Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, and Their Complaints - Updated

In the earlier version of this post, there were some discrepancies.  After discussions with other persons analyzing the Guardian data, I downloaded the data and parsed it myself.  The armed category now includes firearms, non-lethal firearms, knives, vehicles, and "other weapons" where I previously only included the Guardian's "any Weapon" category.  The confluence of Black Lives Matter and the Guardian Newspaper's database of police shootings in the US makes this analysis possible.  in addition, I founds more data on ethnicity percentages in the population.

Black Lives Matter, Colin Kaepernick, etc.  The means of communication of these folks is offensive and self-destructive to many of the people that could make a difference in their cause.  That said, do they have a legitimate case?

Using their percent of the population, new data available says that black people are 3 times more likely to be shot by police than white people.  Although their presentation is terrible and offensive, on this basis it is likely that Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter do have a legitimate complaint.  I'll explain this below.

The Guardian newspaper chain started a database of shootings by police last year.  Importantly,  they were able to show about 4 times the number of police killings than the FBI has catalogued.  Perhaps this is because the FBI reporting requirements are voluntary.

Using the ethnicity data as presented in Wikipedia, we can draw some conclusions about deaths of people in encounters with the police versus their ethnicity.

The 2015 Guardian data includes 1,146 shootings.  Using their categories, we get the following percentages:

You will see that the percentage of people shot is 50.7% white.  Dividing by the percentage of whites in the population, we get a likelihood that you are likely to be represented in the Guardian police shooting database at 80% of your proportion of the population.

A similar calculation for blacks shows that you are likely to be represented in the Guardian police database at 219% of your proportion of the population.

A black person therefore is 3 times more likely to be shot by police than a white person.  (2.19/.8=2.73 -->3)

As you can also see, Blacks are slightly less likely than whites to have been armed in the deaths by police.

As a disclaimer, I am not saying that all of the black deaths at the hands of police are unjustified.  I am saying that the number of blacks killed at the hands of police clearly exceeds the likelihood based on population alone.  Whether this is actual, and terrible, discrimination, a tendency to go after blacks because of personal perception, or a perception that black lives do not matter is not clear.

This is our nation's problem, however.