A new analysis finds racial and ethnic disparities in fatal police shootings vary significantly by state – and that New York has the lowest rate of fatal police encounters across all groups in the nation.
To learn more about the disparities – and what may be contributing to the variation among states – WAMC’s Lucas Willard spoke with University at Albany Professor Shawn Bushway, a co-author of the study recently published in the journal PLOS One.
Generally speaking, in every state, Black Americans have higher rates of fatal police shootings than do whites. It varies dramatically as to how many more, how much more. In all but, in 31 states, Hispanic Americans actually have less have fewer police shootings as a percentage or as a rate than do whites. Obviously, whites make up the majority of Americans, and so they are also the majority of victims of fatal police shootings, but in terms of this disparity relative to their proportion in the population, that’s the general pattern you see for Black and Hispanics…