alt Hacker News> if you are black specifically your chance of getting killed in an interaction with police is higher.
Again, not an expert. But, are we talking per police interaction, or per capita, or of all police homicides?
Pretty sure when I saw, far more unarmed white people were killed than unarmed black people per year, which per capita makes sense, right? But, isn’t total police interactions more inportant?
Its very hard to get a sense for this. There are a few papers which indicate that on a per interaction basis, black and latino people are a few percent more likely to end up dead than white people, but that, again, doesn't necessarily mean that police are more disposed to escalate with these two groups. "Criminality" might be higher among some groups than others, and so the context of interactions with police might be different, but, on the other hand, criminality is to some degree socially constructed and is also correlated with economic hardship, which is racialized in the US (and most other places).
I'm not really interested in defending some sort of per se percentage of unjust police killings, anyway. I think there is ample enough evidence that racism is still a pretty big issue in the US that the slogan "black lives matter" is at worst harmless and at best communicates something important.