After the death of George Floyd on 25th May 2020, America was rocked by weeks of protests and rioting – 25 people lost their lives and property damage totalled $1–2 billion.
The protestors’ main grievance was “systemic police racism”. As the media reported endlessly at the time, black people make up around 30% of the victims of police shootings despite comprising only 13% of the population. Black people, it was said, could not even walk down the street without fear of being gunned down by a racist police officer.
Yet the narrative was flawed. After all, victims of police shootings are overwhelmingly male, but this doesn’t mean the police are sexist against men. It is simply that men are more likely to get into situations where a police officer ends up shooting them.
What’s more, activists were vastly inflating the numbers. According to the Washington Post’s police shooting database, only 12 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 –in a country of 330 million.
We now know that part of the problem was innumeracy.
Hellbound and Down 