, so that readers of the newspapers have an accurate sense of reality and can modify their beliefs and policy preferences accordingly; this accuracy doesn't require that the distribution of newspaper coverage of police killings by race be identical to the distribution of police killings by race, and it is reasonable to have some imbalance to reflect the possibility that police killings of blacks are more newsworthy because outside factors such as protests make them more newsworthy or, as you alluded to, because of a belief that historic discrimination against black Americans makes contemporary police killings of blacks more newsworthy. But I think that a ratio of 1,281:4:0:0 is too imbalanced for a reader to get an accurate sense of the contemporary distribution of police killings by race.
If the individual is a white man does the newspaper report it as "unarmed white man" or just "unarmed man"? (Evidence suggests the latter I suppose) And how would one interpret that result? It would require database access, but it would be interesting to see what terms most commonly follow "unarmed".
Hi Jacob,
I haven't conducted a detailed analysis, but I'd guess that the variation is partly because the New York Times is more likely to cover certain police killings, partly because the New York Times is more likely to report more stories about certain police killings, and partly because the New York Times is more likely to note the race of the killed and/or killers for certain police killings.
For example of the latter type, the New York Times published multiple stories about the police killing of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis, but the text of the stories did not note Mardis' race (white) or the police officers' races (black); however, the New York Times' website published photos of Mardis and the police officers that revealed their respective races.
There are multiple ways to interpret the variation in usage of "unarmed", but a charitable interpretation might be an increased likelihood of highlighting black disadvantage due to a concern about racial inequality.
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The New York Times database permits searches without a subscription that provide a sense of the context of the use of "unarmed" (e.g., here). The first page of results for a search I just now conducted ran from June 20, 2016, to June 28, 2016, and the word after "unarmed" was a variation of "black" or "African American" in five of the ten cases, with "terrorist", "dissident", "Mexican", "Iraqi", and "man" as the residual words.