What is the truth?

What is true can be debated. The facts cannot. One can debate what is or was true in any given incident. One can attempt to reduce a situation to less than the sum of it’s parts. Was the victim high? Did they have a criminal record? Did the police act within the rules of engagement?

It is fruitless to debate the truth in a situation like that of John Crawford III when the fact is that a Black man who committed no crime was left dead at the hands of the police.

The truth of being Black in America is categorically different from the truth of being white in America but there are certain facts which are useful in framing a broader truth.

• Black are people are extrajudicially killed at roughly the same rate at which they were lynched during the peak of lynching. Historians best estimates state that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries 2-3 Black people were lynched each week. According to the FBI’s self-admittedly conservative estimates place the rate of extrajudicial killing of Black folks at 2 victims per week
• Young Black males are 21 times more likely to die during a police encounter than young white males. According to federal data which is widely acknowledged as underestimating the problem, from 2010-2012, Black males 15-19 were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million compared with 1.47 per million for their white counterparts
• Research conducted by Bowling Green State University informs us that over a seven year period only 41 police were indicted for on-duty murder or manslaughter charges. A USA Today analysis of the police killings reported to the FBI by local police agencies identifies about 400 incidents per year of police killings. This yields an indictment rate of less than 1.5%, meaning that 98.5% such incidents have a prima facie assumption that police acted appropriately
• According to the same USA Today analysis, Black people comprise nearly a quarter of all reported incidents of extrajudicial killing. Meanwhile, Black Americans comprise 12% of the population

The above bullets are merely a preliminary framing of the state of Black American/police relations. There is, of course, much more that can be said. But this fact cannot be debated; Black folks are disproportionately the victims of state-sanctioned violence in America.