Blacks disproportionately killed by police, assault police in Va.

An analysis of state data on killings by police shows disproportionate numbers of blacks are killed, but other factors raise questions.

Posted: Sunday, January 25, 2015 9:00 pm

By Mark Bowes Richmond Times-Dispatch

African-Americans have been disproportionately killed by police in Virginia as a percentage of their population since 2000, but as a group they have committed a disproportionate number of violent crimes and assaults on officers that could lead to deadly encounters with law enforcement, an analysis of state crime data shows.

Police from across the state reported killing 31 blacks over the past 14 years, just one less than the 32 whites that were reported killed in confrontations with officers over the same period, according to reported “justifiable homicides” by Virginia law enforcement officers culled from Virginia State Police uniform crime reports.

While nearly 51 percent of the 63 people police reported they killed in Virginia from 2000 to 2013 were white, 49 percent of the fatalities were black, which would appear to be disproportionate since blacks constitute only about 20 percent of Virginia’s population. ... But as a group, blacks also have been over-represented as offenders in violent crimes and assaults on police officers — factors that criminologists say increase potential for violence with law enforcement.

“Police killings are not random, and we shouldn’t expect killings to be proportionate with population percentages, but instead proportionate with potentially violent encounters with police,” said Thomas Baker, a criminologist and an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs who teaches quantitative research methods and criminology theory and analyzed the data for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. ... The data, however, also show that police officers in Virginia are more likely to kill black offenders for reasons other than attacking police officers or civilians or for resisting arrest than they are to kill white offenders for the same reason.