Since all of us at the darkside love facts and statistics, let’s review some statistics. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the US there are well over 254,000,000 citizens over the age of 16 making contact with with law enforcement during the course of a year. There are around 1,000 people who die yearly at the hands of law enforcement. That represents a 0.00000394% chance you will die at the hands of a police officer this year. Let’s adjust in an overly conservative way specifically for BIPOC (Black,Indigenous and people of color) by decreasing the number of them who encounter LE and over represent them in deaths. That makes 100,000,000 BIPOC citizens and 600 deaths specifically for BIPOC. This represents a 0.000006% chance a black, indigenous, or person of color dies at the hands of police every year.

It certainly doesn’t fit the narrative of a pervasive problem of cops out there randomly killing black people, or anyone for that matter. That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvements with law-enforcement, or that systemic racism doesn’t exist (it does) but from a statistical standpoint, shootings and deaths are outliers but watching too much mainstream media will convince you otherwise. It just happens that more things are caught on video these days and is overplayed and spun in the media deliberately to create tension, anger, and the belief this is a pervasive problem. People’s confirmation bias then take over and they begin to analyze through a skewed lens with no ability to be objective and consider every death as an injustice regardless of what the situation is. Police bad, criminals victim, always.

-Steamy