The Washington Post reports a national analysis of police shootings in a two-year period that finds the majority of people killed by police were white, but blacks were killed in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the population.
The review found that 28.1 percent of civilians killed in 2014 and 2015 by police were black though they make up 17 percent of the population. Minorities killed by police also tended to be younger than white people killed by police.
The study concluded that this is more likely due to “over-policing” of poor, majority black neighborhoods.
Our findings join other scholarship, including research on stop-and-frisk and “driving while black,” that suggest that racially disproportionate killings by police are the result of institutional approaches to policing rather than individual racist police officers.
In other words, a major reason that young black men are disproportionately likely to be killed by police is because police are disproportionately likely to come into contact with young black men. Reducing these deaths may require different approaches to policing in the United States.