We don't have a problem of racially motivated officer-involved shootings. We have a problem of violent criminals behaving violently.

A cluster of articles which force the policing conversation back where it belongs - What are the empirical numbers versus the ideological numbers.

First out of the gate was Variation in fatal police shootings by Noah Carl.  The subheading is Explaining all the data, not just some of it.

His point is that police shootings map to criminal behavior.  Areas with a higher murder rate will also have a higher incidence rate of officer involved shootings.  

The chart below plots fatal police shootings against murders for the eight demographic groups. Murders is the total number of murders committed by each group between 2015 and 2020. Which brings me to the reason Hispanics were not included: the FBI treats Hispanic ethnicity as a separate variable that may overlap with race.

Groups that commit more murders get fatally shot more often.

There’s an extremely strong correlation between the two variables (r = .94), and despite the tiny sample size it has a p-value of 0.005. Murders can explain almost all the variation in fatal police shootings.

[snip]

By what mechanism do murders explain demographic variation in fatal police shootings? It’s not that the police go out and shoot different groups in proportion to how much they murder, as some form of punishment. Rather, murders serves as a proxy for the kind of behaviour that leads people to get shot by police (such as, say, violently resisting arrest).

We don't have a problem of racially motivated officer-involved shootings.  We have a problem of violent criminals behaving violently.  

Next up is also from the same author.  From Police killings in England and Wales by Noah Carl.  The subheading is Is there evidence of bias?  This has the advantage of comparing the US to a completely different set of legal and cultural conditions.  Same result - officer involved shootings are driven by criminal behavior, not by race.

Rather than black people being seven times more likely to die than white people, they are just as likely to die – the ratio of ratios is exactly one. This suggests that ethnic disparities in police killings are due to differences in the kind of behaviour that leads people to get killed by police, not “racism institutionalised in police culture”.

You can insist that population is the right benchmark for assessing bias, but then you have to explain why the police kill so many more men than women without invoking “sexism institutionalised in police culture”. It’s not going to work.

As in the US, so in England and Wales: racial bias isn’t a plausible explanation for ethnic disparities in police killings.

Then today, I see What Killed Tyre Nichols by Heather Mac Donald.  The subheading is His fatal torture was a tragic culmination—not of racism, but of the racism-in-policing narrative.  Mac Donald has written in the past about the fact that police shooting correlate with violent behavior, not with race.  In this article she explores the fact that as long as we pursue race based solutions, we are going to actually make the probability of officer involved shootings greater.  

Is U.S. policing in a death spiral? Yes, as long as the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers is portrayed as a manifestation of racism. The problems underlying that horrifying episode—the recruitment crisis, lax hiring standards, and depolicing—will worsen, intensified by the very policies ostensibly adopted to prevent another such travesty. The vicious circle of rising crime and a flight from the profession will accelerate.

[snip]

The only thing that will get policing out of its death spiral is the widespread repudiation of the racism narrative. It is not racism that brings officers into more frequent contact with minorities; it is exceedingly high rates of crime in minority communities. It is not the police who are responsible for the fact that blacks between the ages of ten and 24 die of gun homicide at 25 times the rate of whites in that age bracket; those black victims are shot almost exclusively by black criminals. In 2022, seven allegedly unarmed blacks were fatally shot by police officers, out of a national homicide death toll for blacks that will likely exceed 10,000 and a black population of 44 million. Meantime, dozens of blacks are killed every day (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the U.S. population), to no attention from the mainstream media or from Black Lives Matter activists, because their assailants are not cops and are not white.

Departments across the country must urgently review their training and hiring standards to ensure that another abomination like the fatal torture of Tyre Nichols does not reoccur. But they will be less able to provide the protection that law-abiding residents of high-crime communities desperately deserve so long as the president, academia, and the media insist that police are the embodiment of America’s allegedly lingering white supremacy.

When our political, academic and mainstream media push an agenda based on race despite the clear numeric evidence, everyone ends up suffering.